Past Future: The Future Begins

The idea of the future that H.G. Wells expressed in his first novel, and that has been the basis of our idea of “the future” ever since, arose from particular historical circumstances, especially as young Wells experienced them.  To suggest the full significance of that idea, we need to explore those circumstances.

The future begins with the personal.

People think about the future when they see things change. In mid 19th century England, change was everywhere.

When Joseph Wells met Sarah Neal, he was the latest of several generations of gardeners for large estates. His previous employer had encouraged him to broaden his horizons, and gave him books on botany. But when Joseph’s benefactor died he lost his position. He wound up at a smaller estate called Up Park.

Sarah had grown up in the ancient town of Midhurst, where many buildings were three or four hundred years old. It was on a main road to London, so several of her ancestors stabled horses for the coaches.

 Her father owned and operated an inn. After working there as a girl, she went to school to learn skills required for a position as maid to aristocratic women. She was employed at Up Park as a lady’s maid when she met Joseph.

Up Park

Sarah and Joseph were lower middle class, probably the most vulnerable position in the English class system. Some of the occupations that had provided stability and security were disappearing. The great estates were fading, and with them the demand for the traditionally secure and relatively genteel positions of house servants.

Sarah and Joseph had a basic lower middle class education—they could read and write, and do enough arithmetic to keep basic accounts. But they were ill-equipped to deal with what was happening around them.

The industrial age was changing everything. England had been the first to industrialize so thoroughly, and the massive changes began within a generation, and didn't stop.

Beginning in 1825, railroads sliced the countryside (by mid-century, this tiny island still had a quarter of the world’s railroad track), dividing and consuming the land, darkening the skies and splitting the air with roaring noise. The railroads redefined the natural world in an historical instant.

Industries also required other transportation systems such as canals to bring in resources and send out parts and products to ports and around the country. Coal to fuel the engines of industry meant large-scale mining, which transformed the landscape even more brutally and extensively, and left much of it depleted and despoiled.

s.s. Great Britain

But industry was the key to the country's wealth and power, especially when linked with commerce. England was already the world's premier naval power when in 1842, steam was harnessed for the first screw-propelled iron steamship, the Great Britain. The new larger and quicker ships propelled faster and more extensive trade, and accelerated the exploration, exploitation and colonization of the last unknown and unconquered territories on the planet.

All of this took land and labor. Mining and machine industry followed the first large-scale agriculture on tracts of lands often taken through the Enclosure Acts from small farmers and especially from the commons, the lands that no one had owned but everyone was free to use.

This brought drastic change in the lives of many.  Families were forced off the land to live in towns that were often little more than slum encampments thrown together near the mines and factories that the poet William Blake named for all time as the “dark, Satanic mills.” Many of these families drifted into London to work, fade and die in the anonymous mass. They were the new working class.

While the new industrialists who owned and operated the mines and factories became wealthy and powerful, the landed gentry lost much of its accustomed income from the agricultural fruits of its great estates. Land was no longer the main source of wealth, and so the hereditary upper class was slipping away. Class no longer determined wealth; wealth was beginning to determine class.

The era’s great novelists such as Thackery, Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and especially Charles Dickens chronicled how these changes affected everyday lives at almost every level.

 The changes were especially evident in the fast-forming middle class. This volatile industrial expansion was providing them with new occupations and opportunities. Yet there were still dangers for these aspirants, even as these transformations reached out to the old towns and their inhabitants, edging them into this new age.

When Sarah and Joseph were courting, her father became ill and she was called back to Midhurst. He died, and a few months later so did her mother. Sarah was shocked to find that the family inn was deeply in debt, and lawyers were taking most of what remained. Whatever expectations she might have had to share in the business were shattered.

She and Joseph married. A relative offered to sell them a house and attached shop, with its stock and china and household crockery, to provide them with a sustaining income. As there were no gardener jobs available, they used Sarah’s small inheritance to make the purchase.

The ramshackle house was in Bromley, another ancient town from the 9th century, when it was a woodland clearing. The business however was a bust from the beginning. As London expanded and Bromley became more of a railroad suburb, new shops from the city made prospects worse. Sarah Wells worked hard to keep her family respectable, but they were only clinging to the lower edge of the middle class.

street where H.G. Wells was born

These were the unpromising circumstances into which Herbert George Wells was born in 1866, the third of three sons. (A sister he never knew had died from an illness two years before his birth, at the age of 9.) We are perhaps accustomed to stories of early poverty and later success, especially in America. But there and at that time, such an ascent was very rare, and practically impossible.

