A new biography by Claire Tomalin is always an event. This biography of author HG Wells comes 10 years after Tomalin’s acclaimed life of Charles Dickens, which incorporated her earlier ground-breaking work on the older author’s secret affair with young actress Ellen Ternan. The style is as well-researched and engaging as ever, her treatment of the complicated personal life of Wells as sensitively and carefully handled as in the Dickens.
At some point in its gestation, Tomalin’s life of Herbert George Wells became halved into a biography of the younger man. But as she points out, the series of original works of fiction he effortlessly produced for years petered out after 1911. Wells continued to write until his death in 1946, producing lumbering, grandiose nonfictional tomes with titles such as The History of the World (1920), but to lessening effect.
Born in 1866, Wells grew up in straitened circumstances and was denied the education a child of his precocious intelligence deserved. His father, Joseph, ran a small shop not very successfully; his mother, Sarah, was already exhausted when her third and final child, HG (“Bertie”), arrived.
His early life was hemmed in by the darkness and claustrophobia of his living quarters. Their luck changed when Mrs Wells was called to become a housekeeper of a great house where she had worked as maid before her marriage. Wells would come to spend his school holidays in Uppark, where he had virtually unlimited access to the house’s extensive library and could equally enjoy the freedom of the outdoors.
Uppark may also have saved his life, for Wells was subject to prolonged bouts of bleeding from tuberculosis. (When felled by bouts of TB, he had regular treatment by a first-rate London doctor who was staying at the estate or summoned from London.) Wells’s virtuoso prose description of one of these blood-letting episodes is praised by Tomalin for its forensic precision and journalistic immediacy. These qualities marked all his writing, no matter how fanciful the story.
Bad husband
Wells had a very active libido whose unleashing as his health improved and he began to earn money as a writer caused problems. It also poses a problem for his biographer as she strives to do justice to her subject’s publicity-attracting practice of free love, as well as the collateral damage it caused those closest to him, especially his wife and two sons. As Tomalin declares: “He was a bad husband and an unreliable lover.”
Wells’s first wife, his cousin Isabel, insisted on six years of enforced celibacy before they married and then found her husband’s sexual advances difficult to take. They soon divorced.His second marriage was to a younger “new woman”, Jane Robbins, who could hold her own with him in intellectual discussions. But she could not hold him to their marriage vows and had to endure decades of his infidelities.
The final third concentrates on Wells’s most tumultuous affair, with Amber Reeves, a brilliant 20-year-old student at Newnham College, Cambridge, who bore him a child (at her insistence).
Wells had joined the socialist collective known as the Fabians (which included Bernard Shaw), arguing for a more revolutionary activism than their endless committee work. Amber Reeves was one of several young Fabian women who were attracted to Wells. The thesis she was supposed to be writing languished while the sexual excitement spurred Wells on to an even more prodigious output. Eventually Amber married her eligible young man and had her baby.
Older man
Tomalin provides two conflicting ways in which this affair can be viewed: as an easily flattered author set upon by a predatory, ambitious young woman; or of a vulnerable young woman, scarcely out of her teens, set upon by an older man who should have known (and acted) better. Tomalin presents both versions, but it is clear which one she favours.
This is a wonderfully readable and fascinating account of the life of HG Wells, and deserves a wide readership. The only criticism I have is that it gives short shrift to the four great “scientific romances” Wells produced at the end of the century, including The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Tomalin stakes her claim for Wells as novelist on the books he produced in the first decade of the 20th century, works of social realism like Tono-Bungay and Kipps.
I’m with Winston Churchill, an avid Wells reader, who wrote saying that he preferred the “jam” of his entertainments to the “suet” of the socially improving books.
