60 Fun Facts About H. G. Wells

In which Kent town was H. G. Wells born in 1866?

Bromley is where Wells was born, at the china shop his parents kept on the High Street. The business never paid its way, and as the family sank he was sent out to work as a draper's apprentice.

How did Wells's father Joseph earn money besides keeping a china shop?

Play professional cricket for Kent: Joseph Wells bowled for the county in 1862 and 1863, once taking four Sussex wickets with four successive balls. An injury in 1877 ended his playing days and cut off that income.

What childhood accident in 1874 turned young Wells into a devoted reader?

A broken leg that left him bedridden for weeks gave the boy his first long spell with books, which his father fetched from the library. Wells later called the break a stroke of good fortune that saved him from life as a shop assistant.

Wells's miserable teenage apprenticeship at a Southsea drapery inspired which novels?

Kipps and The History of Mr Polly both start their heroes as drapery apprentices, as Wells was, working thirteen-hour days and sleeping in a dormitory. He escaped in 1883 by persuading his parents to let him become a student teacher.

Which ancient book in the library at Uppark, where his mother was housekeeper, set the teenage Wells questioning society?

Plato's Republic showed the teenage Wells, he wrote, that law and custom might be thrown into the melting pot and made anew. He read it lying on the grass above the great house, and soon turned to socialism.

Under which scientist, now remembered as 'Darwin's Bulldog', did Wells study at the Normal School of Science?

Thomas Henry Huxley taught Wells for a single year, which Wells called the most educational of his life. Nothing else at the school held him, and he left in 1887 without a degree.

A precursor to The Time Machine appeared in Wells's school magazine under what title?

The Chronic Argonauts ran in the Science Schools Journal in 1888 until Wells broke it off after three instalments, unable to go on. He later mocked its 'rococo' title and spent seven years reworking the idea into The Time Machine.

Which future children's author did Wells teach at Henley House School in 1889-90?

A. A. Milne was a small boy at the school, which his father ran, when Wells rushed his class from sums to algebra in a year. Wells wrote that it launched two or three university careers; Milne won a mathematics scholarship to Cambridge.

How was Isabel, the first wife Wells left for one of his students, related to him?

His cousin: Wells fell for Isabel while lodging with her mother, his aunt Mary, and married her in 1891. Three years later he ran off with a pupil, Amy Catherine Robbins, who became his second wife.

In which Surrey town was Wells living when he wrote The War of the Worlds?

Woking was home from 1895, and Wells wrote that he cycled round the district marking down places and people for destruction by his Martians. The town has since put up a seven-metre Martian tripod sculpture in its centre.

After Wells refused the architect's trademark heart on its front door, his new Sandgate home took which name?

Spade House was named for the spade-shaped letter plate Wells accepted in place of C. F. A. Voysey's usual heart. Ill health had driven him from London to the Kent coast, where both his sons were born in the new house.

Wells had a son, Anthony, in 1914 with which novelist and feminist 26 years his junior?

Rebecca West and Wells called each other Panther and Jaguar, and the pet name went into their son's own: he was born Anthony Panther West. The affair lasted about ten years, and the two stayed friends until Wells died.

Which American campaigner had an on-and-off love affair with Wells from 1920 until his death?

Margaret Sanger, the birth-control pioneer, met Wells in 1920, and he backed her cause as well as courting her. He wrote the introduction to her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization.

Moura Budberg was the mistress of which Russian writer when Wells stayed at his Petrograd flat in 1920?

Maxim Gorky was Wells's host, and Budberg, Gorky's secretary and companion, began an affair with the visitor. She later settled in London and stayed close to Wells until he died, but always refused to marry him.

What did Wells call the comic sketches he drew for his wife Jane, often about their marriage?

Picshuas were the quick sketches Wells began drawing in 1893 to amuse Jane and himself. Many were thrust into drawers and survived, so he later used them in his memoirs to trace how the marriage changed over thirty-five years.

