The Country of the Blind and Other Stories Read online

  THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND AND OTHER SELECTED STORIES

  H. G. WELLS, the third son of a small shopkeeper, was born in Bromley in 1866. After two years’ apprenticeship in a draper’s shop, he became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and won a scholarship to study under T. H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. He taught biology before becoming a professional writer and journalist. He wrote more than a hundred books, including novels, essays, histories and programmes for world regeneration.

  Wells, who rose from obscurity to world fame, had an emotionally and intellectually turbulent life. His prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress, whose anticipations of a future world state include The Shape of Things to Come (1933). His controversial views on sexual equality and women’s rights were expressed in the novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). He was, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘an important liberator of thought and action’.

  Wells drew on his own early struggles in many of his best novels, including Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). His educational works, some written in collaboration, include The Outline of History (19x0) and The Science of Life (1930). His Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., 1934) reviews his world. He died in London in 1946.

  PATRICK PARRINDER took his MA and Ph.D. at Cambridge University, where he held a Fellowship at King’s College and published his first two books on Wells, H. G. Wells (1970) and H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (1972). He has been Chairman of the H. G. Wells Society and editor of The Wellsian, and has also written on James Joyce, science fiction, literary criticism and the history of the English novel. His book Nation and Novel (2006) surveys English fiction from its late Medieval origins to the present day. Since 1986 he has been Professor of English at the University of Reading.

  NEIL GAIMAN has won highly respectable awards for writing comics (like Sandman) and adult novels (like American Gods) and children’s books (like Coraline). He has written screenplays for films, like the upcoming Beowulf. His books have been filmed, like the upcoming Stardust. He travels too much and sometimes writes about it at www.neilgaiman.com He needs a haircut, but has reached the age where he’s happy just to have hair.

  ANDY SAWYER is the librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool Library, and Course Director of the MA in Science Fiction Studies offered by the School of English. He also teaches a ‘speculative fictions’ module for undergraduates. He has published widely on science fiction and related literatures, co-edited the collection of essays Speaking Science Fiction (2000) and was an Associate Editor of the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy Themes, Works, and Wonders (2005). He is Reviews Editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction.

  H. G. WELLS

  The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories

  Edited by PATRICK PARRINDER

  With an Introduction by NEIL GAIMAN

  and Notes by ANDY SAWYER

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

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  This selection first published in Penguin Classics 2007

  Text copyright © the Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells

  Biographical Note, Further Reading, Note on the Texts

  Copyright © Patrick Parrinder, 2005, 2007

  Introduction copyright © Neil Gaiman, 2007

  ‘Wells’s London and Surrounding Region’, Glossary and Notes copyright © Andy Sawyer, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 9781101492215

  Contents

  Biographical Note

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  Note on the Texts

  The Lord of the Dynamos

  The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes

  The Moth

  A Catastrophe

  The Cone

  The Argonauts of the Air

  Under the Knife

  A Slip under the Microscope

  The Plattner Story

  The Story of the late Mr Elvesham

  In the Abyss

  The Sea Raiders

  The Crystal Egg

  A Story of the Stone Age

  The Star

  The Man who could work Miracles

  A Dream of Armageddon

  The New Accelerator

  The Truth about Pyecraft

  The Country of the Blind

  The Empire of the Ants

  The Door in the Wall

  The Wild Asses of the Devil

  Appendix: H. G. Wells’s Introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories

  Wells’s London and Surrounding Region

  Glossary

  Notes

  Biographical Note

  Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 at Bromley, Kent, a small market town soon to be swallowed up by the suburban growth of outer London. His father, formerly a professional gardener and a county cricketer renowned for his fast bowling, owned a small business in Bromley High Street selling china goods and cricket bats. The house was grandly known as Atlas House, but the centre of family life was a cramped basement kitchen underneath the shop. Soon Joseph Wells’s cricketing days were cut short by a broken leg, and the family fortunes looked bleak.

  Young ‘Bertie’ Wells had already shown great academic promise, but when he was thirteen his family broke up and he was forced to earn his own living. His father was bankrupt, and his mother left home to become resident housekeeper at Uppark, the great Sussex country house where she had worked as a lady’s maid before her marriage. Wells was taken out of school to follow his two elder brothers into the drapery trade. After serving briefly as a pupil-teacher and a pharmacist’s assistant, in 1881 he was apprenticed to a department store in Southsea, working a thirteen-hour day and sleeping in a dormitory with his fellow-apprentices. This was the unhappiest period of his life, though he would later r
evisit it in comic romances such as Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Kipps and Polly both manage to escape from their servitude as drapers, and in 1883, helped by his long-suffering mother, Wells cancelled his indentures and obtained a post as teaching assistant at Midhurst Grammar School near Uppark. His intellectual development, long held back, now progressed astonishingly. He passed a series of examinations in science subjects and, in September 1884, entered the Normal School of Science, South Kensington (later to become part of Imperial College of Science and Technology) on a government scholarship.

