Historical Context
Political, social and cultural background during the life of Wells Herbert.
H. G. Wells was born in 1866 during the final decades of the great Victorian era, when Britain stood at the centre of a vast empire and was one of the world’s leading industrial and economic powers. Behind the image of progress and imperial strength, however, lay profound social divisions. Industrial development had created enormous wealth, but it had also widened the differences between social classes, while a significant part of the population worked and lived under difficult conditions.
The British society in which Wells grew up remained strongly divided by class. A person’s family background and economic position could largely determine education, occupation and opportunities in life. For those born into the lower social classes, social advancement was difficult and economic insecurity was an everyday reality.
This world of extreme social divisions lies behind many of Wells’s works. Even in The Time Machine, a novel set in the distant future, the division of humanity into the Eloi and the Morlocks can be read as a dark extension of the class divisions of Victorian society. Wells did not imagine the future independently of the present; he often magnified the tendencies he observed around him and asked where they might ultimately lead.
At the same time, science was radically changing the way Europeans understood nature and humanity’s place within it. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had provoked profound scientific, philosophical and religious debates. Biology, geology, physics and medicine were advancing rapidly, creating the sense that human beings could now understand — and perhaps transform — the natural world in ways that had previously seemed impossible.
Wells’s encounter with this new scientific thought shaped him deeply. Evolution, adaptation, competition between species and the possibility of altering living organisms appear repeatedly in his work. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, for example, biological science becomes the starting point for a much larger question: how far should human beings be allowed to go when they acquire the power to alter nature?
The end of the nineteenth century was also a period of remarkable technological change. Electricity was spreading, communications were becoming faster, railways had transformed travel, and new machines were changing production and everyday life. The automobile and the aeroplane soon followed, along with new forms of mass communication. The sense that the world could be completely transformed within only a few decades became one of the foundations of Wells’s imagination.
Yet technological progress did not inspire optimism alone. Wells recognized that the same scientific discoveries capable of improving human life could also be used for warfare and destruction. In many of his works, therefore, technology is not presented as inherently good or evil; its consequences depend on the way society chooses to organize and use it.
The British Empire was then approaching the height of its power. Imperial expansion was often presented within British society as evidence of superiority and progress. At the same time, colonialism depended upon the conquest and subjugation of other peoples. The War of the Worlds strikingly reverses this reality: Britain itself is confronted by a technologically superior invading power that treats human beings much as imperial powers had often treated the peoples they conquered.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, political debate over poverty, workers’ rights and the role of the state was also growing. Socialist and reformist ideas were gaining greater influence in Britain. The Fabian Society, with which Wells was associated for a time, argued that society could be transformed through gradual political and social reform rather than necessarily through revolution.
Wells shared the belief that profound social change was necessary, although he often disagreed with his contemporaries about the means and speed by which that change should occur. His social thinking developed during an era in which industrial society had created extraordinary possibilities but had not yet discovered how to distribute their benefits fairly.
The First World War dramatically changed the European landscape. Technology, which had previously been celebrated primarily as a symbol of progress, was employed on an unprecedented scale for destruction. Machine guns, aircraft, poison gas and modern artillery transformed warfare into an industrial process of mass death. For thinkers such as Wells, the war demonstrated that scientific progress did not automatically produce moral or political progress.
After the war, the collapse of empires and the creation of the League of Nations strengthened discussion about the need for international cooperation. Wells increasingly supported the idea of a form of global political organization capable of preventing future wars. His conviction that humanity’s greatest problems could no longer be addressed solely within individual nation-states became one of the defining elements of his mature thought.
The rise of fascism and Nazism, the economic crises of the interwar years and ultimately the Second World War intensified his concerns. The world that Wells had once imagined could advance through science, education and reason now appeared capable of using those same forces for destruction on a massive scale.
In 1945, one year before his death, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed in the most dramatic way the destructive power that modern science had placed in human hands. For Wells, who had spent decades writing about future weapons, technological revolutions and the need for global political cooperation, these developments reflected one of the central concerns of his work: technological progress could advance more rapidly than society’s ability to control it responsibly.
H. G. Wells was therefore shaped by a world that changed enormously during the course of a single lifetime. He was born into a Victorian society with rigid class divisions and died at the beginning of the atomic age. Between these two worlds, industrialization, evolutionary theory, empire, social inequality, two world wars and the explosive growth of technology shaped the questions that dominated his writing: where humanity was heading, who would control the power of science, and whether social and moral development could keep pace with technological progress.
