[Marxism] Revenge of the wage-slave

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Revenge of the wage-slave

HG Wells's funniest book, Kipps, a satire on English class, drew on his own
humble background and his experience as a shop assistant, writes David
Lodge. The novel, which found an unlikely champion in Henry James, also
reflected Wells's flirtation with Fabian socialism

Saturday February 26, 2005
The Guardian

The early novels and tales of HG Wells fall into two quite different and
distinct categories. He first made his name as the author of "scientific
romances", such as The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds
(1898), classics of what is now called science fiction. But over the same
period he was also writing more conventional realistic novels about
contemporary social life: The Wheels of Chance (1896), Love and Mr Lewisham
(1901), and Kipps: the Story of a Simple Soul, which was completed and
published in 1905, but begun much earlier.

All three books have as their central character a young man of humble
background and limited horizons who glimpses the possibility of a richer
and more fulfilling existence but is unable to seize the opportunity and in
the end resigns himself to a life more ordinary. All three stories contain
a significant autobiographical element. Hoopdriver (the hero of Wheels of
Chance) and Kipps are draper's assistants, as was Wells for two miserable
years in his youth; and Lewisham is a teacher, as Wells was before he
became a professional writer.

It was his literary genius that allowed Wells to throw off the chains of
wage slavery and become a free spirit and a rich and famous man. That
blessing is not vouchsafed to the heroes of these novels, though the
possibility is briefly and rather absurdly entertained by Kipps ("he let it
be drawn from him that his real choice in life was to be a Nawther"). In
creating these characters Wells drew deeply on memories of his early life
and the emotions associated with it; but at the same time he celebrated his
own escape from its limitations, humiliations and privations by placing
himself as author at a comic distance from his heroes. This is especially
true of Kipps, probably the funniest of all his novels.

Herbert George Wells was born in 1866, the fourth child of his parents, who
had met when his mother was a lady's maid and his father a gardener at a
large country house. By the time of Herbert's birth they were running a
rather unsuccessful shop in the high street of Bromley, Kent, selling
chinaware and cricket equipment. Joseph Wells was a professional county
cricketer of some note, and his earnings from this source usefully
supplemented their meagre business income.

The family lived above and behind the shop, in dark, cramped and insanitary
accommodation, which made an indelible mark on the consciousness of young
Herbert, and gave him a lifelong obsession with domestic architecture. His
parents clung to the very lowest rung of the lower middle class, sending
their son to a cheap and badly managed private school to avoid the stigma
of a state "board school". In fact young Herbert largely educated himself,
making good use of a long period of convalescence at the age of seven to
develop a precocious enthusiasm for reading, which his parents did their
best to discourage.

It was Mrs Wells's intention that Herbert should, like his two older
brothers, be apprenticed in the draper's trade when he left school at 14.
Herbert put up some resistance to this plan, but finally submitted in 1881,
when he was indentured to the Southsea Drapery Emporium. In his Experiment
in Autobiography (1934), he wrote: "I recall those two years of my
incarceration as the most unhappy hopeless period of my life," but it
qualified him to write, in the early chapters of Kipps, one of the most
vivid accounts in English fiction of the lives of workers in the retail trade.

In his second year a new apprentice took over some of Wells's more menial
duties. "He had, by the bye," Wells recalled, "an amusing simplicity of
mind, a carelessness of manner, a way of saying 'Oo'er', and a feather at
the back of his head that stuck in memory, and formed the nucleus which
grew into Kipps ... "

When he could bear it no longer, Wells abandoned his apprenticeship to work
as an unqualified teaching assistant. This was another kind of wage
slavery, but more congenial, and it provided a platform from which the
talented young man was able to propel himself into higher education. He won
a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington (later to
become Imperial College), where he studied biology under Thomas Huxley, and
eventually took a first-class degree in zoology. Wells's interest in and
aptitude for the physical sciences was an unusual preparation for a
literary career but it was precisely what gave him a "competitive edge"
when, in the early 1890s, he began to supplement his earnings as a tutor in
a correspondence college with freelance journalism and, in due course, fiction.

full: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1425407,00.html


Louis Proyect
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