In The Time Machine, which underground creatures prey on the gentle Eloi in the year 802,701?

Morlocks keep the machinery running below ground and climb up at night to feed on the Eloi. Wells made the two peoples the far descendants of Victorian workers and the leisured rich, a warning about where the class divide might lead.

The Eloi in The Time Machine are thought to have been inspired partly by which William Morris utopia?

News from Nowhere pictures a future England without money, where work is a pleasure. Wells had gone to hear Morris speak as a student, and his own future turns that gentle paradise into a trap for its idle inhabitants.

What is the name of the scientist who makes himself invisible in The Invisible Man?

Griffin makes himself invisible but cannot undo it, turns to robbery and terror, and is finally beaten down by a mob. Only as he dies does his battered body fade back into view.

Which Wells novel opens with a stranger arriving through a snowstorm at an inn in the Sussex village of Iping?

The Invisible Man opens at the Coach and Horses, where the landlady takes her lodger's bandages for the marks of an accident. When she presses him over an unpaid bill, he tears them off in a rage and shows her nothing at all.

Who narrates The Island of Doctor Moreau after surviving the shipwreck of the Lady Vain?

Edward Prendick gets back to England but can no longer bear crowds, seeing the animal about to break out in every face. He ends his days in the country with his books, his chemistry and the stars.

Doctor Moreau creates his human-like Beast Folk by what method?

Vivisection, surgery on living animals, is Moreau's method, and his creatures call the laboratory the House of Pain. The results never hold: they keep slipping back, and after his death they revert to beasts.

Where does the first Martian cylinder land in The War of the Worlds?

Horsell Common fills with sightseers once the cylinder is found, and a deputation walks towards the pit waving a white flag to show that humans are intelligent too. The Martians answer with the heat-ray.

In The War of the Worlds, what finally kills the Martians after every human weapon has failed?

Bacteria do what armies could not: the Martians have no resistance to Earth's germs, and the narrator finds them dead among their machines. Wells has him call the killers the humblest things on Earth.

What alien vegetation do the Martians spread across England in The War of the Worlds?

Red weed grows from seeds the invaders bring with them: in the novel, plants on Mars are blood-red where Earth's are green. It runs wild wherever there is water and chokes both the Wey and the Thames.

Which future prime minister wrote to Wells in 1906, 'I owe you a great debt'?

Winston Churchill sent that letter two days before a landmark speech that echoed Wells's ideas on the state, and later said he could pass an exam in his books. The two met in 1902 and stayed in touch until Wells died.

Orson Welles's famous radio version of The War of the Worlds was broadcast in 1938 as a special for which occasion?

Halloween: the play went out on 30 October, and Welles signed off by calling it the Mercury Theatre's version of dressing up in a sheet and saying 'Boo!'. If the doorbell rang and nobody was there, he added, that was no Martian.

In The First Men in the Moon, which gravity-blocking substance carries two Englishmen to the Moon?

Cavorite is named after its inventor, Mr Cavor. The first sheet sets too soon: the air above it turns weightless and rushes upward, wrecking his house before the sheet itself shoots off into space.

A plot point in The First Men in the Moon was inspired by which inventor's claim of radio signals from Mars?

Nikola Tesla is named in the novel itself: a Dutch electrician using Tesla-style apparatus to listen for Mars instead picks up broken messages in English, sent by the scientist left behind inside the Moon.

In which 1914 novel did Wells coin the term 'atomic bombs' and describe a nuclear weapon?

The World Set Free imagines bombs that go on exploding for days. Leo Szilard read it in 1932, conceived the nuclear chain reaction the next year, and kept his patent secret because, he wrote, he had read Wells and knew what it would mean.

Which 1901 non-fiction bestseller by Wells predicted that faster transport would spread cities out into suburbs?

Anticipations got the suburbs right but fumbled the sea: Wells wrote that his imagination refused to see a submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and sinking. He still called the book the keystone of his work.