The British society in which Wells grew up remained strongly divided by class. A person’s family background and economic position could largely determine education, occupation and opportunities in life. For those born into the lower social classes, social advancement was difficult and economic insecurity was an everyday reality.
This world of extreme social divisions lies behind many of Wells’s works. Even in The Time Machine, a novel set in the distant future, the division of humanity into the Eloi and the Morlocks can be read as a dark extension of the class divisions of Victorian society. Wells did not imagine the future independently of the present; he often magnified the tendencies he observed around him and asked where they might ultimately lead.
At the same time, science was radically changing the way Europeans understood nature and humanity’s place within it. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had provoked profound scientific, philosophical and religious debates. Biology, geology, physics and medicine were advancing rapidly, creating the sense that human beings could now understand — and perhaps transform — the natural world in ways that had previously seemed impossible.
Wells’s encounter with this new scientific thought shaped him deeply. Evolution, adaptation, competition between species and the possibility of altering living organisms appear repeatedly in his work. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, for example, biological science becomes the starting point for a much larger question: how far should human beings be allowed to go when they acquire the power to alter nature?
The end of the nineteenth century was also a period of remarkable technological change. Electricity was spreading, communications were becoming faster, railways had transformed travel, and new machines were changing production and everyday life. The automobile and the aeroplane soon followed, along with new forms of mass communication. The sense that the world could be completely transformed within only a few decades became one of the foundations of Wells’s imagination.
Yet technological progress did not inspire optimism alone. Wells recognized that the same scientific discoveries capable of improving human life could also be used for warfare and destruction. In many of his works, therefore, technology is not presented as inherently good or evil; its consequences depend on the way society chooses to organize and use it.
The British Empire was then approaching the height of its power. Imperial expansion was often presented within British society as evidence of superiority and progress. At the same time, colonialism depended upon the conquest and subjugation of other peoples. The War of the Worlds strikingly reverses this reality: Britain itself is confronted by a technologically superior invading power that treats human beings much as imperial powers had often treated the peoples they conquered.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, political debate over poverty, workers’ rights and the role of the state was also growing. Socialist and reformist ideas were gaining greater influence in Britain. The Fabian Society, with which Wells was associated for a time, argued that society could be transformed through gradual political and social reform rather than necessarily through revolution.
Wells shared the belief that profound social change was necessary, although he often disagreed with his contemporaries about the means and speed by which that change should occur. His social thinking developed during an era in which industrial society had created extraordinary possibilities but had not yet discovered how to distribute their benefits fairly.
The First World War dramatically changed the European landscape. Technology, which had previously been celebrated primarily as a symbol of progress, was employed on an unprecedented scale for destruction. Machine guns, aircraft, poison gas and modern artillery transformed warfare into an industrial process of mass death. For thinkers such as Wells, the war demonstrated that scientific progress did not automatically produce moral or political progress.
After the war, the collapse of empires and the creation of the League of Nations strengthened discussion about the need for international cooperation. Wells increasingly supported the idea of a form of global political organization capable of preventing future wars. His conviction that humanity’s greatest problems could no longer be addressed solely within individual nation-states became one of the defining elements of his mature thought.
The rise of fascism and Nazism, the economic crises of the interwar years and ultimately the Second World War intensified his concerns. The world that Wells had once imagined could advance through science, education and reason now appeared capable of using those same forces for destruction on a massive scale.
In 1945, one year before his death, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed in the most dramatic way the destructive power that modern science had placed in human hands. For Wells, who had spent decades writing about future weapons, technological revolutions and the need for global political cooperation, these developments reflected one of the central concerns of his work: technological progress could advance more rapidly than society’s ability to control it responsibly.
H. G. Wells was therefore shaped by a world that changed enormously during the course of a single lifetime. He was born into a Victorian society with rigid class divisions and died at the beginning of the atomic age. Between these two worlds, industrialization, evolutionary theory, empire, social inequality, two world wars and the explosive growth of technology shaped the questions that dominated his writing: where humanity was heading, who would control the power of science, and whether social and moral development could keep pace with technological progress.
Born
1866
Category
Literature
Country
Britain