  Wells was a born teacher, as many of his books would show, and at first he was an enthusiastic student. He had the good fortune to be taught biology and zoology by one of the most influential scientific thinkers of the Victorian age, Darwin’s friend and supporter T. H. Huxley. Wells never forgot Huxley’s teaching, but the other professors were more humdrum, and his interest in their courses rapidly waned. He scraped through second-year physics, but failed his third-year geology exam and left South Kensington in 1887 without taking a degree. He was thrilled by the theoretical framework and imaginative horizons of natural science, but impatient of practical detail and the grinding, routine tasks of laboratory work. He cut his classes and spent his time reading literature and history, satisfying the curiosity he had earlier felt while exploring the long-neglected library at Uppark. He started a college magazine, the Science Schools Journal, and argued for socialism in student debates.

  In the summer of 1887 Wells became science master at a small private school in North Wales, but a few weeks later he was knocked down and injured by one of his pupils on the football field. Sickly and undernourished as a result of three years of student poverty, he suffered severe kidney and lung damage. After months of convalescence at Uppark he was able to return to science teaching at Henley House School, Kilburn. In 1890 he passed his University of London B.Sc. (Hons.) with a first class in zoology and obtained a post as a biology tutor for the University Correspondence College. In 1891 he married his cousin Isabel Wells, but they had little in common and soon Wells fell in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (usually known as ‘Jane’). They started living together in 1893, and married two years later when his divorce came through.

  During his years as a biology tutor Wells slowly began making his way as a writer and journalist. He wrote for the Educational Times, edited the University Correspondent, and in 1891 published a philosophical essay, ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, in the prestigious Fortnightly Review. His first book was a Textbook of Biology (1893). But no sooner was it published than his health again collapsed, forcing him to give up teaching and rely entirely on his literary earnings. His future seemed highly precarious, yet soon he was in regular demand as a writer of short stories and humorous essays for the burgeoning newspapers and magazines of the period. He became a fiction reviewer and, for a short period in 1895, a theatre critic.

  Ever since his student days Wells had worked intermittently on a story about time-travelling and the possible future of the human race. An early version was published in the Science Schools Journal as ‘The Chronic Argonauts’, but now, after numerous redrafts and much encouragement from the poet and editor W. E. Henley, it finally took shape as The Time Machine (1895). Its success was instantaneous, and while it was running as a magazine serial Wells was already being spoken of as a ‘man of genius’. He was celebrated as the inventor of the ‘scientific romance’, a combination of adventure novel and philosophical tale in which the hero becomes involved in a life-and-death struggle resulting from some unforeseen scientific development. There was now a ready market for his fiction, and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; later revised as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910), The First Men in the Moon (1901) and several other volumes followed quickly from his pen.

  By the turn of the twentieth century Wells was established as a popular author in England and America, and his books were rapidly being translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian and other European languages. Already his fame had begun to eclipse that of his predecessor in scientific romance, the French author Jules Verne, who had dominated the field since the 1860s. But Wells, an increasingly self-conscious artist, had larger ambitions than to go down in history as a boys’ adventure novelist like Jules Verne. Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) was his first attempt at realistic fiction, comic in spirit and manifestly reflecting his own experiences as a student and teacher. By the end of the Edwardian decade, when he wrote his ‘Condition of England’ novels Tono-Bungay (1909) and The New Machi-avelli (1911), Wells had become one of the leading novelists of his day, the friend and rival of such literary figures as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and Henry James.

  But Wells was never a devotee of art for art’s sake; he was a prophetic writer with a social and political message. His first major non-fictional work was Anticipations (1902.), a book of futurological essays setting out the possible effects of scientific and technological progress in the twentieth century. Anticipations brought him into contact with the Fabian Society and launched his career as a political journalist and an influential voice of the British left. During his Fabian period Wells wrote A Modern Utopia (1905), but failed in his attempt to challenge the bureaucratic, reformist outlook of the Society’s leaders such as Bernard Shaw (a lifelong friend and rival) and Beatrice Webb. Wells’s Edwardian scientific romances such as The Food of the Gods (1904) and The War in the Air (1908), though full of humorous touches, are propagandist in intent. In other ‘future war’ stories of this period he predicted the tank and the atomic bomb.

