Wells, H. G.
Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was born in Bromley, Kent, United Kingdom, on September 21, to servants turned shopkeepers. After a poor education in local private schools he was apprenticed to the drapery trade at age fourteen. After a spell as a pharmacist's assistant Wells became a student-teacher in Midhurst, where he won a scholarship to study for a degree under the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. After initially failing to earn a degree, he became a schoolteacher and completed his bachelor of science degree in zoology at the University of London in 1890. He died in London on August 13.
Although eventually Wells became world famous as the author of The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and other novels, his first two books were science textbooks published in 1893. Throughout the 1890s Wells was a regular contributor to scientific periodicals and wrote popular science articles for the mainstream press. Even after becoming famous as a writer of fiction, Wells maintained an interest in science as a Fellow of the Zoological Society after 1890 and joined the Sociological Society (on its foundation in 1904). He debated eugenics with the scientist Francis Galton (1822–1991) and others and published scientific works such as Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901), The Science of Life (1930), and Science and the World-Mind (1942).
Wells's contribution to science, technology, and ethics was considerable. He recognized from his university days that although human progress was not inevitable, science would play a key role in human achievement. From Huxley he adopted the notion of ethical evolution: humankind's responsibility to influence the biological destiny of humans and other species positively. That notion ultimately led Wells to promote, at the micro level, a welfare state based on negative eugenics and state provision of a "basic minimum" and, at the macro level, a cosmopolitan world state based on education, cooperation, and socialist planning.
Eugenics was an important subject for Wells during much of his career. He first considered it in Anticipations
H. G. Wells, 1866–1946. The English author began his career as a novelist with a popular sequence of science fiction that remains the most familiar part of his work. He later wrote realistic novels and novels of ideas.(1901) before analyzing it more closely in works such as
Mankind in the Making (1903),
A Modern Utopia (1905),
Men Like Gods (1923),
The Science of Life (1930), and
The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931) and finally rejecting it outright in
The Rights of Man (1940) and '
42 to '
44 (1944). During the Edwardian period Wells believed that negative eugenics could be a viable means of preventing the procreation of "the people of the abyss": the incurably diseased, habitual criminals or drunkards, and those unable to adapt to the rapidly changing modern world. Gradually he tempered his position, seeing welfare provision, education, and medical science as more important factors for improving the quality of successive generations. With the rise of Nazi eugenics after 1933, Wells distanced himself from general eugenic theory, declaring that any form of compulsory or state eugenics would be a fundamental breach of human rights in
The Rights of Man (1940).
According to Wells, human progress rests on technological advancement, and he predicted that in the twentieth century humanity would either destroy itself or create material abundance and cosmopolitan unity. His 1935 film Things to Come is a marvel of invention, with ultramodern architecture, highly skilled workers, scientific population control, space flight, moving footpaths, and more. However, the society it portrayed was brought about only by generations of warfare, and in this lies the tension that existed between Wells's vision of a technological future and the means to achieve it.
Although Wells preached disarmament and world peace throughout his life, his futuristic utopian societies founded on the power of science consistently had to go through devastating wars to be achieved. Humankind had to learn a severe lesson before it would apply the gifts of science to its destiny. Thus, in TheWar in theAir (1909), powered flight leads to aerial combat; in The World Set Free (1914), harnessing the atom leads to nuclear war; and in The Shape of Things to Come (1933), material progress leads to global conflict and an "air dictatorship." All these stories end with global human fellowship and peace, but they are achieved at a high price.
Wells's legacy in terms of science, technology, and ethics lies in his imaginative application of science to invention, his hopefulness about what science may produce for humanity, but also his warnings about what the abuse of science may mean for the human race. In his nonfiction writings Wells was ambiguous throughout his life, never able to offer a peaceful route to the achievement of his predicted scientific utopias. Although Wells was never certain in his hope or despair for the future, his ultimate mood on the subject is aptly characterized in the title of his final work, published a few months before the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945).
Eugenics;; Progress;; Science Fiction;; Science, Technology, and Literature;; Utopia and Dystopia.
Bibliography
Haynes, Roslynn D. (1980). H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future: The Influence of Science on His Thought. New York: New York University Press. A detailed study of Wells's application of scientific concepts in his literary art; an alternative reading to Reed (see below).
Partington, John S. (2003). Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H.G. Wells. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. A comprehensive analysis of Wells's political thought, considering the influence of Huxleyan notions on Wells's world-view, and detailing Wells's support and later rejection of eugenics.
Reed, John R. (1982). The Natural History of H.G. Wells. Athens: Ohio University Press. An alternative study of the influence of science on Wells's literary work; an alternative reading to Haynes (see above).
Smith, David C. (1984). H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. The outstanding biography of Wells.
Wagar, W. Warren. (1961). H.G. Wells and the World State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. The first thorough study of Wells's world-state ideas.
Wells, H.G. (1984). Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866). London: Faber and Faber. Wells's outstanding autobiography, first published in 1934.
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