Kipps Read online

  The mental change Kipps underwent was, in its way, what psychologists call a conversion. In a few moments all Kipps' ideals were changed. He who had been ‘practically a gentleman,’ the sedulous pupil of Coote, the punctilious raiser of hats, was instantly a rebel, an outcast, the hater of everything ‘stuck up,’ the foe of Society and the social order of to-day. Here they were among the profits of their robbery, these people who might do anything with the world…. (II, 7, §6)

  This of course is an ironic overstatement of Kipps' change of attitude. He continues to try to conform to the social code of the hotel, and continues to fail. His efforts to purchase the respect of the staff by extravagant tipping merely make him ridiculous – though it is only the reader, by courtesy of the authorial voice, who perceives just how ridiculous: ‘At his departure Kipps, with a hot face, convulsive gestures, and an embittered heart, tipped everyone who did not promptly and actively resist, including an absent-minded South African diamond merchant who was waiting in the hall for his wife’ (II, 7, §7). But he does return to Folkestone to some extent a changed man – or at least a desperate and determined one. When Ann reappears in his life, as a maid at one of the bourgeois establishments where he is submitted to further social torture, for once he takes control of his own destiny and persuades her to marry him. In this part of the story Wells makes deft use of the conventions that divided middle-class people from their servants to dramatize the transgressive nature of Kipps' action – Ann, for instance, will not speak to him about personal matters at the front door of the house where she works, only in the ‘Basement after nine. Them's my hours. I'm a servant, and likely to keep one. If you're calling here, what name, please?’ (II 8, $4).

  Even when he is married to a woman whom he really loves, Kipps has difficulty finding a style of life that coincides with his desires because of his ambiguous social status. When he tries to get a house built, he is bullied by the architect into commissioning an absurdly ostentatious and impractical dwelling (Wells's hobby horse about domestic architecture gets a thorough airing here), and Ann causes problems by refusing to employ a proper complement of servants. In a poignant scene she confesses that she pretended to be her own servant when some respectable visitors caught her painting the floor of their temporary home. Kipps' reproachful dismay reveals that he is far from being liberated from bourgeois aspirations, and causes their first matrimonial tiff. This however is swamped by a far greater catastrophe, when Kipps learns that his fortune has been embezzled by Helen Walshingham's brother.

  At this point the story seems to have reached its final reversal, with Kipps stripped of most of his wealth, and perhaps happier for its absence. He is not quite back where he started: there is just enough value in the villa he inherited from Waddy and his own half-built house to save him from bankruptcy and enable him to open a little shop – something he had always secretly wanted to do, but felt was incompatible with being a gentleman. Ann embraces the plan enthusiastically: ‘A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. “Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of that!”’ (III, 3, §3). The shop, surprisingly and inauspiciously in view of Kipps’ limited education, is a bookshop, belonging to a chain called the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union, a new speculative venture which the narrator tells us would soon fail. Kipps, however, is protected by the handsome return on his investment in Chitterlow's play, The Pestered Butterfly, and thus able to run his little bookshop in Hythe as a kind of hobby. There, the narrator archly and unconvincingly observes:

  you may see him for yourself and speak to him and buy this book of him if you like. He has it in stock I know. Very delicately I've seen to that. His name is not Kipps,… but everything else is exactly as I have told you… (Of course you will not tell Kipps that he is ‘Kipps,’ or that I have put him in this book. He hasn't the remotest suspicion of that… ) (III, 3, §7)