  Success as an author brought about great changes in his personal life. Ill-health had forced him to leave London for the Kent coast in 1898, but in the long run the only legacy of his footballing injury was the diabetes that affected him in old age. He commissioned a house, Spade House, overlooking the English Channel at Sandgate, from the architect C. F. A. Voysey, and here his and Jane’s two sons were born – George Philip or ‘Gip’, who became a zoology professor and collaborated with his father and Julian Huxley on the biology encyclopedia The Science of Life (1930), and Frank, who worked in the film industry. Wells gave generous support to his parents and to his eldest brother, who was a fellow-fugitive from the drapery trade. Increasingly, however, he looked for emotional fulfilment outside the family, and his sexual affairs became notorious. He had a daughter in 1909 with Amber Reeves, a leading young Fabian economist, and in 1914 the novelist and critic Rebecca West gave birth to his son Anthony West, whose troubled childhood would later be reflected in his own novel Heritage (1955) and in his biography of his father.

  As Wells’s personal life became the gossip of literary London, his roles as imaginative writer and political journalist or prophet came increasingly into conflict. Ann Veronica (1909) was an example of topical, controversial fiction, dramatizing and commenting on such issues as women’s rights, sexual equality and contemporary morals. It was the first of Wells’s ‘discussion novels’ in which his personal relationships were often very thinly disguised. His later fiction takes a great variety of forms, but it all belongs to the broad category of the novel of ideas. At one extreme is the realistic reporting of Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) – still valuable and unique as a portrayal of the English ‘home front’ in the First World War – while at the other extreme are brief fables such as The Undying Fire (1919) and The Croquet Player (1936), political allegories about world events each cast in the form of a prophetic dialogue.

  Wells was by no means an experimental novelist like his younger contemporaries James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but he was often technically innovative, and in some of his books the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction begin to break down. Sometimes he would take a classic from an earlier, pre-modern epoch as his literary model: A Modern Utopia (1905), for example, refers back to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Plato’s Republic. His bestselling historical wor
ks The Outline of History (1920) and A Short History of the World (1922) break with historical conventions by looking forward to the next stage in history. These works were written in order to draw the lessons of the First World War and to ensure that, if possible, its carnage would never be repeated; Wells saw history as a ‘race between education and catastrophe’. The same concerns led to his future-history novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933), later rewritten for the cinema as Things to Come, an epic science-fiction film produced in 1936 by Alexander Korda. Both novel and film contain dire warnings about the inevitable outbreak and disastrous consequences of the Second World War.

  By the 1920s, Wells was not only a famous author but a public figure whose name was rarely out of the newspapers. He briefly worked for the Ministry of Propaganda in 1918, producing a memorandum on war aims which anticipated the setting-up of the League of Nations. In 1922 and 1923 he stood for Parliament as a Labour candidate. He sought to influence world leaders, including two US Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. His meeting with Lenin in the Kremlin in 1920 and his interview in 1934 with Lenin’s successor Josef Stalin were publicized all over the world. His high-pitched, piping voice was often heard on BBC radio. In 1933 he was elected president of International PEN, the writers’ organization campaigning for intellectual freedom. In the same year his books were publicly burnt by the Nazis in Berlin, and he was banned from visiting Fascist Italy. His ideas strongly influenced the Pan-European Union, the pressure group advocating European unity between the wars.

  But Wells became convinced that nothing less than global unity was needed if humanity was not to destroy itself. In The Open Conspiracy (1928) and other books he outlined his theories of world citizenship and world government. As the Second World War drew nearer he felt that his mission had been a failure and his warnings had gone unheeded. His last great campaign, for which he tried to obtain international support, was for human rights. The proposal set out in his Penguin Special The Rights of Man (1940) helped to bring about the United Nations declaration of 1948. He spent the war years at his house in Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, and was awarded a D.Sc. by London University in 1943. His last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), was a despairing, pessimistic work, even bleaker in its prospects for mankind than The Time Machine fifty years earlier. He died at Hanover Terrace on 13 August 1946. He was restless and tireless to the end, a prophet eternally dissatisfied with himself and with humanity. ‘Some day’, he had written in a whimsical ‘Auto-Obituary’ three years earlier, ‘I shall write a book, a real book.’ He had published over fifty works of fiction and, in total, some 150 books and pamphlets.