Kipps Read online

  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’, Book I, Chapter 3,$4). As Wells's biographers Norman and Jean Mackenzie observe: ‘The “little men” to whom Wells gave his best writing as a novelist… are not fated to escape into their wish-fulfilments. They are nostalgic figures and, unlike their author, they are not permitted to cross the frontier of success. They are not fit to become supermen.’ 1 By ‘nostalgic’ the Mackenzies mean that 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 Bertie's birth they were running a rather unsuccessful shop, grandiloquently called Atlas House, in the high street of Bromley, in 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 Bertie, 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 Bertie 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. When his father broke his leg and was forced to retire from cricket, the family fortunes declined steeply. His mother took the position of housekeeper at Uppark, in Sussex, the stately home where she had formerly been employed, and young Bertie's occasional sojourns in this establishment gave him a valuable insight into the upper reaches of the English class system and the place of the landed aristocracy and gentry in English social history.

  It was Mrs Wells's intention that Bertie should, like his two older brothers, be apprenticed as a draper's assistant when he left school at the age of fourteen. Bertie put up some resistance to this plan, and contrived to get dismissed by his first employer within a few weeks, but after short spells as a pupil-teacher and pharmacist's assistant he finally submitted to becoming a draper's apprentice at Southsea, a seaside district of Portsmouth in Hampshire, in June 1881. Describing that experience in his Experiment in Autobiography, he wrote, ‘I recall those two years of my incarceration as the most unhappy hopeless period of my life’, 2 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 more menial duties, but also the errands that had provided occasional relief and escape from the shop's boring routine and petty restrictions. ‘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 my memory, and formed the nucleus which grew into Kipps…’ 3

  When he could bear the ignoble servitude of the Southsea Drapery Emporium no longer, Wells abandoned his apprenticeship and returned to Midhurst, the nearest town to Uppark, 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 part of Imperial College) where he studied a range of subjects, including biology under the instruction of Professor T. H. Huxley, and eventually took a first-class degree in zoology from the University of London. Wells's interest in and aptitude for the physical sciences was an unusual preparation for a literary career but, combined with a natural gift for verbal expression nourished on voracious reading, 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. He bridged the gap between ‘the two cultures’ of science and literature long before that phrase was coined. 4

  Wells badly needed the extra money at this time, because of the complications of his personal life. In spite of an indifferent physique, and a history of illness and serious accidental injuries, the young Wells was very interested in sex and very frustrated by the repression and prudery that inhibited relations between men and women in late Victorian England. In 1891 he married his cousin Isabel but quickly discovered that they were sexually and emotionally ill-matched. Soon he was conducting an affair with one of his adult students, Amy Catherine Robbins – whom he later renamed ‘Jane’ – and lived with her in what was then known as sin until he obtained a divorce in 1895 and was free to marry her. Curiously she seemed no more capable of satisfying his erotic needs than her predecessor, but she was more tolerant of his tendency to seek satisfaction with other women, and she remained his faithful, supportive, and more or less complaisant wife until her death in 1927. It is probably not coincidental that both Kipps and Lewisham find themselves compromised by conflicting ties and obligations to two women; but the urgency of Wells's own sexual desires finds little expression in Love and Mr Lewisham, and none at all in Kipps, whose hero has a childlike innocence in this as in every other aspect of life.

  The composition of Kipps had a long and complicated history. We can date its inception very precisely. In his earlier years Wells was in the habit of drawing little cartoon-sketches which he called ‘picshuas’ as a kind of visual diary, and one of these, dated 5 October 1898, shows Wells as an authorial chicken who has just hatched an egg from which has emerged a diminutive figure named ‘Kipps’. 5 He and Jane were then living in a rented cottage by the edge of the sea at Sandgate, a few miles to the west of Folkestone, and he was to situate his new hero in the same part of England, where the Romney Marshes meet the high cliffs of Kent. In July of that year they had set out on a cycling tour of the south coast, but at Seaford, in Sussex, Wells became seriously ill, with acute pain in the kidney that had been damaged in a football injury some years earlier. Luckily he was able to consult a very able and sympathetic doctor, Henry Hick, whom he had met through George Gissing, 6 and who lived in the little town of New Romney. Hick generously took the invalid and his wife into his own house and nursed him there. While he was convalescing, Henry James cycled over from Rye with Edmund Gosse 7 and met Wells for the first time, commencing a literary friendship which began in mutual esteem but ended unhappily some seventeen years later. In the autumn of 1898 Gosse and James were covertly checking out Wells's possible need of a grant from the Royal Literary Fund, but they discovered that the young writer's finances were in good order and that he was already planning to build himself a house in the locality with an en suite bathroom for every bedroom – which in due course materialized as Spade House, Sandgate. Meanwhile he rented the aptly named Beach Cottage in the same place, where he finished Love and Mr Lewisham and began the story of Arthur Kipps, a humble draper's assistant who inherits a fortune and is suddenly promoted into the bourgeoisie.