Years later, in his Experiment in Autobiography H.G. Wells would mark a painful childhood incident as the turning point of his life. He was between seven and eight years old when an accident while playing with a family friend left him with a badly broken bone in one leg. His long and at times excruciating convalescence required him to stay in bed. His father borrowed books to help him pass the time, and Bertie Wells got his first glimpses of a wider world.

illustration from Woods'
Natural History, an 1859
book he saw at this time

One illustrated volume “took me to Tibet, China, the Rocky Mountains, the forests of Brazil, Siam and a score of other lands,” he recalled. He learned about whaling and American Indians, the Battle of Waterloo and the American Civil War, about tigers in India, wolves in Russia and gorillas in Africa (which gave him nightmares.) He read about the vast distances to the stars.

None of his classmates at school knew about any of these things. Later he believed everything that came afterward in his life began with those hours propped up in bed, warmed by the kitchen stove. “ Probably I am alive today and writing this autobiography instead of being a worn-out, dismissed and already dead shop assistant, because my leg was broken.”

His hunger for books continued. Though his parents were worried that his dedication to reading was unhealthy, his father continued to borrow books for him from the Literary Institute in the Bromley Town Hall. Notable among the reading he remembered are Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos, the first attempt to describe the planet as a single system, as well as a smattering of Shakespeare and a lot of Dickens.

Bertie Wells was good at school—an excellent student, respected by teachers and well-liked by classmates, who he entertained with enthusiastic stories and funny drawings. Wells’ son Anthony West commented in a book on his father that a photograph taken during Bertie’s school days “shows my father radiant with the discoveries of this world...”

But boys of his class generally ended their formal education at around 13. Then it was time to concentrate on their future. Sarah Wells was determined to see her sons firmly entered in secure occupations. They had to learn a trade, and the trades she knew were in the shops.

Boys learned their trade through apprenticeships that qualified them for jobs. These apprenticeships were themselves a business: families paid shop owners to train their boys, and often to provide room and board.

Bertie’s first shop apprenticeship was a disaster. He was quickly dismissed. But an opportunity arose when an uncle decided to start a school, and enlisted Bertie to help him. There was yet no organized education system in England, and most schools were private ventures. At the age of fourteen, Bertie became a pupil-teacher, and applied the interest and discipline to his tasks that he could not summon for his shop assistant training. He also had the benefit of boarding with a baker, whose wife took pity on him and fed him well. It was the only period of his life until manhood that he was not under-nourished.

But as quickly as it had begun, his uncle’s school closed. He was again apprenticed to a shop. Once again, it was a disaster, but it ended in an intriguing way. It was a chemist shop (a drug store or pharmacy in American terms.) Bertie was sent to a nearby school for an hour each day to learn enough Latin to read medicine labels and write up prescriptions. He astounded the school’s headmaster by learning more in a few hours than his other pupils learned in a year.

The building that housed Midhurst Grammar School

Horace Byatt, headmaster of Midhurst Grammar School, encouraged Wells to become a full time student. The chemist shop gladly parted with the otherwise incompetent Bertie, and he moved in with Byatt.

Once again Bertie flourished. He particularly cherished his first lessons in science: the exaltation he felt when he realized he was standing on land that had once been at the bottom of a Cretaceous sea, and the thrill of peering through a telescope to find the moons of Jupiter.

But Sarah Wells wasn’t happy. By then she had returned to Up Park as head housekeeper. She felt (as Anthony West wrote) that the school was giving her son ideas “above his station,” encouraging unrealistic ambitions and unhealthy fantasies which would doom her attempts to give him “a good start in life.”

So she arranged for his third apprenticeship, at a drapery emporium in the town of Southsea. This time she had to pay a substantial sum for his training. Bertie knew that if he quit, his parents would forfeit an amount equivalent to a year of his mother’s wages.

