Herbert George 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.