The Conversion to Science

Abstract

The third son of a cricket-playing shopkeeper and a lady’s maid, Herbert George Wells spent his childhood between the dreary squalor and inefficiency of his parents’ china-shop home in Bromley, Kent, and the equally dreary and inefficient private school to which his mother sent him because she had class aspirations which excluded the educationally superior but socially less prestigious National School. This travesty of education was rudely aborted when Wells was fourteen, at which tender age he was thrust out into the inhospitable world of small business as a draper’s assistant at the emporium of Messrs Rodgers and Denyer, Windsor. However it was soon apparent that despite his mother’s habitual attitude of ingrained servility towards her social betters, and her fixation concerning the draper’s trade as the dignified and proper calling for her sons, Wells was not of a similar mind. Messrs Rodgers and Denyer found him to be sadly lacking in both servility and the requisite cash in the till, although this latter deficiency was apparently the result of inattention rather than intention. Two other apprenticeships followed, for Mrs Wells was indefatigable in soliciting opportunities for her boys, but Wells displayed no greater talents or gratitude for these later openings and was finally, as a last resort, permitted to fill in time as an usher at the nearby Midhurst Grammar School.