H.G. Wells Essay, Research Paper

One of the most prolific writers of his time, H.G. ( Herbert George) Wells was able to do it all. He was universal, and could write from many different sides. He was one of the most versitile writers, as he could write like a novelist, as in the The History of Mr. Polly. He could also write short stories, like The Star, or The Door In The Wall. He was also considered to be a visionary and a dreamer, as shown throughout A Modern Utopia, and Men Like Gods. What Wells was most famous for was his ability to be a scientific romancer. His novels, The Time Machine, The War of The Worlds, and The Invisible Man, were what he became most widely known for. All his writings, in the different genere’s they were written from, truly prove he was one of the most versitile writers that ever lived.

The date was September 21, 1866, and the place was 47 (now renumbered 172) High Street, Bromley, Kent, a suburb of London.. His father, Joseph Wells, and his mother, Sarah, had been married in 1853 and they had four children. An elder sister, Fanny, had died at the age of 9 two years before H.G. was born. After he was born, his family was worried that he may also die like his sister Fanny, being that he was a sort of “weakling” and struggled to not get sick most of the time. His father was a shopkeeper and a professional cricketer, and his mother served from time to time as a housekeeper at the nearby estate of Uppark. His father’s business failed and the family never made it to middle-class status, so Wells was apprenticed like his brothers to a draper, spending the years between 1880 and 1883 inWindsor and Southsea as a drapeist. In 1883 Wells became a teacher/pupil at Midhurst Grammar Scool. He obtained a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London and studied there biology under T.H. Huxley. However, his interest faltered and in 1887 he left without a degree. He taught in private schools for four years, not taking his B.S. degree until 1890. Next year he settled in London, married his cousin Isabel and continued his career as a teacher in a correspondence college. From 1893 Wells became a full-time writer.

After some years Wells left Isabel for one of his brightest students, Amy Catherine, whom he married in 1895.

Wells began to write fantasy fiction because he wanted to make money, and to get on with his writing career. He decided to write in this genere because he thought, and was right, that there was a large amount of people looking for spine chilling stories and the unexplained. Also, Wells knew of some of the early tales of the unexplained and far fetched: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and The Last Man, and also works of Edgar Allan Poe, all which he enjoyed profousely. Wells made his debut with The Time Machine, where the Time Traveler lands in the year 802701 and finds two people: the Eloi, weak and little, happy during the day, scared at night, who live above ground, and the Morlocks, apelike and carnivorous creatures that live below ground. Much of the realism of the story was achieved by carefully studied technical details. The Time Machine was a great success, and is the first of hundred’s of writings Well’s produced.

The Island Of Doctor Moreau (1896) is the most horrifying of Wells’s fantasies and one of the best written. The doctor is seeking to make animals half human by means of vivisectional surgery, the transplatation of organs, and the pain involved is very vividly described. Doctor Moreau suceede’s in making some of his man-animals talk and even read, but they tend to revert to the beast, so Moreau continues to try to get all the animal out, and make a creature of his own. Moreau is then killed by his creatures, which continue to come to their demise, and finally all die off. When the H.M.S. Scorpion visits the island, there is nothing alive there except for a few “white moths, some hogs and rabbits and some rather peculiar rats.” In the same year as his gorey fantasy The Island Of Doctor Moreau, he also published the light and cheerful novel The Wheels of Chance: A holiday Adventure.

The Wheels Of Chance: A Holiday Adventure tells about a draper’s assistant (Wells was a drapers apprentice when he was younger, which is why it is believed he used a draper’s assistant as the occupation of the man) who sets off on a cycling holiday and comes to the rescue of a maiden in distress. This book wasn’t nearly as much as a success as The Island Of Doctor Moreau, but it shows the flexibility contained in his writings and thoughts.

The year after H.G. Wells wrote The Wheels of Chance, he returned to the fantastic and unrealistic genre with The Invisible Man. It is about a man with a bandaged face, who wears dark blue glasses and has a false nose. The man becomes frusturated and starts a life of crime and violence. He then gets into an ordeal with the police, and runs away from the town, and that is the end.

Wells’s next novel, The War Of The Worlds, which appeared in 1898, is probably his most famous work. It is about Martians, arriving from their planet in ten cylinders at twenty-four-hour intervals, and they devastate the whole country, especially London. The Martians in his novel look like brain, floating in a brown liquid with nerves, that instead of eating, suck blood from other creatures. They use spiderlike engines to fight, and have the weapons to completely smother cities. The rest of the story tells about how the humans were powerless against the Martians, and how the Martians are able to take over whatever they want.

In 1901 Wells wrote The First Men On The Moon. This was nothing like The War Of The Worlds, even though they both dealt with space. He used vivid descriptions of lunar scenery, and he was quite close to what it looked like, as people saw in 1960 when pictures were sent back by American