We collect cookies to analyze our website traffic and performance; we never collect any personal data. Cookie Policy
Accept
NEW YORK DAWN™NEW YORK DAWN™NEW YORK DAWN™
Notification Show More
Font ResizerAa
  • Home
  • Trending
  • New York
  • World
  • Politics
  • Business
    • Business
    • Economy
    • Real Estate
  • Crypto & NFTs
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
    • Lifestyle
    • Food
    • Travel
    • Fashion
    • Art
  • Health
  • Sports
  • Entertainment
Reading: How H.G. Wells Predicted the 20th Century
Share
Font ResizerAa
NEW YORK DAWN™NEW YORK DAWN™
Search
  • Home
  • Trending
  • New York
  • World
  • Politics
  • Business
    • Business
    • Economy
    • Real Estate
  • Crypto & NFTs
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
    • Lifestyle
    • Food
    • Travel
    • Fashion
    • Art
  • Health
  • Sports
  • Entertainment
Follow US
NEW YORK DAWN™ > Blog > Art > How H.G. Wells Predicted the 20th Century
How H.G. Wells Predicted the 20th Century
Art

How H.G. Wells Predicted the 20th Century

Last updated: November 19, 2021 5:00 pm
Editorial Board Published November 19, 2021
Share
SHARE
Johnson facebookJumbo

Time and again in his youth, he was confronted with career options wrong for his multiple talents, originality, imagination and critical intelligence — for example, as a chemist’s assistant, and a trial apprenticeship at Hyde’s Drapery Emporium that became “the unhappiest and most hopeless period of his entire life.” Yet some early work like being a student-teacher served him well, giving him the chance to educate himself in the fields of anatomy, mathematics, chemistry, especially biology, geometry, and then win a scholarship to the Normal School of Science. There, his talent for debate and writing, his natural charm and sense of humor, blossomed.

At the Normal School of Science, we see him “always ready to set off on fresh paths,” in Tomalin’s words. “Taking on too much was the way Wells lived his life.” He gave talks at the college Debating Society, one being “The Past and Future of the Human Race,” which foreshadowed by a decade his vision of things to come in “The Time Machine,” a work initially published in the first issue of New Review by his friend William Henley, best known for his poem “Invictus.”

Tomalin, who has written biographies of Charles Dickens, Samuel Pepys and other writers, found that she could not simply deliver the young Wells and confesses that “I have found him too interesting to leave.” Thus, all of Wells’s life emerges here as she takes us carefully through three important, overlapping profiles of one of England’s enduring, most widely read and cited literary artists. One profile is Wells as a social activist determined, as he said, “to write, talk and preach revolution.” He was an atheist, a socialist and the author of scores of books where he frequently dreamed of a better social world; his political publications were as influential and popular as his groundbreaking science fiction tales, which he called “scientific romances.” We learn about his important though not entirely comfortable involvement with the visionary progressives in the Fabian Society. In his best-selling work “Anticipations,” he told a friend, his intention was “to undermine and destroy the monarch, monogamy and respectability — and the British Empire, all under the guise of a speculation about motorcars and electrical heating.” It is no little achievement that his 1940 “The Rights of Man” became “one of the sources for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights” proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly.

Wells did, in fact, destroy monogamy and respectability in his own life. Examining at length this unpleasant, sad dimension, Tomalin enables us to see that “he was a bad husband and an unreliable lover,” with the person he hurt the most being his second wife, Jane, who “found herself abandoned for ever longer periods as the years went by, while he carried on his love affairs in blazes of publicity.”

So it is this biography’s last profile of Wells as a prolific, original storyteller that ensorcelled me as a young reader and, as a writer, cemented my respect for him. Though he was often sick, and self-educated, his early literary labors were prodigious. Before his success with “The Time Machine,” he took work copying diagrams for slides sold to medical students, tutored students, devised quiz questions for cheap magazines and wrote two popular science textbooks, one of which he illustrated, yet to him they were hackwork. He edited a journal and weekly, churned out book reviews, tried his hand unsuccessfully at playwriting, sold lightweight pieces to The Pall Mall Gazette, which, to his surprise, earned him more money than he received from teaching. All this is but the iceberg’s tip of his voluminous literary outpourings.

You Might Also Like

Hitler’s Three-Hour Architectural Tour of Paris

Koyo Kouoh, Curator Tapped for 61st Venice Biennale, Dies at 57

Schomburg Heart Turns 100 With an Artwork Historic Library Card

International Tourism Was Constructed on Headless Blemmyes

One Man’s Trash Is One other’s Artwork

TAGGED:The Washington Mail
Share This Article
Facebook Twitter Email Print

Follow US

Find US on Social Medias
FacebookLike
TwitterFollow
YoutubeSubscribe
TelegramFollow
Popular News
The way forward for theater is immersive. These L.A. artists are creating it in actual time
Entertainment

The way forward for theater is immersive. These L.A. artists are creating it in actual time

Editorial Board May 6, 2025
Pragma raises $12.75M for backend recreation engine for reside providers video games
Enhancing the outcomes of dwelling coaching with an AI app
Seahawks’ Geno Smith appears to be like to proceed Jets’ downward spiral in return to MetLife Stadium
Video exhibits Kilmar Abrego Garcia 2022 visitors cease in Tennessee

You Might Also Like

New York Space Exhibits We Love Proper Now
Art

New York Space Exhibits We Love Proper Now

May 12, 2025
An Exhibition That Appears to the Bronx for Inspiration
Art

An Exhibition That Appears to the Bronx for Inspiration

May 12, 2025
A.I.R. Gallery Seeks Neighborhood’s Assist After Shedding K NEA Grant
Art

A.I.R. Gallery Seeks Neighborhood’s Assist After Shedding $30K NEA Grant

May 12, 2025
A Mystical, Obsessive Encounter With the Ginseng Root
Art

A Mystical, Obsessive Encounter With the Ginseng Root

May 11, 2025

Categories

  • Health
  • Sports
  • Politics
  • Entertainment
  • Technology
  • World
  • Art

About US

New York Dawn is a proud and integral publication of the Enspirers News Group, embodying the values of journalistic integrity and excellence.
Company
  • About Us
  • Newsroom Policies & Standards
  • Diversity & Inclusion
  • Careers
  • Media & Community Relations
  • Accessibility Statement
Contact Us
  • Contact Us
  • Contact Customer Care
  • Advertise
  • Licensing & Syndication
  • Request a Correction
  • Contact the Newsroom
  • Send a News Tip
  • Report a Vulnerability
Term of Use
  • Digital Products Terms of Sale
  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy
  • Cookie Settings
  • Submissions & Discussion Policy
  • RSS Terms of Service
  • Ad Choices
© 2024 New York Dawn. All Rights Reserved.
Welcome Back!

Sign in to your account

Lost your password?