1. H. G. Wells – Teacher to the World1. H. G. Wells (1866-1946). Text-book of Biology. London: W.B. Clive & Co.; University Correspondence College Press, [1893]. Wells 570 W46t, vol. 1, cop. 1

2. H. G. Wells. The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. London: G. Newnes, [1919-20]. Wells Q. 909 W46o 1919 vol. 2, part. 24, cop. 2

3. H. G. Wells. ‘The Idea of a World Encyclopedia.’ Nature, 138, no. 3500 (28 November 1936) : 917-24.Q. 505N

4. H. G. Wells. Picshua [sketch] ‘The Shop of Authorship.’ [November 1895].Wells Picshua Box 1

2. The Time Machine5. H. G. Wells. The Time Machine: An Invention. London: William Heinemann, 1895.Wells 823 W46ti 1895 cop. 5

6. H. G. Wells. The Time Machine: An Invention. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1895.WELLS 823 W46 ti cop. 2

7. H. G. Wells. The Time Machine: An Invention; With a Preface by the Author Written for this Edition; and Designs by W.A. Dwiggins. New York: Random House, 1931.Wells 823 W46ti 1931

3. The Time Machine in the World 8. H. G. Wells. The Time Machine. New York: Berkley, [1963?].Wells 823 W46ti 1963

9. H. G. Wells. The Time Machine and The Man Who Could Work Miracles. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1953.Wells 823 W46ti 1953 cop. 2

10. H. G. Wells. Mashina vremeni. Translated by Ė. K. Pimenova, edited by Evgeniǐ Ivanovich Zamiatin. Saint Petersburg: “Vsemirnai︠ a︡ lit-ra” pri Gos. Izd., 1920. Wells 823 W46tiRz

11. H. G. Wells. Die Zeitmaschine. (Illustrierte Klassiker, no. 46) [Aachen: Bildschriftenverlag, 196-].Wells Q. 823 W46ti:G

12. H. G. Wells. La machine à explorer le temps. Translated by Henry-D. Davray, illustrated by Max Camis. Paris: R. Kieffer, [1927].Wells 823 W46tiFd

13. H. G. Wells. Stroz času : Neviditelný. Translated by Pavla Moudrá. Prague: J. Otty, 1905.Wells 823 W46tiCzm.

4. Fantastic Transport 14. H. G. Wells. ‘The Land Ironclads.’ The Strand Magazine, 26, no. 156 (December 1903): 751-64.052 STR

15. H. G. Wells. ‘The First Men in the Moon.’ The Strand Magazine, 20, no. 120 (December 1900): 697-705.052 STR

16. H. G. Wells. The War in the Air, and Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted. Illustrated by A. C. Michael. London: George Bell and Sons, 1908.WELLS 823 W46w cop. 4 and cop. 5

5. Future Technologies17. H. G. Wells. The Conquest of Time. London: Watts & Co., 1942.Wells 104 W46c

18. H. G. Wells. ‘When the Sleeper Wakes.’ Illustrated by Henri Lanos. The Graphic, no. 1529 (18 March 1899): 329-31.072 GR

6. The End of the World 19. H. G. Wells. The War of the Worlds [holograph manuscript, ca. 1897].Wells WOW-001, folio 93a

20. H. G. Wells. The Time Machine [holograph manuscript, ca. 1894].Wells TT-001, folio 231

21. H. G. Wells. Picshua [sketch] ‘Omaggio to P.C.B.’ [1900]Wells Picshua Box 1

7. Fantasias of Possibility 22. H. G. Wells. The World Set Free [holograph manuscript, ca. 1913].Wells WE-001, folio W-3

23. H. G. Wells to Frederick Wells, ‘Oct. 27th 45’ [Holograph letter].Post-1650 MS 0667, folder 75

24. H. G. Wells’ Things to Come. Produced by Alexander Korda, directed by William Cameron Menzies. United Artists, 1936. Wells 09 T-01 and T-16

25. H. G. Wells. Picshua [sketch] ‘The Future.’ 1908.Wells Picshua Box 1, 6 22b

8. Human Rights and World Peace 26. H. G. Wells. The Rights of Man; or, What Are We Fighting For? [typescript, ca. 1940].Wells RI-001, folio 629

27. H. G. Wells. The Rights of Man; or, What Are We Fighting For? Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1940.Wells 940.93 W46r

28. H. G. Wells. Mind at the End of its Tether. London: William Heinemann, 1945.Wells 824 W46m 1945

29. Your Human Rights:The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Proclaimed by the United Nations. December 10, 1948. Introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. New York: Ellner Publishers, 1950. 323.4 Un36y

Curated by Simon J. James and Caroline Szylowicz

The Rare Book & Manuscript LibraryUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars.

