Yours disgusted, H.G. Wells: the young writer finds marriage insufferable

The Young H.G. Wells is a biography that takes biology seriously. This is partly because H.G. Wells was a biologist before he became a writer of science fiction (his first publication was A Text Book on Biology, which he illustrated himself), but also because Claire Tomalin is alert to the life of the body as well as the mind. In her hands, Wells’s youth was less about his rise from the lower classes to become the wealthy socialist who predicted the aeroplane, the tank and the atomic bomb than about the rise of his weight. There is never a point in these pages when we are not told what numbers Wells saw when he stood on the bathroom scales, or reminded of the connection between his physical evolution and his evolution as a writer.

Herbert Wells was born in Bromley in 1866, beneath the shop where his father, Joe, sold crockery and cricket bats. His mother, Sarah, was 44, and Bertie would be her last child. In his earliest memories of her she has already lost several teeth and her hands are gnarled by years of sewing, mending and cleaning. Bodies, in the Wells family, were forever falling apart, something Bertie turned to his advantage. When, aged seven, he broke a shin bone, his convalescence became a period of uninterrupted reading. Not only did he emerge from his bedroom with a planet-sized brain but he had also discovered his legendary libido, stirred into life when he saw illustrations of a semi-clad Britannia and pillowed his head against her naked bosom. His own naked body, we are told, smelt of honey.

Four years later there was another lucky accident when Joe fell off a ladder and broke his thigh bone, which made him no longer able to work in the shop. To feed her family (Bertie almost certainly suffered from malnutrition), Sarah took up the position of housekeeper at Uppark, a 17th-century Dutch-style mansion set high in the South Downs, where she had formerly been employed as a lady’s maid.