Her wages was about all the family had. Joseph Wells had supplemented the meager shop income with his small earnings as a professional cricket player. He was good at it—one of his records stood for a century. But he’d fallen from the house roof while pruning the grapevine he’d coaxed into flourishing, and badly damaged a leg. His cricket days were over.

So Bertie understood the stakes of the investment in his apprenticeship, and he went. “At fifteen he had no answer to this kind of blackmail,” West comments.

Southsea in the early 1880s was a prosperous town on the southern coast of England. Gentlemen in frock coats crossed Southsea Common and Clarence Parade to attend meetings of the Southsea Bowling Club, or to play billiards at the Bush Hotel. They might attends talks on medieval miracle plays or “The Earth and Its Movements” at the nearby Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society. If unattached, they could meet young ladies from the best families at dances.

That was not the life of Bertie Wells, from the age of 15 to 17. He lived in a dormitory of boys who were similarly apprenticed to the Southsea Drapery Emporium, an early version of what would become the department store. They were rousted out of bed to clean the shop before it opened, then fed a brief breakfast of bread and butter in the cellar canteen.

Sale day at an emporium of the period

Bertie’s day consisted of fetching and carrying rolls of flannels and twills, folding sheets of ginghams and sateens, unfolding lace curtain material and holding it up for customers while the salesman extolled its virtues, wrapping packages and straightening up, as well as generally doing the bidding of sharp-eyed and disapproving managers. Then scrubbing floors and fixtures after the shop closed—in total a 13 hour day.

Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle in front of the Bush Villa
where he lived in Southsea

His employer was fairly enlightened for the time. The dining room was airy, the dormitory neat and adequately large. A young doctor who lived nearby was available for their medical needs. (As it happened, he was Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, years before he began writing his Sherlock Holmes stories. He and Wells were destined to become friends, but much later.)

Nevertheless, Bertie Wells was at the edge of despair. Not only did he hate what he was doing, he was bad at it. Thin and short for his age, he wasn’t physically equipped for the heavier work, but also awkward at folding fabric and packaging purchases. He was given to daydreaming and fits of temper. He couldn’t cope with either the regimented tedium or the onslaught of demands. He was failing.

But even if he did better, it might not make much of a difference. If his mother believed he was training for a secure place, he soon found she was wrong. From older boys at the shop and others, he learned how difficult it was to find a position and that it was even harder to keep it. A poorly paid shop assistant could be fired on a whim, and that could be the end of him. As Wells wrote, “You swam for as long as you could and then, if you could not scramble into some sort of shop, down you went to absolute destitution, the streets and beggary.”

Kings Road Southsea, location of the Emporium

Anthony West explained the context in this way: “... However liberal that vanished [19th century] order may have been in rewarding the successful, it had no pity on those who fell behind in the struggle to get on. My father was in real danger of being trapped in the worst of all social niches, that of the white-collar worker who had to keep up the appearances of gentility while earning a day-labourer's wage. A shop assistant had no security of employment….He knew that he would be as good as finished before he'd begun if he gave way and accepted the role that had been assigned him."

Yet to rebel against it was at least as risky. Wells knew, as scholar Frank McConnell writes, “...your odds were poor ever to rise out of the class you were born to and quite good to fall below it.”

Bertie endured it for two years. His only escapes were the vacations he spent at Up Park, where he haunted the library left by the free-thinking aristocrat who had inherited the place. Wells spent hours there, pouring over books published in the 18th century, including volumes by Voltaire and Thomas Paine, and his first look at Plato’s Republic. He enthusiastically read the works of Jonathan Swift, including the unexpurgated Gulliver’s Travels, books not readily available elsewhere as Swift was then considered a scandalous author.

Southsea Beach

But vacations ended, and he was back at his Southsea grind. Bertie was only halfway through his four year apprenticeship but he could endure no more. There seemed no way out. He wrote letters to everyone who might conceivably help him, but no rescue arrived.

After his workday ended at 8:30 and in the hour before the doors were locked, he would go down to the seaside and stare into the black water, with thoughts of suicide.

He didn’t think he was meant for better things, as he wrote later, but for different things. But so far, all he had been good at was school.

As it happened, school was slowly becoming an avenue of hope. Education in England was changing. The growth of industry demanded not only laborers, bookkeepers and clerks but managers, engineers, chemists and skilled technicians. They were not all going to come from the aristocracy.