  The sudden changes of direction and shifts of tone in the concluding chapters of Kipps suggest that Wells was not at all certain how to end it, and he confessed to Pinker that the last Book was ‘scamped… a thing of shreds and patches, but it is quite handsomely brought off’. 14 To understand Wells's difficulties with Book III, it is helpful to look at his political views. Political issues were at the forefront of his mind when he was striving to finish Kipps, because of his involvement in the Fabian Society. It had been founded in 1884 as a kind of think-tank and talking shop for left-wing middle-class intellectuals who espoused the gradual evolution of modern society towards socialism but rejected class struggle and violent revolution on the Marxist model. H. G. Wells was a natural recruit to the Fabians. His non-fiction books and articles called for a radical transformation of British society by the application of rational planning and new technology, sweeping away unearned privilege and opening up a decent quality of life to the masses. The Fabians hoped he would bring a new energy and eloquence to their programme and make it more appealing to the young, while Wells himself was flattered to be introduced into this high-minded and exclusive intellectual milieu. He was elected as a member in 1903, one of his sponsors being George Bernard Shaw.

  Very soon, however, there were clashes of opinion and style between the Fabian Old Guard and the new recruit. Wells felt the Society had achieved too little in its twenty years of existence, and that it needed a thorough shake-up of its policies and executive officers. In this he was probably right, but his manner of proceeding was abrasive and caused considerable offence. He instigated the setting up of a committee to consider the reform of the society, and a series of dramatic and divisive debates ensued which ended in 1906 when Wells was procedurally outmanoeuvred and defeated by Shaw, after which his active involvement rapidly diminished and eventually ceased. In the Autobiography he declared: ‘no part of my career rankles so acutely in my memory with the conviction of bad judgment, gusty impulse and real inexcusable vanity, as that storm in the Fabian tea-cup’. 15 Though he blamed himself for the debacle, a parting of the ways was inevitable. Wells's ‘socialism’ was not at heart democratic, but meritocratic – even, in some respects, autocratic. Early in 1905 he published A Modern Utopia, in which he envisaged a world run by an elite of wise and clever men (called rather revealingly ‘samurai’) for the benefit of all – but an ‘all’ purged of antisocial and unproductive elements by a chilling eugenic policy. The latter part of Kipps (which was completed in 1904) shows signs, particularly in the characterization of Masterman, of the intellectual strain Wells was under as he struggled to define his political philosophy and to reconcile it with Fabianism.

  Surviving drafts of the novel show that originally Masterman was given several opportunities to expound the doctrine of socialism to Kipps, who was to be genuinely converted and resolve to bring up his son by its light. 16 In the finished novel Masterman is given much less scope, and is a much more ambiguous character, a malcontent rather than a genuine reformer, embittered by his ill-health and other misfortunes, raging against the injustices and corruption of the social system and anticipating its imminent self-destruction with gloomy relish. He seems to be something of a parasite on the Pornicks, and Sid's awed regard for him is portrayed as naive. Kipps' own verdict is: ‘Bit orf’ is ‘ead, poor chap’ (II, 7, § 5). This unsympathetic portrayal is all the more puzzling because the character was based on Gissing, whom Wells regarded as a good friend, and whose death in December 1903 had upset him very much. Perhaps in a clumsy effort to disguise the model for his fictional character, Wells gave him the name of another writer and politician of radical views, C. F. G. Masterman, who was not amused, though he reviewed the novel favourably and later became a good friend and supporter of Wells.

  What seems to have happened, then, is that in the process of writing Masterman's exposition of socialist theory Wells concluded that he didn't really believe in it himself, and so couldn't in good faith show his hero embracing it. Therefore the character of Masterman was reduced in stature, to an extent that he hardly has any function at a
ll. Kipps' rebellion against bourgeois values is not ideological in motivation, but personal, emotional and opportunistic. Just how tenuous it is, is revealed when he quarrels with Ann over her pretending to be her own servant, which provokes an exasperated outburst from the author:

  The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives!

  As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night… Above them, brooding over them,… there is a monster, a lumpish monster… It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, it is the ruling power of this land, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow… I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh….

