Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) remains celebrated as one of the most prolific, and imaginative, writers about the future and the possibilities (and threats) of technological development, whose various books and short stories from the last decade of the 19th century to his death over fifty years later helped to describe, and shape, the direction of the wider world. He wrote of space and time exploration, and of lost worlds, as well as producing a stream of commentary, criticism, and journalism. Much of this is still in print to this day.
Wells was technically born in Kent, in Bromley, though the town was subsumed almost as soon as he was born into the London suburban area. His behaviour in later life showed that he did not maintain a great deal of affection for the place he spent his early years (he turned down invitations to return to his old school there, for instance, to speak as guest of honour). From adolescence, he spent time in places dotted around London, largely due to the hardship experienced by his family, finally attending the Royal College of Science (now part of Imperial College) where he studied biology under Thomas Huxley. That led to his teaching near Stoke-on-Trent, and then completing a degree in zoology at the University of London External Programme. He married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells in 1891, but divorced her four years later, immediately marrying one of his students Amy Robbins. He remained with Amy till her death in 1927, though his personal life was, to put it delicately, complex and varied. This was known widely at the time, including to his second wife.
The publication of `The Time Machine’ in 1895 set Wells on a career as a writer. Three years later, after returning from a visit to Italy, in order to enjoy a healthier life style, Wells and his wife moved from Worcester Park to Beach Cottage in Sandgate, just south of Folkestone, and, after a brief stay, to Arnold House in the same place. They stayed here for three years, but commissioned the architect Charles Voysey to build a new property nearby overlooking the Channel, on the cliffs around Sandgate seafront. Thus the place that came to be called Spade House was devised. `Voysey,’ Iain Finlayson writes, `had wanted to adorn the front door with a heart-shaped letter place, but Wells “protested at wearing my heart so conspicuously outside and we compromised on a spade”’ (Iain Finlayson, `Writers on Romney Marsh’, Severn House Publishers, London, 1986, 59). The house was to be the home of Wells, his wife and their two boys till 1909 when they moved back to London. It remains in existence today, with a small plaque marking the house’s links with Wells, a lasting memorial to his time here.
The decade in which he lived in Sandgate was an important one in terms of his writing. It was here that he wrote `Love and Mr Lewisham’ (1900), `The First Men on the Moon’ (1901), `Kipps’ (1905), `Modern Utopia’ (1905), `The War in the Air’ (1908) and `Tono Bungay’ (1909). Such a prolific output did not prevent him from undertaking a number of liaisons, one of the most important of which was with Amber Reeves, the daughter of Pember Reeves, Agent General for New Zealand. Described as `a girl of brilliant and precocious promise’ (Ibid, 54) their assignations started around 1904, and filled the middle decade of Wells’ Sandgate time. `I have never,’ Wells wrote, `been able to discover whether my interest in sex is more than normal’ (Ibid). It was certainly fairly voracious, and continued for much of the rest of his life, with many other partners.
The landscape of Sandgate, Folkestone and the environs does figure in Wells’ work – and in particular in `The First Men in the Moon’ and `The Sea Lady’ (1902). The first, which describes the visit to the moon by Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor, starts in the small village of Lympne, close to Sandgate. `I had gone to Lympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place in the world,’ Bedford explains in his narrative. It is interesting that his reflections on the landscape around him are tied up with its history, with the Romans, and with the memory traces and physical ones that these had left. `Certainly,’ Bedford muses,
`if one wants solitude, this place is Lympne. It is in the clay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea cliff and stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea. In very wet weather the place is almost inaccessible, and I have heard that at times the postman used to traverse the more succulent portions of his route with boards upon his feet. I never saw him doing so, but I can quite imagine it. Outside the doors of a few cottages and house that make up the present village bit birch besoms are stuck, to wipe off the worst of the clay, which will give some idea of the texture of the district. I doubt if the place would be there at all, if it were not a fading memory of things gone for ever. It was the big port of England in Roman times, Portus Lemanis, and now the sea is four miles away. All down the steep hill are boulders and masses of Roman brickwork, and from it old Watling Street, still paved in places, starts like an arrow to the north. I used to stand on the hill and think of it, the galleys and the legions, the captives and the officials, the women and the traders, the speculators like myself, all the swarm and tumult that came clanking in and out of the harbour.’ (Wells, `The First Men in the Moon’, Phoenix Pick, Maryland, 2008 edition, 2-3)
There can be few better descriptions of the intuitive understanding of how the past does remain etched on the landscape. Strangely, the very faint remnants of the Roman fort at Lympne, which exist as stones scattered about where the sea front must once have been, barely visible from the footpath that passes by them, do have an almost lunar quality to them. And they are evocative of a whole world which was once immense, and which has long since departed. The story as it develops involves Cavor and the narrator finding themselves on the moon, fighting against the inhabitants there, and then Bedford making it back to Britain alone, where he crashes in his vessel at Littlestone, a tiny hamlet close to Lympne. Ensconced in a hotel there, he recovers from his trauma, finally upping sticks and ending up in Italy, where he hears finally of a series of strange Morse messages from Cavor, the man left behind in the moon.
`The Sea Lady’ is more earthbound, and more located in the single habitat of Sandgate itself. `The villa residence to the east of Sandgate castle, you must understand,’ the short novella begins,
`are particularly lucky in having gardens that run right down to the beach. There is no intervening esplanade or road or path such as cuts off ninety-nine out of the hundred of houses that face the sea. As you look down on them from the western end of the Leas, you see them crowding the very margin. And as a great number of high groins stand out from the shore along this piece of coast, the beach is practically cut off and made private except at low water.’
It is to this world that Miss Waters, the woman with a human upper body, and a lower body like a fish’s long tail, comes `to Folkestone. To get a soul.’ Her adventures there, after being lifted from the sea, result in one of her suitors simply disappearing with her back into the depths of the water from whence she had come, migrating to her world. Perhaps this carried some more personal meaning about Wells’ own perpetual quest to regenerate his soul with his eventful, and often turbulent, private life. Spade House was to prove too quiet a domain, and from 1909 he and his family were based back in London. But the memory of this time is sprinkled through his work, which remains a memorial to the period in which not just he, but Conrad, were based in this place.