The government instituted an ongoing series of educational reforms designed to disperse learning and develop talent more widely across the country and across classes. Several of these new programs in the 1880s were to make all the difference in the life of Bertie Wells.

While at Southsea he learned of a provision of a new education law that supported student teachers, so he wrote to his most recent mentor—Horace Byatt at the Midhurst school—and asked him if there was a way for him to be employed there. All Byatt could offer him was room and board and a year as a student teacher without pay, with the possibility of a paid position in the future.

That was good enough for Wells. But he had to persuade his parents to approve the cancellation of his apprenticeship. He wrote letters home without success. So one Sunday morning, Wells escaped from the Southsea Emporium dormitory and walked the seventeen miles to Up Park to plead with his mother in person. It’s probable if not certain that Wells had read David Copperfield by then, but in any case it was a dramatic gesture suggesting the desperate trek of Dickens’ young hero, though without the immediately triumphant outcome.

Wells believed he was fighting for his life. The new school term was beginning in September but as summer approached, his parents were still unrelenting. Then a letter from Byatt ended their opposition. Thanks to government programs Midhurst school was expanding, so he could offer Wells a paying position after all. It was a solid sum, with the prospect of higher wages the following year. His parents’ last arguments dissolved.

present day exterior of the old Midhurst School 

When Wells left Southsea his ambitions were not especially high. His goal was a career as a schoolteacher. In his first year back at Midhurst he did so well and was promoted so rapidly that he could dare to believe he could be headmaster by the time he was 35.

But all that changed again with a sudden surprise. During Wells’ year back at Midhurst, Byatt had taken advantage of another new national policy that provided grants to schools if students tested high on exams. Wells was good at school, but he was even better at exams. Byatt concocted new courses for him to take—sometimes he was the only student, essentially working on his own—and his exam scores brought in grant money.

But by most accounts neither Byatt nor Wells realized those exams were scrutinized for an additional purpose. Another new educational effort was beginning, to provide scholarships for superior students to study at the Normal School of Science in London, which despite its pedestrian name was the government’s new science university (its name would soon be changed to the Royal College of Science.) National exam results helped identify potential recipients.

So Wells was puzzled as he opened a letter from the Normal School. His exam scores qualified him for a scholarship, the letter said, and he was invited to apply for one. The forms were enclosed.

Despite anxiety about leaving a secure position with a better income that his parents together earned, he filled out the blue forms and sent them in. He didn’t tell anyone until he got a reply. But when he received an offer of a full scholarship to attend university in the fall, plus a small stipend for living expenses, he ecstatically accepted.

Neither Byatt nor Wells’ parents were happy about it at first, but it was uncharted territory for them all. Young men of the lower middle class almost never got to university.

Joseph Wells

A final interlude, a kind of coda to his youth, occurred that summer before he left for college. Rather than spending it at Up Park with his mother, Wells lived with his father in the old Bromley home, the place he was born.

  Joseph Wells was nearly lame by then, but still an enthusiastic walker. They resumed their rambles through the countryside together. Perhaps this was a result of an earlier visit the two made to his father’s boyhood territory, where Joseph showed him the places that had meant the most to him, including features of the landscape. He pointed out the birch trees, and discoursed on the careful process of making cricket bats from them.

kingfisher, one of the birds Wells' father remembered

This last summer of Bertie’s boyhood, his father talked to him about the local landscape he had known as a younger man. He described the meadows and groves that had been destroyed as Bromley’s suburban population grew, and recalled trout fishing in the now polluted waters.  He pointed out a hill near Up Park where he sprawled at night to look at the stars.

 He pointed out the birds and flowers that had been abundant in the countryside before, and showed him where he and his friends had foraged for mushrooms to eat, seasoned with the salt they happened to bring with them.

Joseph was keenly interested in what his son told him about the latest science. Wells saw his father and his thwarted dreams in a new way, as he perceived the confusions within his resolute mother. He would remain close to his parents and his brothers, and in times to come would at least temporarily be supporting them all.

Then at summer’s end, little more than a year after his failure and despair in the Southsea Drapery Emporium, Wells was off to the great city of London. His impassioned attention to his own future had changed his life, and would soon change the world’s view of its future.

to be continued...

for previous posts in this series, click on the "soul of the future" label under this post.