Wells's lower middle-class origin and scientific training made him unique among contemporary novelists, enabling him to introduce new subject matters into English fiction. As a personality, he attracted additional attention for his dynamism, his adventurous love life, and his controversial repudiations of aesthetic principles. He has remained in the popular mind, above all, through his slightly inflated reputation as a forecaster of scientific developments and human destiny. Wells is an author whose achievement is as impossible to ignore as it is difficult to fit into readily assessed categories.
Herbert George Wells began life on 21 September 1866 in Bromley, Kent, as the youngest son of a former lady's maid and a former gardener. His father, Joseph Wells, had turned storekeeper and professional cricketer, but still found it difficult to support his family. When his mother, Sarah Neal Wells, took the post of housekeeper at a country house in Sussex in 1880, she decided that thirteen-year-old Bertie should also go out to work. The boy, who had been a promising pupil, found himself relegated to menial jobs.
Drudgery was relieved by visits to his mother's workplace. Throughout Wells's formative years, the occasional freedom to roam the house and grounds of Up Park deeply stimulated his imagination.
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