  Originally the novel was entitled The Wealth of Mr Waddy, and apart from a brief ‘Prelude’ Kipps himself did not figure in the early chapters. Wells worked hard on the book in late 1898 and submitted a draft of the first 35,000 words, with an additional 15,000 words of notes indicating the intended development of the story, to his agent J. B. Pinker in January 1899. As Pinker endeavo
ured without success to interest publishers and magazine editors in the project, Wells added further passages to the typescript, but towards the end of 1899 he abandoned the novel on the grounds that it had grown too big and unwieldy in scale. Over the next few years he returned to the story, focusing more narrowly on the character and fortunes of Arthur Kipps, but he still had difficulty in bringing it to a conclusion that was aesthetically and thematically satisfying, for reasons that will be examined later.

  The sizeable fragment of The Wealth of Mr Waddy, which Wells himself believed to be lost, in fact survived and was published posthumously. 8 It is well worth reading on its own merits as well as for the fascinating glimpses it affords into the workshop of Wells's imagination and the light it throws on his development as a novelist. As its editor, Harris Wilson, observes, it supports ‘the contention of some critics that the early Wells was much “darker” than the later’. 9 Mr Waddy, who is only briefly mentioned in the published novel as the source of Kipps' legacy, dominates the early chapters of the earlier version – a monster of egotism and misanthropy who provokes a kind of appalled laughter in the reader. Selfish and irascible by nature, he is further embittered by being crippled in a cycling accident just as he inherits a fortune and is condemned to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He has no compassion for those similarly afflicted but more needy. ‘Convalescent Homes indeed! Lethal chambers are what we want’, is his typical reaction to a request for a charitable donation. 10 Residing in Folkestone, he tyrannizes over a little group of servants and hangers-on, who include Chitterlow and his wife Muriel. An ill-fated attempt to make their son Harry ingratiate himself with Waddy in the manner of Little Lord Fauntleroy so enrages the misanthropic invalid that he loses control of his wheelchair on the Folkestone Leas and careers down a path that leads to the cliff edge, to be saved from certain death by the chance intervention of Kipps. Waddy dies shortly afterwards from shock, but not before he has left all his fortune to Kipps, as much to spite his retainers as out of gratitude to his rescuer.

  The retrospective account that follows of Kipps' character, background and apprenticeship as a draper is very similar to the corresponding passages in the published novel, though more condensed. Wells's notes indicate that the rest of the plot was to develop along essentially the same lines as in Kipps, and the characters of Ann, Helen and Coote (a little younger) were already in place, as well as the Chitterlows. So his declared reason for abandoning Mr Waddy, and starting afresh – that it had been planned on ‘too colossal a scale’ 11 – doesn't quite ring true. Perhaps Pinker's failure to find a publisher made him think its comedy was too black to have popular appeal, for he was always desirous of commercial success as well as critical acclaim. The characters, apart from Kipps himself, are greedy, predatory and unscrupulous, with not a redeeming feature between them, whereas in Kipps they are treated more gently, their behaviour being expressive of what is wrong with society in general rather than manifestations of personal malevolence.

  The model for both versions was pre-eminently Charles Dickens's books, as Wells himself frankly acknowledged. He wrote to his father about Mr Waddy in December 1898: ‘I am writing rather hard… at a comic novel in the old-fashioned Dickens line’, and seven years later he wrote to his publisher Macmillan about the finished Kipps: ‘I've been aiming at the interest of character, the same interest that gives Dickens his value…’ 12 The very names ‘Chitterlow’, ‘Coote’ and ‘Kipps’ have a Dickensian ring. In some ways the discarded character of Mr Waddy was the most Dickensian of all, a comic villain with something of the demonic energy and eloquence of Quilp or Fagin, but Chitterlow has an obvious ancestry in Jingle, Micawber, and other plausible, unreliable good-fellows in Dickens's corpus, while the orphaned and repressed childhood of Kipps occasionally reminds one of the young David Copper-field and of Pip in Great Expectations. The opening pages of Kipps are particularly reminiscent of the beginnings of those two novels, and the allusion to Barnaby Rudge (1841) on the first page (Kipps' mother wears a ‘Dolly Varden hat’ in the only image of her that survives) may be a conscious acknowledgement by Wells of his debt. The two writers had indeed much in common – a penurious lower-middle-class background, an indifferent education and the talent, energy and ambition to overcome these handicaps. Both men were scornfully critical of what they perceived as a corrupt and ossified social system which privileged the undeserving few and stifled the potential of most of its members; and just as Dickens drew on the emotional trauma of being made to work in a blacking factory at the age of twelve to give an authentic pathos to his representations of loneliness, unhappiness and oppression, so Wells drew on his miserable existence as a draper's apprentice to similar effect.