(H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future: A Discourse Delivered to the Royal Institution on January 24, 1902)

H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

Time Traveler

Time TravelerSimon J. James is Head of the Department of English Studies, Durham University, UK. He has edited Wells texts for Penguin and World’s Classics and The Wellsian, the scholarly journal of the H. G. Wells Society. He is the author of Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (OUP 2012).

Caroline Szylowicz is the Kolb-Proust Librarian and Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Illinois Library.

Special thanks to Adam Doskey, Valerie Hotchkiss, Travis McDade, Eva Miller, Dennis Sears, and Joe Lenkart; to Conservators Quinn Ferris and Cher Schneider; and to Miyuki Meyer and Angela Waarala in the Library’s Digital Content Creation Unit.

Design by Nivens Design.

© 2016, The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library

346 Library, 1408 West Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL 61801

www.library.illinois.edu/rbx

21 September−21 December 2016

www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/hgwells2016

Items on Exhibit

Item 9.

Item 18, detail from illustration.

Item 4.

Item 29.

Item 29, detail.

Item 24.

Item 26.

Item 27.

Item 23.

Item 28.

Item 16.

Item 11.

Item 7, detail from title page.

No writer is more renowned for his ability to anticipate the future than H. G. Wells. His writing foresaw the aeroplane, the tank, space travel, the atomic bomb, and the worldwide web; his fantastic fiction imagined time travel, flights to the moon, alien invasion, and human beings with the powers of gods. Wells is one of the most influential writers in the English language. In the years between the wars he reached millions of readers worldwide with The Outline of History, which told the story of humanity from its evolutionary origins to the utopian World State he hoped would be the outcome of his prophecies, and broadcast his message to cinema audiences in Things to Come. His major scientific romances The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds have never been out of print. Hailed as a genius from his debut in print, he has helped shape the imagination of a range of writers from George Orwell to Jorge Luis Borges to every science fiction writer who has come after him.

Yet for all his success, Wells died with unfulfilled ambitions: asked, late in life, what he wanted for his epitaph, he chose the words, ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’ Even more than literary success, what Wells wanted was to teach his readership – indeed his first two books, preceding The Time Machine by two years, were textbooks, Honours Physiography and Text-Book of Biology. Later in his career, he disavowed the term ‘artist’ for his declared vocation, preferring ‘journalist.’ Wells did not merely want his creations to be aesthetically successful but to make a difference to life as it is really lived. On this issue, Wells explosively fell out with Henry James. Tiring of the older writer’s patronizing comments on his work, Wells cruelly lampooned him in his 1915 novel Boon. In his 1934 Autobiography, Wells remembers the disagreement thus:

One could not be in a room with him for ten minutes without realizing the importance he attached to the dignity of this art of his. But I was disposed to regard a novel as about as much an art form as a marketplace or a boulevard. You went by it on your various occasions.

While literature students are taught now to be suspicious of texts which have a palpable design upon their reader, Wells’s aims for fiction to be useful are, in their way, more ambitious than James’s for the novel to be beautiful. In his essay ‘The Contemporary Novel,’ Wells called for the novel

to be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of self- examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social dogmas and ideas.

Wells’s key intellectual influences were Darwin and Plato. If correctly educated human beings, liberated by the possibilities of future technology, can organize culture and politics in the best possible way, then a modern Republic might be possible. For Wells it was crucial for everyone to be taught about humankind’s shared evolutionary origin, and for outmoded ideas of national sovereignty to be put aside in favor of building a utopian World State. If, however, humanity persisted with inadequate education, economic inequality, and nation states going to war against each other, then the future he predicts for homo sapiens is a bleak one. The Time Traveler journeys to the year 802,701 and witnesses humanity having degenerated into the subspecies of the effete Eloi and the apelike Morlocks; traveling further into the future, he sees that all animal life on Earth has become extinct and no trace of us remains. ‘Human history,’ he wrote in the Outline, ‘becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’

Having seen his dreams of a co-operative world community thwarted not once but twice by catastrophic World Wars, in the 1940s Wells turned to ensuring human rights and freedom at the level of the individual. Letters that Wells wrote to the Times newspaper led to the Sankey Committee for Human Rights, and the influence of Wells’s 1942 pamphlet The Rights of Man; Or What Are We Fighting For? can be seen in the United Nations 1948 Declaration of Universal Human Rights. Passionate to the last for the lot of future generations to be better, Wells appeals for international laws that will guarantee the right to life, education, work, trade, and property for every man and woman on Earth. Wells’s vision has passed into law but not yet into reality: this twentieth-century prophet clearly has lessons from which the twenty-first century can still learn.

H. G. WellsTime Traveler

Simon J. JamesDurham University