Most first novels tend to be largely autobiographical. Although by the time he wrote Love and Mr Lewisham H. G. Wells had published ten books – seven science fiction novels, which he called ‘fantasy romances’, three science textbooks and a number of short stories – this was what he thought of as his first ‘proper’ novel, and it indeed draws heavily on his own life. With the exception of the timing of young Mr Lewisham’s meeting with Ethel Henderson and their subsequent re-encounter and marriage, the events of the novel closely follow Wells’ own experience. Both in literary and in biographical terms, therefore, Love and Mr Lewisham is a fully paid-up example of literary realism.
But in being so it is, for all its wit, readability and surface clarity, a darker and more complex work than it appears. It cost Wells a great effort to write it; he told friends that he had thrown away much more than he kept, and that more time and care had gone into it than into (as he put it) a work of scientific research for the Royal Society. What reads easily is often the result of assiduous polishing and editing, and this is the case here. It follows that Wells left much between the lines that he would later (in Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica) be more frank about, especially regarding sex. The competition between aspiring mind and youthful body is, familiarly, all too often a one-sided one, but what in the Arcadia of Longus would have been a simple matter is, in Love and Mr Lewisham, the source of a tragic diversion of talent and opportunity. This, with its setting of associated themes, makes one look at Love and Mr Lewisham with a more interested and more instructed eye.
The novel tells of the effect of love on an aspiring youth, the eponymous Mr Lewisham, who at the novel’s opening is a teenaged teaching assistant in a provincial town, without connections or money. He there meets the engaging but otherwise very ordinary Ethel Henderson, a young woman trapped in a net of unappetising dependencies. Some of the live themes of the day – education as the doorway to opportunity for the lower classes, socialism, science, spiritualist charlatanism and a still-stifling sexual and social morality – drive the tale, which follows a course whose predictability is a main part of its point.
Lewisham and Ethel are attracted; one day they go for a long walk which involves Lewisham neglecting his teaching duties and Ethel neglecting the possible harm to her reputation. As a result he is dismissed from his post and she is sent back to her useless and venal mother in London to seek work as a typist. They lose contact.
Lewisham gets a place at the Normal School of Science in London, and at first shows great promise. He there establishes a friendship with the dowdy and earnest Miss Heydinger, who believes in his potential to become a Great Man and a husband for herself. But then at a spiritualist séance where Lewisham is a sceptical observer he meets Ethel again; she is secretary to a wealthy dabbler in the occult, and she abets the fraudulent spiritualist displays of her uncle, Chaffery. Lewisham is appalled by Ethel’s involvement in deceit, but his attraction to her is rekindled in urgency, with the inevitable result that she comes to displace his commitment to education, his friendship for Miss Heydinger, and indeed his common sense.
The most poignant moment in a novel which begins with wit and light and grows increasingly dark as the coils of consequence wind around Lewisham and Ethel, occurs at the end of the simple register office wedding which unites their destinies. ‘The little old gentleman made no long speeches. “You are young people,” he said slowly, “and life together is a difficult thing … Be kind to each other.” He smiled a little sadly, and held out a friendly hand.’
That is the fulcrum of the story, summarised by Wells himself as being about the diversion of a young man’s hopes by youthful infatuation and the resulting heavy commitment of an unsuitable, too young and ill-provided marriage. In our own day infatuations and the strong sexual imperatives of youth only rarely lead to such mistakes, and in any case the mistakes are more easily remediable now. But for Lewisham and Ethel the finalities of a restrictive code meant that all sorts of possibilities were blighted by the all-too-human needs whose denial was the price that a chance to make progress exacted.
Wells did everything Lewisham did in the way of teenage teaching and then the Normal School for Science (founded shortly before Wells went there by T. H. Huxley – and Huxley was one of Wells’ teachers), but he did not make his first marriage until later than Lewisham did, and it was not the reason for his taking longer to finish his science education. Wells was self-confessedly a man of powerful sexual urges, and his first marriage, to his cousin Isabel, was a failure because she was unresponsive. But the lineaments of Lewisham’s story are strongly those of Wells’ own; whence its almost-documentary character arises.
