H.G. Wells | The Father of Science Fiction

Time travel, Martian invasions and free love all have one thing in common - H.G. Wells.

Helen Antrobus explores how the world was changed through the writings of one author as H.G. Wells brought science fiction to the masses with the War of the Worlds, the Time Machine and many more iconic stories.
Discover how a series of underground tunnels and a telescope in an attic room helped to pave the way for the sci-fi we know today.
 
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Production
Presenter: Helen Antrobus
Producer: Jack Glover + Sophie Wilkinson
Sound Design: Jesus Gomez

Contributors
Mark Syson-Harvey
Sophie Wilkinson

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Episode Transcript

GENERIC (00:48):
We're interrupting the show with a special bulletin
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HELEN ANTROBUS (01:34):
Have you ever imagined being a fly on the wall
of history? Join me for aninside view of the stories of
people, places and moments thatmade us.
I'm historian Helen Antrobus andlean in for a tale from time.
Back When.

(01:58):
No one would have believed inthe last years of the 19th
century that the literary worksof one author would completely
change the world of sciencefiction.
A prolific writer, a prophet tosome, and a man who is said to
have found no real conventionalsocial station.
H. G. Wells' stories havespanned generations and gripped

(02:19):
audiences around the globe.
The year is 1938, and one ofthose stories, The War Of The
Worlds, has just been brought tolife during a radio broadcast
that for many sent shivers downthe spine of those listening, as
they believed the Earth wasbeing invaded by Martians.
Behind it all was a world caughtin the tangles of extraordinary

(02:42):
scientific advances.
A world that, for the firsttime, was entering into a new
era of mass media andcommunication unseen at such a
scale in the centuries thatpreceded.
And in the middle, H. G. Wells.This is the origin story of the

(03:02):
father of science fiction.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY (03:10):
The Wells family are kind of, I guess
you'd say lower middle class,but he describes them as servant
class.

HELEN ANTROBUS (03:17):
This is Mark Syson-Harvey, a curator and H.
G. Wells fan and expert. We meetMark at Uppark, the Grand
Country House in West Sussexwhere our story begins.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY (03:28):
His mother, Sarah, had been a housemaid here
at Uppark when she was young andthat's when she met Joseph, his
father, who was a gardener.

HELEN ANTROBUS (03:38):
The pair worked at Uppark for a number of years
before leaving to care forSarah's dying mother. It was
after her passing that the Wellsbegan their family.
The youngest of four children,Herbert George Wells, was known
affectionately as Bertie.
Young Bertie grew up in aworking-class family observing
the comings and goings of bothhis parents and the multiple

(04:01):
jobs they held to provide a lifefor their children.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY (04:05):
He talks about his mother being almost
obsessed with keeping upappearances.
She didn't want people to knowthat they didn't have servants.
It was her big secret that shedid all the housework herself.
Joseph was sort of...semi-successful cricket player
as well as a gardener. He'd hada bit of a mixed career.

(04:28):
They ran a shop together, whichwas a mixture of crockery and
cricket goods. It was calledAtlas House. It was a bit of a
strange place, not particularlysuccessful.
It was a bit of an albatrossreally. By the time it was sold
to them, it was already notdoing well. And they lived
basically their life indrudgery, running this slightly

(04:49):
odd and slightly unsuccessfulshop.

HELEN ANTROBUS (04:52):
An incident and childhood injury came next in
the journey that would defineliterary history.
Bertie suffered a broken leg.
Bedridden and in need ofentertainment, his father would
bring him books from the locallibrary to read, something which
he credited in later life as theinitial spark for his
creativity.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY (05:15):
Basically, all he did was read and he got
obsessed with all these ideas.
He was not going to live hislife in drudgery as he described
it. He was aspiring to somethingdifferent that his parents
didn't really aspire to.

(05:37):
He's really quite dismissiveabout his mother in his
autobiography.
He says his earliest memories ofher are distressed and
overworked. And then hedescribes his father as a
baffled, unsuccessful, stuck manbutq had a cheerful disposition.
And he says, "Probably I amalive today and writing this

(05:57):
autobiography instead of being aworn-out, dismissed and already
dead shop assistant because myleg was broken."

