QI The Book of the Dead

himself and was proud to say that during these years he never read a work of fiction or played a single game. His hard work paid off and he secured a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London studying biology under the great T. H.Huxley. Dirt poor, shabbily dressed and permanently hungry, Wells graduated with a degree in zoology, discovering the joys of English literature and socialism en route. He worked as a teacher, first at a boarding school in Wales and then in Kilburn, where his star pupil was A. A. Milne, author of Winnie- the-Pooh . While lodging with relatives, he fell in love with, and married, his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells. He was twenty-five and she was twenty-two. Until then, his only sexual experience had been with a prostitute several years earlier.
    The newly-weds moved to Wandsworth, where Wells continued to teach, earning extra money by writing educational journalism and producing his Textbook of Biology , which stayed in print for thirty years. On the side, he was also making up for lost time in the sack. By 1894 the marriage was over. Wells moved in with, and then married, one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he called Jane. Although Wells wasn’t your typical Lothario – he was short and scrawny, with a limp moustache and a squeaky voice – he bubbled with ideas and self-confidence, and loved to talk, fixing people with his piercing blue eyes. He discovered that women found him irresistible.
    His political awakening, his immersion in Darwinism and his struggle to pull himself out of poverty led him to believe that love meant freedom from restraint and the judgement of others and this could only be achieved if he had more than one sexual relationship. In Jane he found a woman who seemed happy to go along with this radical logic, allowing him to keep an apartment in town for assignations and hang photographs of his lovers in the family home. She was even prepared to deal with the human fall-out of Wells’s endless bacchanals, taking one of his spurned lovers, the Austrian journalist Hedwig Gatternigg, to hospitalafter she had slashed her wrists outside his flat, distraught at the idea that he didn’t truly love her.
    Wells’s health had troubled him since his time at the boarding school in North Wales. He had been aggressively fouled while playing football and, falling badly, had acquired a crushed kidney and haemorrhaged lung. The lung problems developed into a condition that his doctors suspected was tubercular and he wasn’t given long to live. This added urgency to his sexual conquests, but also gave him time while convalescing to begin writing the scientific romances for which he is still best known. In a tremendous four-year burst of creativity he produced The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). He founded modern science fiction at a stroke, marrying thrilling, apocalyptic stories with the latest scientific and political ideas. He would later come to disparage their popularity, but they propelled him to the front rank of English novelists and gave the couple much-needed financial security. Moving to the healthier air of Sandgate on the Kent coast, he discovered a thriving community of fellow writers, with whom he soon became good friends, including Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and George Bernard Shaw. He gradually got fitter and began a lifelong passion for cycling: ‘Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race,’ he wrote. By 1909 he felt well enough to re-enter the intellectual ferment of London and he and Jane and their two boys, Gip and Frank, moved to 17 Church Row in Hampstead.
    Wells’s ‘open marriage’ scandalised literary London, but it worked for them. He called her ‘Bits’ and ‘P.C.B.’ (Phylum: Companion of the Bath). She called him ‘Bins’ (short for‘ husbinder ’) or ‘Mr Binder’ or sometimes ‘Pobble’. They communicated in ‘Picshuas’ – little scrawled cartoons that caricatured incidents in their marriage and which, Wells said, ‘softened our relations to the pitch of making them tolerable’.
    This childlike domestic contentment gave Wells a secure base from which to sally forth on his carnal adventures, to explore the ‘sexual imaginativeness’ that Jane could not provide. His lovers included the birth-control campaigner Margaret Sanger and the novelists Dorothy Richardson and