Which 1920 work of popular history made Wells a rich man?

The Outline of History began as a plan for professional historians to write a world history for the League of Nations Union. None would take it on, so Wells gave a year to it himself, expecting it to earn little.

Which weapon of the First World War did Wells describe in a 1903 short story, years before it existed?

The tank: in 'The Land Ironclads', armoured machines up to a hundred feet long crawl across the trenches. Hardy riflemen, sure the enemy's 'devitalized townsmen' can't fight, are rounded up by a few slender young men inside them.

In Wells's 1933 The Shape of Things to Come, a second world war erupts from a clash in which city?

Danzig: a Polish traveller wrestles with his false teeth at the station, a young Nazi takes the grimace for an insult and shoots him, and war follows in January 1940. The real war came four months sooner.

Who produced the 1936 film Things to Come, written by Wells?

Alexander Korda made two Wells films back to back, following Things to Come with The Man Who Could Work Miracles, from a Wells short story. He spent so lavishly on the first that it struggled to earn its costs back.

Which Wells novel became the stage musical Half a Sixpence?

Kipps gave the 1963 musical its title: when young Artie Kipps leaves home, his sweetheart Ann gives him half of a sixpence as a keepsake. The show was written as a vehicle for the pop star Tommy Steele.

In Wells's 1909 novel Tono-Bungay, what is Tono-Bungay?

A quack patent medicine: the narrator helps his uncle sell the useless tonic, privately calling it a swindle, and watches it build a business empire that collapses as fast as it rose.

Wells's story 'The Country of the Blind' is set in an Andean valley a hundred miles from Cotopaxi, in which country?

Ecuador's Andes hide the valley, where the lost climber Nunez expects his eyesight to make him king. The blind villagers take his talk of seeing for madness instead, and their doctor proposes the cure: removing his eyes.

Wells's 1913 book Little Wars set out rules for what?

Fighting battles with toy soldiers began when a lunch guest, Jerome K. Jerome, fired a toy cannon at some tin troops and Wells joined in. Then a pacifist, he ends the book calling this 'amiable miniature' far better than the real thing.

Which famous phrase did Wells coin as the title of a 1914 book?

The War That Will End War gathered articles Wells rushed out in August 1914. A pacifist until then, he argued that every soldier fighting Germany was 'a crusader against war' and that this conflict would be the last.

Which man did Wells interview in Moscow for three hours in 1934 for the New Statesman?

Joseph Stalin got a warm opening: Wells said he had already seen the happy faces of healthy men and women. He had come hoping to argue the dictator into freer speech for writers, and left knowing it would not happen.

As president of which writers' body did Wells chair a stormy congress over the Nazi takeover of its Berlin club?

PEN International began as a sociable club for writers. Wells became its president when John Galsworthy died, just as the Nazis tried to turn the Berlin branch into a propaganda tool, and the fight made free expression the club's cause.

Wells's name appeared on which Nazi list of people to be arrested after an invasion of Britain?

The Black Book is the post-war nickname for the SS's 'Special Search List G.B.' of 1940, naming people to arrest once Britain fell. Wells was on it: he had attacked the Nazis in print since they took power.

For which party did Wells stand as a parliamentary candidate for London University in 1922 and 1923?

Labour put Wells up twice and he came last of three both times, behind a Unionist and a Liberal. He later called the candidacies lapses towards a class-war socialism he did not believe in.

Wells's 1940 book The Rights of Man is credited with laying groundwork for which 1948 UN text?

The Universal Declaration was adopted in December 1948, two years after Wells died. He wrote The Rights of Man early in the war to answer a blunt question, what Britain was fighting for, with a list of rights for everyone.

Which condition did Wells live with, leading him to co-found a national charity for fellow patients in 1934?