HELEN ANTROBUS (06:04):
But it was a second leg injury, this time for
Mr Wells Senior, that saw Bertieand his mother Sarah return to
Uppark.
With the shop collapsing and abroken femur putting an end to
Joseph's cricketing career, thefamily's little income was
quickly vanishing.
Sarah returned to her oldemployer Lady Frances, with whom
she had a good relationship andhad kept in contact with.

(06:27):
Now back in regular employment,Sarah's attention turned towards
her youngest, Bertie, who shewas desperate to set on the
right path.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY (06:39):
He was a difficult child. He, in fact,
describes himself as a difficultchild at one point.
But his mother had apprenticedhim to be a draper. That didn't
work out.
He went to a friend of thefamily to be a sort of teaching
assistant, age 14. That didn'twork out.
So all these various routes shehad for him weren't happening.

(07:03):
So he describes how his motherspoke to Lady Frances and got
permission for him to come andstay at Uppark temporarily while
she figured out his next move.
But a snowstorm actuallyhappened while he was here, kept
him here for a couple of weeks,so he slotted into the below
stairs life.

HELEN ANTROBUS (07:28):
Beneath the main house at Uppark are the
servants' quarters, a labyrinthof rooms and outbuildings
connected by a series oftunnels. And it's there that
Mark describes the effect thatthis had on a young and
inquisitive mind.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY (07:43):
Down in these tunnels would have been a sort
of a hub of activity, basically.
You would have had staff runningback and forwards from the house
to the kitchens, maybe carryingfood, going to different parts
of the property.
And the idea was to kind of keepthem out of sight, really. The

(08:04):
aristocracy don't want to bebothered by seeing staff running
around. So these tunnels allowthat access without getting in
the way.

HELEN ANTROBUS (08:17):
It's here that Wells first became aware of the
separation between the classesand The life below stairs
inspires him to write what wouldbe his first novel, The Time
Machine.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY (08:28):
I think you can really see how the tunnels
inspire Wells in The TimeMachine. He talks at length in
that future section about whathas become of the working
classes. He's incrediblyunsubtle by today's standards.
The time traveller who'snarrating the story essentially
says, oh, I've seen what'shappened to the working classes,

(08:52):
and this is obviously becausethey were not given proper
access to above ground and whathe'd seen in the 19th century
he's extrapolating.
So 800,000 years in the futurethe working classes have
literally become thisunderground race.

HELEN ANTROBUS (09:15):
Published in 1895, The Time Machine was
Wells' first novel, and it wasthe first novel to introduce
that now classic sci-fi trope,the idea of a device that can
travel through time.
The story was a huge success andhelped to rescue Wells from
poverty and started his prolificliterary career.

(09:39):
The Time Machine was the firstof, as he called them, his
scientific romances, whichhelped pave the way for science
fiction in the 20th century andbeyond and kick-started a
Victorian craze along the way.

SOPHIE WILKINSON (09:53):
At the time H. G. Wells started writing he was
one of the few people who wereessentially generating a new
literary genre.

HELEN ANTROBUS (10:02):
This is Sophie Wilkinson, a writer with a
passion for Victorian literatureand science fiction.

SOPHIE WILKINSON (10:11):
A couple of popular genres in Victorian
times were ghost stories,stories of the supernatural, and
then also you've got reallygritty realism, we're talking
Charles Dickens, that sort ofthing.
What is now known as sciencefiction kind of fell somewhere
between that, and I think it wasjust the right moment for it

(10:32):
really.
There was a huge upsurge ininterest in science and
technology, belief in progressand the kind of mass production
printing and the railway meantthat all these kind of ideas
were readily available to a lotof people.
Things like scientific ideas,they weren't just the pursuit of

(10:54):
a few privileged gentlemen,anyone could get their hands on
it.
So that creates this. I guess, atime when things like this can
be explored in literature.