  But the most important debt Wells owed to his great precursor was in the use of the authorial voice. In Kipps, as in the novels of Dickens, it is this voice that brings the characters to life, moralizes on the story and provides most of the humour. The account of Kipps' childhood friendship with Sid Pornick exploits the Dickensian trick of describing the naiveties of the young in a knowing adult voice: ‘[Sid] produced a thumbed novelette that had played a part in his sentimental awakening; he proffered it to Kipps, and confessed there was a character in it, a baronet, singularly like himself’ (I, i, § 4). This ironic distance between the teller and the tale persists into the narrative of the hero's adult life. Kipps is a ‘Simple Soul’, unable to articulate his anxieties and longings, while the other characters, blinkered by the prejudices of their class or their own selfish egos, communicate in clichés, platitudes and stock responses which Kipps can only parrot. The narrator alone is allowed to be truly eloquent – with a few exceptions, as when Minton, the senior apprentice at the Folkestone Drapery Bazaar, memorably declares to Kipps: ‘I tell you we're in a blessed drain-pipe, and we've got to crawl along it till we die’ (I, 2, §3). But it is the narrator who describes the effect of this bleak pronouncement on the hero:

  There were times when Kipps would lie awake, all others in the dormitory asleep and snoring, and think dismally of the outlook Minton pictured. Dimly he perceived the thing that had happened to him, how the great stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into its wheels, a vast, irresistible force which he had neither strength of will nor knowledge to escape. This was to be his life until his days should end. No adventures, no glory, no change, no freedom. Neither – though the force of that came home to him later –might he dream of effectual love and marriage. (I, 2, § 4)

  The full hopelessness of Kipps' plight strikes him when he falls in love with the unattainable cultured beauty who is his art teacher, Helen Walshingham, and then, as a result of Chitterlow's reckless irruption into his life, is dismissed from his place. He goes down into the basement of the shop, deliberately upsets a box of window-tickets ‘and so having made himself a justifiable excuse for being on the ground with his head well in the dark, he could let his poor bursting little heart have its way with him for a space’ (I, 5, §4).

  From this lowest point in his fortunes he is rescued by the legacy from Waddy (now an off-stage character who, we are told, stopped his son, Kipps' father, from marrying Kipps' mother, and much later repented of this action). The unexpected legacy was a plot device often used by Victorian novelists to bring a story to a happy conclusion. In Kipps, however, it triggers the main action, giving the hero a chance to achieve happiness and fulfilment which he fails disastrously to seize (until the author takes pity on him at the end and rescues him with another deus ex machina 13 in the form of Chitterlow's hit play). Although money is necessary to Kipps' happiness, it is not sufficient, because he doesn't know how to conduct himself as a ‘gentleman’, a consequence partly of his impoverished education and upbringing, but also of the limitations of his own character and intelligence. He is sponged on by Chitterlow, exploited by the Walshinghams and brainwashed by Coote. Most of the time among his new friends he feels embarrassed and ill-at-ease, overdressed and underbred. His wealth allows him to form the attachm
ent to Helen that had seemed an unrealizable dream, but ‘He had prayed for Helen as good souls pray for heaven, with as little understanding of what it was he prayed for’ (II, 5, §1). In her company he is mainly conscious of his own inadequacy. She looks at him ‘with an eye of critical proprietorship’ (II, 3, §6), noting his deficiencies ‘as one might go over a newly taken house’ (II, 5, §1). Their engagement is entirely lacking in sexual passion – he is too intimidated even to attempt to kiss her. When he meets his old childhood sweetheart, Ann, he feels no such inhibition, but then finds himself in a moral and emotional dilemma from which he simply runs away – to London.

  Kipps' adventures in London constitute the comic high-point of the novel. His prolonged and unsuccessful struggle to master the protocol of the luxury hotel where he is staying anticipates the farcical misadventures of Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean, but it also reinforces the moral of the story: that class and culture are stronger social forces than mere wealth. On his first day in the capital Kipps goes hungry because, although he has plenty of money, he can't find a dining place in which he would feel comfortable, and only a chance meeting with Sid Pornick, who takes him home for a cosy family meal, saves him from fasting: ‘There were no serviettes and less ceremony, and Kipps thought he had never enjoyed a meal so much’ (II, 7, § 3). The humiliating experience of eating next day among disdainful waiters and plutocratic diners in the hotel restaurant is enough to convert him temporarily to socialism – a concept to which he has just been introduced by Sid and Sid's lodger, Masterman: