Love and Mr Lewisham
Author | H. G. Wells |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Novel |
Publisher | Harper Brothers |
Publication date | 1900 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
OCLC | 4186517 |
Text | Love and Mr Lewisham at Wikisource |
Love and Mr Lewisham (subtitled "The Story of a Very Young Couple") is a 1900 novel set in the 1880s by H. G. Wells. It was among his first fictional writings outside the science fiction genre. Wells took considerable pains over the manuscript and said that "the writing was an altogether more serious undertaking than I have ever done before."[1] He later included it in a 1933 anthology, Stories of Men and Women in Love.
Events in the novel closely resemble events in Wells's own life. According to Geoffrey H. Wells: "referring to the question of autobiography in fiction, H. G. Wells has somewhere made a remark to the effect that it is not so much what one has done that counts, as where one has been, and the truth of that statement is particularly evident in this novel. ... Both Mr Lewisham and Mr Wells were at the age of eighteen, assistant masters at country schools, and that three years later both were commencing their third year at The Normal School of Science, South Kensington, as teachers in training under Thomas Henry Huxley. The account of the school, of the students there and of their social life and interests, may be taken as true descriptions of those things during the period 1883-1886."[2]
Plot
At the beginning of the novel, Mr Lewisham is an 18-year-old teacher at a boys' school in Sussex, earning forty pounds a year. He meets and falls in love with Ethel Henderson, who is paying a visit to relatives. His involvement with her makes him lose his position, but he is unable to find her when he moves to London.
After a two-and-a-half-year break in the action, Mr Lewisham is in his third year of study at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. He has become a socialist, declaring his politics with a red tie, and is an object of interest to Alice Heydinger, an older student. However, chance brings him together again with his first love at a séance. Ethel's stepfather, Mr Chaffery, is a spiritualist charlatan, and Mr Lewisham is determined to extricate her from association with Chaffery's dishonesty.
They marry, and Mr Lewisham is forced to abandon his plans for a brilliant scientific career followed by a political ascent. When Chaffery absconds to Continental Europe with money he has embezzled from his clients, Lewisham agrees to move into his shabby Clapham house to look after Ethel and Ethel's elderly mother (Chaffery's abandoned wife). Wells's friend Sir Richard Gregory wrote to him after reading the novel: "I cannot get that poor devil Lewisham out of my mind head, and I wish I had an address, for I would go to him and rescue him from the miserable life in which you leave him."[3]
Reception
Love and Mr Lewisham was well received, and Charles Masterman told Wells that he believed that along with Kipps, it was the novel most likely to endure.[4] Sir Richard Gregory compared the novel to Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.[5]
Happily, Mr Wells is a man of varying moods. ... ... Like Dickens, with whom he has much more in common than Gissing had, he shows a happier touch in revealing the merits of the meek and lowly than in exposing the failings of the rich and noble. Vivid as is the gift of satire which he exhibits in other directions, he cannot get a scantling of truth and sharpness into his caricatures of overbearing village squires and supercilious ladies of the manor. But how fresh and clear, on the other hand, is the picture of the poor rustic scholar in 'Love and Mr Lewisham'! How tender the humor, and how light and telling the touch with which the story of his struggle between love and ambition is depicted![6]
More recent critics have also praised the novel. Richard Higgins claims the novel elaborates a "close examination of the relationship between class and the emotions", adding that "these emotions have much to add to conventional class analysis. Many of these emotions are more prosaic than we have been accustomed to observe—more passive frustration, for example, than class rage."[7] And Adam Roberts argues that the novel uses Chaffrey's fake séance as an expressive metaphor for a Wellsian engagement with questions of sexual desire and disillusionment.[8]
References
- Notes
- ^ Smith (1986), p. 208.
- ^ Wells, Geoffrey H. (1926), The Works of H G Wells 1887-1925 London: Routledge, pp.15-16
- ^ Mackenzie, Norman and Jeanne (1973), The Time Traveller: the Life of H.G. Wells London. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p. 152.
- ^ Smith (1986), p. 202.
- ^ Smith (1986), p. 208.
- ^ "The Ideas of Mr H. G. Wells". The Quarterly Review. 208: 472–490. April 1908; quote pp. 487–488
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link) - ^ Higgins, Richard, 'Feeling Like a Clerk in H G Wells', Victorian Studies 50:3 (2008), p.458
- ^ Roberts, Adam (2017), 'Love and Mr Lewisham', Wells at the World's End
- Sources
- Smith, David C. (1986). H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
External links
- Love and Mr Lewisham public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- v
- t
- e
- The Time Machine (1895)
- The Wonderful Visit (1895)
- The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
- The Wheels of Chance (1896)
- The Invisible Man (1897)
- The War of the Worlds (1898)
- When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)
- Love and Mr Lewisham (1900)
- The First Men in the Moon (1901)
- The Sea Lady (1902)
- The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)
- Kipps (1905)
- A Modern Utopia (1905)
- In the Days of the Comet (1906)
- The War in the Air (1908)
- Tono-Bungay (1909)
- Ann Veronica (1909)
- The History of Mr Polly (1910)
- The Sleeper Awakes (1910)
- The New Machiavelli (1911)
- Marriage (1912)
- The Passionate Friends (1913)
- The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914)
- The World Set Free (1914)
- Bealby (1915)
- Boon (1915)
- The Research Magnificent (1915)
- Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916)
- The Soul of a Bishop (1917)
- Joan and Peter (1918)
- The Undying Fire (1919)
- The Secret Places of the Heart (1922)
- Men Like Gods (1923)
- The Dream (1924)
- Christina Alberta's Father (1925)
- The World of William Clissold (1926)
- Meanwhile (1927)
- Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)
- The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930)
- The Bulpington of Blup (1932)
- The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
- The Croquet Player (1936)
- Brynhild (1937)
- Star Begotten (1937)
- The Camford Visitation (1937)
- Apropos of Dolores (1938)
- The Brothers (1938)
- The Holy Terror (1939)
- Babes in the Darkling Wood (1940)
- All Aboard for Ararat (1940)
- You Can't Be Too Careful (1941)
- Anticipations
- Certain Personal Matters
- Crux Ansata
- The Discovery of the Future
- An Englishman Looks at the World
- Experiment in Autobiography
- The Fate of Man
- First and Last Things
- Floor Games
- The Future in America
- God the Invisible King
- In the Fourth Year
- Little Wars
- Mankind in the Making
- Mind at the End of Its Tether
- Mr. Belloc Objects to "The Outline of History"
- The New America
- The New World Order
- New Worlds for Old
- The Open Conspiracy
- The Outline of History
- Russia in the Shadows
- The Science of Life
- A Short History of the World
- The Story of a Great Schoolmaster
- This Misery of Boots
- Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water
- War and the Future
- The Way the World Is Going
- The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind
- World Brain
- A Year of Prophesying
- "Æpyornis Island"
- "The Argonauts of the Air"
- "The Beautiful Suit"
- "The Chronic Argonauts"
- "The Cone"
- "The Country of the Blind"
- "The Crystal Egg"
- "A Deal in Ostriches"
- "The Diamond Maker"
- "The Door in the Wall"
- "A Dream of Armageddon"
- "The Empire of the Ants"
- "In the Abyss"
- "The Land Ironclads"
- "Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation"
- "The Lord of the Dynamos"
- "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"
- "The New Accelerator"
- "The Pearl of Love"
- "The Plattner Story"
- "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper"
- "The Red Room"
- "The Sea Raiders"
- "The Star"
- "The Stolen Body"
- "A Story of the Days to Come"
- "A Story of the Stone Age"
- "Triumphs of a Taxidermist"
- "The Truth About Pyecraft"
- "A Vision of Judgment"
- Things to Come (1936)
- The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937)
- Political views
- G. P. Wells
- Anthony West (son)
- Joseph Wells (father)
- Simon Wells (great-grandson)
- H. G. Wells Society
- Lunar crater
- Time After Time (1979 film)
External links
- Love and Mr Lewisham at Project Gutenberg.