HELEN ANTROBUS (11:07):
The Victorian era ushered in new ways for
people to live and experiencethe world around them.
Suddenly, ordinary people werestarting to have access to all
of the things that we findfascinating and that fills with
excitement.
The timing of Wells' work meantthat, for the first time, people
could start to contextualise theworld around them.

SOPHIE WILKINSON (11:28):
H. G. Wells, he got a lot of critical acclaim
and sort of commercial successin his time.
I think crucially because he wasa fantastic storyteller. He
talks of ordinary things, butwith extraordinary happenings.
So he writes about things thatpeople reading would understand,
but he sort of adds these kindof absolutely fantastic ideas

(11:51):
and runs with them.

HELEN ANTROBUS (11:53):
Many of the concepts that seem so
commonplace today, such as timetravel and space exploration
were first coined by Wells inhis novels.
And while time travel is stillyet to make an appearance, there
are some other things from ourfuture that Wells predicted.

SOPHIE WILKINSON (12:11):
Wells didn't sort of think of the future as
something unknowable. Hepredicted all kinds of other
technologies and advancementsthat did actually come to pass.
So one of them is automaticdoors. There's also genetic
engineering. Wirelesscommunication. He had an idea
for a world knowledge bank,which is essentially Wikipedia

(12:34):
and the internet.
He coined the term atomic bombin 1914, and he was influential
in kind of future space traveldevelopments.
The first liquid-fueled rocketlaunched in 1926 by Robert H.

(12:56):
Goddard. And he was inspired byreading War Of The Worlds as a
teenager and wrote to H. G.Wells saying that, you know, his
scientific path was paved byreading H. G. Wells and feeling
inspired by that.

HELEN ANTROBUS (13:15):
Not just impacting the worlds of science
fiction and science fact, manyof H. G. Wells' stories also
included social commentarysimilar to class division
portrayed in the upper and lowerworlds of the Time Machine that
had been inspired by his time atUppark.
Wells was a staunch socialist,and he used his writings to try
and help turn the world into amore equal place.

SOPHIE WILKINSON (13:36):
There's some lovely quotes from his peers
about his writing. So Conradcalled H. G. Wells the realist
of the fantastic, and BertrandRussell said that Wells helped
make socialism respectable inEngland.
And I think as well as kind ofhis impact at the time, you've
got to look at sort of hislasting impact.

(13:58):
So on science fiction as agenre, he is known as the father
of science fiction. He was theone who coined these ideas like
time travel and that sort ofthing.
But also his impact on socialismand socialist thought.
In the 1940s, George Orwell saidthat thinking people who were
born about the beginning of thiscentury were in some sense

(14:20):
Wells' own creation.
And you just get the sense he'sthis highly imaginative and
really provocative thinker.
His literature and hisnon-fiction writing, you know,
it made people think, it madepeople question things. And I
think, you know, that legacy is-
You can still see that today.

HELEN ANTROBUS (14:39):
It's fair to say that what had started at Uppark
has had a profound effect on theworld and a whole genre of
writing.
But for Wells, the tunnels hadanother somewhat of a kinky
kickstart. To another side ofhis life.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY (14:55):
One sort of surprising story that happens in
the tunnels is essentially whathe describes as his sexual
awakening.
After a Christmas party, he hadspent most of the whole party
dancing with this maid Mary.
He doesn't know her last name,never did.
His mother did her best to stophim dancing with Mary the whole

(15:18):
night, but they were not havingit.
The next morning, he's walkingthrough the tunnels, out jumps
Mary, gives him a big kiss anddisappears.
And he describes basically inhis autobiography that this is-
This is the moment he becomesquite excited by sex. It's just

(15:38):
a kiss with a housemaid, but itleads to quite a colourful life.

SOPHIE WILKINSON (15:44):
He was married twice, but he had a number of
long-term relationships, asidefrom those marriages and many,
many other brief affairs.

HELEN ANTROBUS (15:56):
Wells was an advocate for free love. A
radical movement hat wasbeginning to gain popularity in
the hedonistic world of the lateVictorian era.