Diabetes: the charity was formed at a meeting in Wells's own London home, called by his doctor, R. D. Lawrence, who had the condition too. Now Diabetes UK, it has its head office in Wells Lawrence House.

Wells's 1936 call for a permanent 'World Encyclopaedia' is often seen as foreshadowing what?

Wikipedia is the usual comparison: Wells wanted one encyclopaedia, constantly updated and open to every student on Earth, and pictured it on microfilm. But where Wikipedia relies on volunteers, his was to be reviewed by leading authorities.

Which novelist nominated Wells for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932?

Sinclair Lewis could nominate because he had won the prize himself two years earlier, and past laureates are among the few people allowed to. Wells was put forward four times between 1921 and 1946 and never won.

What epitaph did Wells propose for himself in 1941?

'I told you so. You damned fools.' ends his preface to a 1941 reprint of The War in the Air, a novel of cities bombed from the sky that he wrote in 1907, when the aeroplane was still a rumour, followed by the aside 'The italics are mine'.

By what pet name was the young Herbert George Wells known to his family?

Bertie is how he went on signing letters home in his late twenties, when readers already knew him as H. G. Wells. He handed out names freely himself: his second wife, Amy Catherine, became 'Jane'.

Conrad dedicated The Secret Agent to Wells as 'the historian of' what?

The ages to come: Conrad offered his 1907 novel 'affectionately' to the author of The Time Machine. Yet Wells wrote later that they never really got on, and that Conrad found him Philistine, stupid and intensely English.

Which younger writer wrote in 1941 that Wells was 'too sane to understand the modern world'?

George Orwell meant it partly as praise: the same essay says the minds of his whole generation would be different if Wells had never existed. But the old prophet, he argued, was too reasonable to grasp the pull of a Hitler.

Wells's 1934 memoir is subtitled 'Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary' what?

Brain: the book opens by weighing his own up as 'a poorish instrument', bad with names, numbers and dates and no match for the 'rich grey matter' of Bernard Shaw. The famous prophet tells his life as a lucky escape, not a triumph of genius.

Wells's last book, published in 1945, was titled what?

Mind at the End of Its Tether is barely a pamphlet. In it the old preacher of progress gives up: the human story is over, he decides, and some other species will have to take our place.

Wells's 1943 book Crux Ansata was an indictment of what?

The Roman Catholic Church is named in the book's subtitle, and the attack is fierce. Writing in London under German bombing, Wells goes for Pope Pius XII in person and calls for Rome itself to be bombed.

In which 1911 novel did Wells caricature Beatrice and Sidney Webb as 'Altiora and Oscar Bailey'?

The New Machiavelli settled two scores with the Webbs: Wells had failed to wrest the Fabian Society from them, and Beatrice had condemned his affair with Amber Reeves. Its hero wrecks a political career over a young lover.

Which dystopian novel began as a parody of Wells's utopia Men Like Gods?

Brave New World started out as a send-up of Wells's hopeful future, its author said. But he grew more interested in his own ideas, and the joke turned into something quite different from the book he had planned.

Which fellow novelist, a friend since the 1890s, did Wells caricature in his 1915 satire Boon?

Henry James was deeply offended by the long parody of his late style, and a pained exchange of letters followed. Wells did not back down, saying he would rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Wells dedicated his 1914 atomic-war novel to a book by chemist Frederick Soddy about which element?

Radium: Soddy's The Interpretation of Radium showed Wells how much energy lies locked inside atoms, and the novel admits it owes long passages to the book. Soddy later won a Nobel Prize for his work on isotopes.

In which subject did Wells finally take his Bachelor of Science degree from London University?

Zoology, taken as an outside candidate while he taught school, after he had failed his finals and left college without a degree. His first published book soon followed: a biology textbook.

Wells died in 1946 at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking which London green space?

Regent's Park was his address through the war: during the Blitz he refused to be driven out of London and stayed put in the terrace house. Its blue plaque now reads simply that he 'lived and died here'.