HG Wells in Nature
by Tom Ruffles
[ bookreviews ]
"Hi, I'm HG Wells. You may know me from such novels as The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds, or more likely the usually awful film versions of them. But I also wrote quite heavyweight social commentary, though you'd never know it today." Which is a shame, as Wells produced a large quantity of interesting non-fiction which has generally been disregarded by the general reader since his death (and quite often was before it). John S Partington has gone some way to making this side of his oeuvre better known with a tightly-packed volume that collects together not only Wells's own contributions to the prestigious science magazine Nature over more than half a century, but also responses to those contributions, as well as reviews of his books, and other items which include his name. An excellent introduction sets the scene generally and lucid and thorough section commentaries outline what Wells and his reviewers were saying, and the debates that he generated.
Wells in Nature is divided into three main parts. The first comprises essays, reviews and letters by Wells himself, a total of 25 items, plus further contributions from others related to them. The second part collects all the reviews of Wells's works printed in the magazine, a further 53 items, and finally a round-up gathers miscellaneous mentions, including his obituary. Together, they provide a fascinating insight into Wells as a thinker and how he used Nature, edited for over 40 years by his friend Richard Gregory, to give his views a cachet that would assist their wider dissemination.
Wells had decent science credentials, having achieved first-class honours in zoology and second-class honours in biology. He combined a scientistic approach in his analysis of society and its problems with an emphasis on improved science education in his determination to improve the lot of humanity. He wrote prolifically in pursuit of a better tomorrow, a world to be populated by Men Like Gods (and women like goddesses too, of course). Nature was an ideal platform for him to convey his ideas to an influential audience, especially as he never managed to obtain a much-coveted Fellowship of the Royal Society and therefore wrote as an outsider to the scientific establishment.
Despite the obscurity of his non-fiction, he still has much of value to say to the modern world. For example, his early article Science, in School and After School (1894) makes a useful distinction between teaching facts and teaching method, with the latter introduced, as far as he was concerned, at far too late a stage in a student's school career. He is severe on the practice of linking teachers' incentives to examination performance, which indicates his relevance at a time when there is disquiet about the practice of 'teaching to the test' in schools at the expense of a broader pedagogic approach.
Unfortunately he had a tendency to show off his erudition, perhaps as a form of overcompensation, to the extent that he crams The Illusion of Personality, an abridged – thankfully – version of his doctoral thesis, with obscure terminology as it rambles indulgently onwards. One senses that his examiners were not marking this work blind. Even at his most interesting, he lacks that clarity which makes his fiction so enjoyable. But overall, the values that he wrestled with - a blend of pessimism for the fate of the human race, mixed with an optimism that top-down planning and control would produce a superior social system - still seem relevant over 60 years after his death, even if his belief in a world government controlled by a scientific élite (The Man of Science as Aristocrat is the rather telling title of a 1941 article) seems overwhelmingly naive.
Partington has spent a huge amount of time writing footnotes glossing the articles, and these are very useful when the context of a particular issue is no longer readily apparent to the modern reader (The Illusion of Personality has 63 footnotes to cover about six pages of text). However, they at times illuminate the already well lit. To take a page from that very essay, it is convenient not to have to reach for the dictionary to find the meaning of 'hormic' ("of vital or purposeful energy") but to have to have en masse explained ("French, all together, as a group") does seem unnecessary. There are many such statements of the obvious, and when one gets to something like the definition of the Roman Catholic Church ("A Christian denomination which acknowledges the pope as its head"), which is not untypical, the effort of checking the bottom of the page for footnotes begins to outweigh the value of having them.
They can also lack subtlety. There is a nice pun in a review by William Inge (the English divine rather than the American playwright). He argues that early hardships had embittered Wells against the class in which he finds himself by virtue of his 'genius': "He sees Red when he thinks of them, and exults in the destitution which he hopes awaits them." The footnote for 'Red' merely says "Gets extremely angry", but the capital letter clearly also refers, apart from being angry, to Wells's Socialism, and the next paragraph goes on to talk about his adherence to "that waterlogged derelict, Fabian collectivism." The interesting part of the reference has been omitted in favour of the obvious.
Similarly Wells, reviewing Frank Podmore's Apparitions and Thought Transference, and considering what he sees as its absence of his much-prized scientific method, suggests that telepathy experiments using cards should, essentially, have had a control condition in which the cards were guessed before they were looked at by the agent (ie sender), to see how far what he describes as "pure haphazard guessing of this kind, or guessing on any particular gambler's 'system'" would deviate from what should be expected by chance. The footnote refers to the word 'system', and tells us that it is "A betting systems (sic) aimed at making profits from casino gambling." True, if readily deducible from the text, but the interesting thing is that this would not necessarily be haphazard, as Wells has described an experimental procedure for a precognition test, though the footnote does not allude to this.
There is the occasional error in the text, usually the result of slack proofreading. Thus Amy Wells, Herbert's long-suffering second wife and a writer herself, appears to have still been married to him the year after her death. The major criticism, though, is that there is no index, which severely impairs the book's usefulness. There is a 32-page list of two-line biographies, which itself gives an idea of the book's range, but no ready way of relating their subjects to those parts of the text in which they appear. Partington is admirably democratic with these snapshots, with William Crookes, Arthur Keith, Alexander Korda, Edwin Ray Lankester, Oliver Lodge, John Arthur Thomson and William Turner Thiselton-Dyer, probably among others, all stripped of their knighthoods, though baronetcies and viscountcies are allowed. One reviewer whom Partington fails to identify because only the initials – FCSS – were used, is probably the philosopher FCS Schiller.
Despite these reservations, this is an excellent volume that disinters a significant quantity of Wells's scientific writings and shows their progression over the course of a large part of his creative life. Whether his non-fiction would warrant as much interest in their own right had he not been also a successful novelist is difficult question, but to understand him in the round his novels have to be read in conjunction with his other work, and Partington has done a tremendous service in blowing the dust off old volumes of Nature and putting these contributions into a handy form.
From Wells's occasionally ponderous non-fiction to the type of writing which made his name and made him great. The Invisible Man still holds up as a ripping yarn with bite, showing the mayhem that can result when the pursuit of scientific knowledge is unyoked from social responsibility. This particular edition comes from Classics Illustrated, once a common sight in their large, usually very-well thumbed, paperback format, now reborn as compact neat little hardbacks. The novel's pace has been retained and augmented with a lively graphic style that conveys the original's escalating sense of paranoia and megalomania until its tragic conclusion.
While aimed primarily at children, this is an engaging treatment for all ages, and the publisher's hope is that having read this short version, an appetite for Wells's version will be whetted, with an endnote modestly exhorting the reader not to miss the 'added enjoyment' of the original. An exposure to The Invisible Man might lead on to discovering other stories by Wells. And if some young potential scientist decides that studying physics and chemistry would be cool on the basis that there is a chance of discovering a method of invisibility, then it will have been even more worthwhile, and Wells, with his dogged emphasis on the necessity of science education for the survival of the human race, would surely have approved.