SOPHIE WILKINSON (16:10):
Essentially, he believed in free love and he
practiced it tirelessly.
He was known as a prophet ofsexual revolution and certainly
a scoundrel.
But I suppose there is anotherside to this in that he always
claimed, and admittedly, wedon't have his wife's voice on
this, but he claimed that it washis-
With his wife's consent that hehad these affairs, and that he

(16:35):
believed in this kind of utopianfuture.
He wanted women to have sexualfreedom as much as men.

HELEN ANTROBUS (16:42):
With his rise in popularity, Wells achieved a
sense of early celebrity and hadbecome a bit of a sex symbol.

SOPHIE WILKINSON (16:49):
H. G. Wells' lovers included novelists like
Dorothy Richardson, RebeccaWest, fellow Fabians such as
Amber Reeves.
Some of those went on to givebirth to some of his children.
American journalists, birthcontrol activists. He described
himself as the Don Juan amongthe intelligentsia in his

(17:12):
biography.
That is obviously his own words,so you know, we'll take that
with a pinch of salt.
But he was certainly gossipedabout within literary and
socialist circles.
They were relatively smallcircles, I think, in many ways.
They all knew each other. Theywould have known each other's
business.
You know, it did get him intosome trouble.

HELEN ANTROBUS (17:35):
And it's this reputation that got the better
of him one day in 1908 with ascandal involving a teenage
mistress and daughter of fellowauthor E. Nesbitt.

SOPHIE WILKINSON (17:46):
One affair was with a woman called Rosamund
Bland, who was at the time 19.
She was secretary for a branchof the Fabian Society and also
the secretly adopted daughter ofHubert and Edith Bland, and now
Edith Bland is better known asE. Nesbitt.
Rosamund and H. G. Wells had anaffair. They were intercepted by

(18:11):
Hubert Bland at Paddington trainstation en route to essentially
a dirty weekend in Paris.
And Hubert punched Wells in theface repeatedly and dragged his
errant daughter home.
So yes, a lot of fuel for gossipamong certain circles.

HELEN ANTROBUS (18:42):
Wells' legacy is one that has shaped the modern
day and continues to do so byinspiring new novelists or
adaptations of his works.
There is one final storyinspired by his time at Uppark
that has become a Hollywoodblockbuster multiple times over,
become a West End musical, andhas become the central

(19:04):
tantalising idea in our ownsearch for extraterrestrial
life.
The War Of The Worlds was thestory behind the 1938 radio
broadcast at the start of thisepisode, for which we made our
own Wells-inspired adaptation.
That was made possible by achance finding in an attic room.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY (19:24):
He talks in his autobiography about enjoying
walking around outside and it'sone particular day where where
the weather is bad and he sayshe can't enjoy the park that he
goes exploring in the the atticrooms near his bedroom.
So his bedroom's sort of tuckedaway in the attic and he finds

(19:45):
this room that he says isbasically full of junk and what
he starts to explore in there ishe finds a box and finds a
telescope that he figures outhow to put together and starts
spending his nights looking out,becoming obsessed with the
stars.
Where Uppark is situated, we'reright on the top of the hill.

(20:08):
You can just imagine looking outthe window at night time, it
must be a spectacular view.
And he talks in theautobiography about his mother
coming in in the middle of thenight and essentially saying,
what on Earth are you doing?
Why aren't you asleep?
But he's captivated by the starsand beginning that obsession

(20:28):
with science that will dominatehis life and career as well as
his writing.

HELEN ANTROBUS (20:36):
Wells died on the 13th of August 1946, leaving
deep and lasting impressions onthis mortal plane, but best
summarised in his obituary bylong-time friend George Bernard
Shaw, who wrote, "HG was not agentleman." "
Nobody understood better than hewhat gentry means, but he could

(20:56):
not, or would not, act the part.No conventional social station
fitted him. Nothing could abatehis likeableness. There is no
end of the things I might sayabout him had I had space or
time."
So the next time you're watchingthe latest sci-fi thriller or

(21:18):
gazing up at the stars andplanets above, imagine how
different that could have beenif it hadn't have been for a
young lad with a broken leg, aseries of subterranean tunnels
or a worldview dreaming of thefuture.

(21:43):
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(22:03):
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Join us again next time for moretales from time. Back When.