The realism point is a significant one for appreciating Love and Mr Lewisham, because it bears on the fact that he was intent on iterating in his own way and from his own experience a truth, however ordinary and familiar, about aspiration and its competition with other imperatives. In an earlier period of literary history he would have had to do this by indirection, perhaps in allegory or something close to it. But by the closing decades of the nineteenth century it had became possible for fiction to address the lives and experiences of a broader and more realistically identified social range than hitherto, and to do it without undue drama – for the drama is in the ordinariness, the familiarity of the pattern.
Consider: Dickens paraded a colourful troupe of the urban poor, criminals, orphans, slum dwellers, the lower middle classes and the aspiring middle classes, but his characters are closer to types or caricatures than those in the works of Wells’ contemporaries Thomas Hardy, George Gissing and Arnold Bennett. George Eliot is cited as an innovator in English realism, though the major influence for late-century novelists might more plausibly be Balzac and Zola across the Channel. Yet however one traces the genealogy of literary realism, it is clear that by the end of the century it was not merely permissible but interesting for novels to be about individuals like Lewisham and Ethel, and about themes – socialism, spiritualism, science – that were current matters of discussion.
No doubt the widened literacy of the age had created a readership as interested in recognisable individuals with some of the same experiences and problems as other or earlier readers were interested in Clarissa and Lovelace, Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy. Wells had a keen sense of the actual, a trait that explains the success not only of his straight fiction but also of both his ‘fantasy romances’ and his polemical writings. You might say that he was to his contemporary readers what television is to its majority audience today, and in that way he anticipates the kitchen-sink realists writing novels and plays in the 1950s, perhaps even helping to prepare the way for them.
It would, though, be a mistake to relegate Wells to a place in the history of the novel as though that were the chief thing to be said. His writerly skills are sometimes under-appreciated because of the popularity and breadth of his output; for he was able to convey place, mood and situation with precision even when – as sometimes happened – he descended into archness and facetiousness. In the earlier chapters of Love and Mr Lewisham an affectionate but accurate gaze is bent on the young Lewisham’s grand designs for progress towards success in the form of his ‘schema’ and highly intellectual reading list. This is not only straight out of Wells’ own past, but the pasts of many hopeful young folk. Most who read this novel will therefore experience a pang of recognition and a stab of regret, knowing that even though we do not now have anything like the same barriers that faced Lewisham, schemas and grand designs have a general tendency to collapse at their first encounter with the real world and its testing of our commitments. Wells explores this with the deftness and facility that reveals his gift as a writer, and the fact that by the time he came to write Love and Mr Lewisham he was an accomplished practitioner.
Writerly skill is only part of the story. The theme of the novel is a significant one for an age in which opportunities for intellectual ambition were greater than ever before because of wider schooling and increased literacy, yet the enemies of promise, as Cyril Connolly was to call them half a century later, had not been defeated – largely because some of them, as Wells sought to show, are undefeatable. That is the observation, the commentary, that Wells felt it worth offering; and it was not then the cliché that it might seem to some now.
At the end of the novel Wells has Lewisham ponder the implications of the fact that Ethel is pregnant, and then base an insight upon them. At this point, remember, Lewisham has a wife, a forthcoming child, a mother-in-law, a dismal tenement home in a grim suburb of London, no qualifications, missed opportunities to regret, and limited prospects – and yet he proceeds to welcome the thought that the child is the future and the future must be served. The idea that the present must subordinate itself to the future is not, in all frankness, any more appealing in Wells’ pages than it was in the Soviet injunction to suffer today in order to build tomorrow’s glorious society.
This is the chief respect in which form (the need for an up-tick at the close) and sentiment overcome Wells sufficiently for a false note to sound; but there is a way of looking at it which excuses him. It is that anyone placed as Lewisham then was might well reach for the nearest justification for enduring or accepting, of making the best of the situation by having (what is natural for a would-have-been intellectual) a fine-sounding principle. ‘The Future!’
Yet on the other hand the Wells who is true to himself might say that the real message of the novel lies in Miss Heydinger’s wordless departure from her last discussion with Lewisham; at that sad moment she is the embodiment of the failure of hope, which is Lewisham’s own experience too. This is a bleak result, to be sure, and itself not invariably true to life; but the logic of Wells’ tale points in that direction, though while reading the early pages of the novel with their charm, wit and freshness you wish you could expect otherwise.