The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World by Claire Tomalin

Wells has given his own account of his life in his Experiment in Autobiography, published in 1934, when he was nearly seventy.  It is a book of great charm; it made me love Wells when I first read it, and led me to reread many of the books and stories I already knew, and look for more.  It soon became clear to me that the books of his I most admired were all written -- apart from the autobiography and the Outline of History (1920) -- in the period starting in 1895, when he published his first story, The Time Machine, at the age of twenty-nine, and up to 1911.                                                                                                             -- Claire Tomalin, The Young H.G. Wells (Penguin, 2021)

One of the reasons I read biographies is to see what methods people use to overcome poverty and illness and achieve their desired ends.  According to Tomalin, as she also said in her biography of Thomas Hardy (see my post of Aug. 30, 2016) the answer is perseverance and hard work.  Wells was born in relative poverty and originally worked as a draper's apprentice before taking an exam that got him a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, followed by teaching jobs and writing assignments, before hitting it big with The Time Machine.  Tomalin follows Wells life in fascinating detail through 1911 and sums up his later life (he died in 1946) in one concluding chapter (more details of his later life can be found in Michael Sherborne's biography, published in 2011). 

Tomalin is particularly fond of Wells's novels through The History of Mr. Polly in 1910 and also praises his work for the Fabian society and for politics in general, "he never lost his enthusiasm for revolution and republicanism."  Wells, however, was not a particularly good husband or father. His first marriage was so sexually disappointing that when he married again he felt he was entitled to extramarital affairs (he claimed his second wife, Amy Robbins, understood and accepted this) and he had children with Amber Reeves and Rebecca West in addition to two children with Robbins. Wells was a very social person, on friendly terms with other writers, including George Bernard Shaw, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Tomalin describers Wells's early years intelligently and succintly, concluding that "the best of his books will go on being read for generations, entertaining, surprising, and provoking different readers to different questions -- as good books should."