  But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses as they are… as things like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children – children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer, and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! (III, 2, § 5)

  In this remarkable passage Wells comes perilously close to scuttling his own novel. He renounces the stance of genial comic detachment which he has adopted as narrator up to this point, and adopts a prophetic, even apocalyptic tone. The lives of Arthur and Ann Kipps are now seen as tragic rather than comic, but they are ‘stupid little tragedies’, mere symptoms of a much bigger and all-embracing malaise. One senses that the author would like to sweep away the whole social system to which his characters (and the masses of people like them) belong, in order to create his model state – and too bad if they perish in the process. But the author relents, the genial comic mask is quickly replaced, the story of the Kippses is resumed and brought to a happy conclusion – represented by, of all things, a shop, an idealized instance of ‘the great stupid machine of retail trade’ that had formerly oppressed and enslaved the hero.

  Though he privately acknowledged its flaws, Wells had faith in his book and was determined that it should be a success when it was finally published, in October 1905. He wrote to his publisher, Macmillan, in August:

  It is, I feel, the most considerable book (from the point of view of a possible popularity) that you have so far published for me, and I think that now is the time for a very special effort to improve my position with the booksellers and bookbuyers… I look to you for some able and sustained advertisement and I will confess that I shall feel it is you and not me to blame if Kipps is not carried well over 10,000 copies. 17

  The eminent publisher was not used to being hustled by his authors in this fashion and did not take kindly to it, but Wells pestered him both in person and by letter after publication, with schemes to promote the novel: men with sandwich boards parading the streets, advertisements in theatre programmes, leaflets for subscribers to the Times Book Club, and even posters at Portsmouth station saying ‘KIPPS WORKED HERE’. How many of these suggestions were adopted is not known, but the authorial pressure seems to have had some effect, for, after a sluggish start, sales improved steadily in November and December and by Christmas 12,000 copies of Kipps had been sold – the best Wells had so far achieved with any book. 18 By 1910 it had sold 60,000 in a cheaper edition, and it has always been one of the most popular of his novels.

  The reviews at the time of publication were generally excellent, but probably none of them gave Wells as much pleasure as a private letter from Henry James:

  [W]hat am I to say about Kipps but that I am ready, that I am compelled, utterly to drivel about him? He is not so much a masterpiece as a mere born gem – you having, I know not how, taken a header straight down into mysterious depths of observation & knowledge, I know not which & where, & come up again with this rounded pearl of the diver. But of course you know yourself how immitigably the thing is done – it is of such a brilliancy of true truth. I really think that you have done, at this time of day, two particular things for the 1st time of their doing among us. 1/ You have written the first closely & intimately, the Ist intelligently & consistently ironic or satiric novel. In everything else there has always been the sentimental or conventional interference, the interference of which Thackeray is full. 2/ You have for the very 1st time treated the English ‘lower middle’ class, &c, without the picturesque, the grotesque, the fantastic & romantic interference, of which Dickens, e.g., is so misleadingly, of which even George Eliot is so deviatingly full. You have handled its vulgarity in so scientific & historic a spirit, & seen the whole thing all in its own strong light. 19

  James continues for many more lines in the same vein. His rapturous and unqualified praise is, it must be admitted, something of a surprise. One would have expected that the flaws in the novel, of which Wells himself was well aware, would have been recognized by the Master, who set himself and others such high standards of formal elegance and consistency in the art of fiction. One almost wonders whether he actually read Kipps with close attention to the very end, since it is Book III that is weakest. But there are other explanations for the somewhat extravagant tenor of his tribute. He was writing privately to a friend and East Sussex neighbour, to a younger writer whose talent he appreciated all the more because it did not threaten his own. The social milieux and the human types they each wrote about were quite different. For James, Wells's description of lower-middle-class life – of the social dynamics of the draper's shop, for example-was a revelation, and what is interesting about his letter is the emphasis he gives to the book's effect of truthfulness to life, and the contrast he draws between Wells and his Victorian precursors in this respect. I think James exaggerates this contrast – there is in fact plenty of authorial ‘interference’ in Kipps – but he does draw our attention to an important aspect of the novel: the almost documentary realism of its descriptions of architecture, decor, possessions, clothes, manners and speech. I remarked earlier on Wells's debt to Dickens, which Wells himself more than once acknowledged, but James is right to point out that there is nothing of Dickens's fantastic and grotesque imagination in Kipps. In Dickens the familiar world is constantly transformed by metaphor and simile: human beings behave like things, while objects are invested with an eerie and sinister life. When Dickens describes the interior of a room it is made to express its occupants through metaphorical suggestion. In a corresponding passage by Wells every detail is observed with literal exactness, and the objects function as metonyms 20 for the taste, class, habits and prejudices of those who accumulated them. Take for example the description of Coote's study, which contains not a single figurative expression to relieve the remorseless inventory of his idea of culture:

