Introduction

Abstract

H. G. Wells was one of the first professional writers of fiction to have had a formal scientific education and the first for whom the role of science in society was a primary question, for in his case this qualification was no mere optional extra — the icing, as it were, on the literary cake; on the contrary it formed perhaps the basic ingredient in the strange and diverse mixture of his thought. Before he enrolled as a science student Wells’s only literary output was fourteen copies of ‘The Up Park Alarmist’, a mock daily newspaper written, as he later said, ‘on what was properly kitchen paper’, for the amusement of the ‘below stairs’ staff and satirising the trivia of Up Park, the stately home where his mother was housekeeper. It was a measure of the environment in which he had grown up that even this insignificant performance was regarded as a cause for some pride on the part of Wells and, one suspects, for trepidation at such daring on the part of his mother. Yet after, and very largely because of, his years at the South Kensington Normal School for Science, Wells became the most prolific author of any stature in his generation, and certainly the most widely read of his contemporaries. His influence on the younger writers of his day was immense, firstly as a model for emulation in their revolution against the establishment, and subsequently as a tradition against whom it seemed to them obligatory to react.