Introduction
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, England into a family where there was little money to spare; his father ran a small shop and played cricket professionally and his mother worked as a housekeeper. The family's financial situation meant that Wells had to work from the age of fourteen to support himself through education. His success at school won him a free place to study at a college of science in London, after which he became a science teacher. His poor health made life difficult, though, and he struggled to keep his full-time job while trying to write in his spare time. He married twice. His first wife was Isabel Mary Wells, but the marriage was not a success. Three years later he left her for Amy Catherine Robbins, a former pupil. Wells often criticised the institution of marriage, and he had relationships with several other women, the most important being the writer Rebecca West. By 1895 Wells had become a full-time writer and lived comfortably from his work. He travelled a lot and kept homes in the south of France and in London, where he died in 1946. Wells wrote about 40 works of fiction and collections of stories; many books and shorter works on political, social and historical matters; three books for children, and one about his own life. His most important early works established him as the father of science fiction and it is for these books that he is remembered. Best known are The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men in the Moon (1901). In all these works he shows a remarkable imagination. He seemed to have the ability to make intelligent guesses about future scientific developments; he described travel underwater and by air, for example, at a time when such journeys seemed to be pure fiction.
IV
Wells