  You must figure Coote's study, a little bedroom put to studious uses, and over the mantel an array of things he had been led to believe indicative of culture and refinement – an autotype of Rossetti's Annunciation, an autotype of Watts' Minotaur, a Swiss carved pipe with many joints, and a photograph of Amiens Cathedral (these two The spoils of travel), a phrenological bust, and some broken fossils from the Warren. A rotating bookshelf carried the Encyclopaedia Britannica (tenth edition), and on the top of it a large official-looking, age-grubby envelope, bearing the mystic words, ‘On His Majesty's Service,’ a number or so of the Bookman, and a box of cigarettes were lying. A table under the window bore a little microscope, some dust in a saucer, some grimy glass slips, and broken cover glasses, for Coote had ‘gone in for’ biology a little. The longer side of the room was given over to bookshelves, neatly edged with pinked American cloth, and with an array of books – no worse an array of books than you find in any public library; an almost haphazard accumulation of obsolete classics, contemporary successes, the Hundred Best Books (including Samuel Warren's Ten Thousand a Year), old school-books, directories, the Times Atlas, Ruskin in bulk, Tennyson complete in one volume, Longfellow, Charles Kingsley, Smiles, a guide-book or so, several medical pamphlets, odd magazine numbers, and much indescribable rubbish – in fact, a compendium of the contemporary British mind. (II, 2, §1)

  What had happened to the novel between Dickens and Wells was the development of a new kind of realism, and its mu
tation into naturalism, in the work of French writers such as Flaubert, the Goncourts, Maupassant and Zola, who influenced younger British novelists like Gissing, Arnold Bennett, George Moore – and H. G. Wells. James's commendation of Wells for handling the vulgarity of lower-middle-class life ‘in so scientific and historic a spirit’ (my emphasis) seems to make this connection, for some of the French novelists, notably Zola, consciously emulated the empirical methods of scientific research. The example of Flaubert however seems more relevant to Kipps than Zola. Wells's subtitle The Story of a Simple Soul echoes the title of Flaubert's tale, Un Coeur Simple (A Simple Heart), in Trois Contes (1877), which describes the life of Félicité, a housemaid in a bourgeois household. Her intelligence is so limited that she barely understands anything outside the humdrum domestic tasks which she performs so dutifully, and her frustrated capacity for love is finally displaced on to a stuffed parrot. Flaubert's last, unfinished work, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), is about two humble clerks who, like Wells's hero, are released from wage-slavery by a legacy, which they apply with disastrous incompetence to ambitious schemes of self-improvement, scientific, commercial and cultural. Wells's characters often seem to be speaking from ‘The Dictionary of Received Ideas’ which forms an appendix to Flaubert's novel. I have found no evidence that Wells had read either of these works, but it is unlikely that he was completely unfamiliar with Flaubert, and in any case literary influence can work by contagion as well as directly. Wells, to be sure, does not imitate the unsettling authorial inscrutability of Flaubert's narrative method – he is always ‘interfering’ to gloss his own effects (e.g. ‘in fact, a compendium of the contemporary British mind’) – but the link between the two writers can be illustrated by putting this description of Félicité's room next to the passage just quoted from Kipps: