H. G. Wells: A Political Life John S. Partington H. G. Wells was born into a struggling lower-middle-class family on 21 September 1866 at Atlas House, High Street, in Bromley, Kent. He had two brothers, Frank (1857-1933) and Fred (1862-1954), and a predeceased sister, Fanny (1855-64). His father, Joseph Wells (1828-1910), was a shopkeeper and former gardener, moving to Bromley in 1855 to sell china and cricket equipment, and supplementing his income by coaching local cricketers and bowling for Kent County Cricket Club. Wells’s mother, Sarah Wells née Neal (1822-1905), had been a lady’s maid before her marriage to Joseph in 1853 and shared the shop-keeping duties on their move to Bromley. When Wells was 11 years old, his father’s cricket career came to an end when he fractured his leg. Although Joseph persisted with the shop until 1887, with the loss of his cricketing income Sarah returned to domestic service, becoming housekeeper to Frances Fetherstonhaugh at Uppark in Sussex from 1880 until her retirement in 1893. In that year she rejoined Joseph, and her son Frank, in a cottage in Nyewoods, Sussex, where the two men earned a meagre living performing odd jobs. In 1896, their newly prosperous son, H. G., bought his parents a cottage in Liss, Hampshire, where they lived for their remaining years. Wells’s schooling took place at Mrs Knott’s Dame School (1871-74) and Thomas Morley’s Commercial Academy (1874-80) in Bromley. Although the curriculum was restricted he proved an able pupil, learning the “three Rs”, basic French and bookkeeping, and was perfectly equipped to take up a retail apprenticeship. As an apprentice, however, Wells proved unsatisfactory, working for brief spells at the Rodgers and Denyer drapery in Windsor (1880), as a pupil-teacher in Wookey (which ended when the headmaster’s qualifications were found to be substandard and the school was closed down) (1880), at Cowap’s chemists in Midhurst (1881), and again as a trainee draper at Hyde’s Drapery Emporium in Southsea (1881-83). After two miserable years at Hyde’s, Wells demanded his mother release him from his indentures or face suicide, and she relented. In September 1883 he enrolled at Midhurst Grammar School (where he had briefly attended Latin classes during his chemist’s apprenticeship in 1881), becoming a pupil-teacher on an annual salary of £20. While at the grammar school Wells sat a number of Education Department examinations, winning a scholarship to study for a science degree at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. In September 1884 Wells enrolled at the Normal School, studying briefly under T. H. Huxley and beginning well only to end his course without a degree in 1887. Despite his lack of academic success, Wells’s time at the Normal School saw him take 1