Often called the father of science fiction, H.G. Wells was admirable but ‘morally rotten’

The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World
CLAIRE TOMALIN
(VIKING, 272 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

If there is one author whose prefaces should not be skipped, it is Claire Tomalin. Her new biography begins in typically compelling style with a schoolboy so desperate to read a new H.G. Wells story that he rises at four in the morning to sneak it away from a sleeping friend’s bedside. The schoolboy is Eric Blair, later to become George Orwell; the friend who shares his obsession is Cyril Connolly. Three decades later, Orwell would write an essay in Connolly’s Horizon celebrating Wells as “a true prophet”: “The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if he had not existed.”

The young Herbert George Wells is easy to admire – and sympathise with. Born in 1866 to Kentish shopkeepers, he was forced to leave school at 14 to become a draper’s apprentice. For a teenager desperate to acquire knowledge, this hard, boring life could hardly have been more frustrating.