A Short History of the World Read Free

elected president of International PEN, the writers' organization campaigning for intellectual freedom. In the same year his books were publicly burnt by the Nazis in Berlin, and he was banned from visiting Fascist Italy. His ideas strongly influenced the Pan-European Union, the pressure group advocating European unity between the wars.
    But Wells became convinced that nothing less than global unity was needed if humanity was not to destroy itself. In The Open Conspiracy (1928) and other books he outlined his theories of world citizenship and world government. As the Second World War drew nearer he felt that his mission had been a failure and his warnings had gone unheeded. His last great campaign, for which he tried to obtain international support, was for human rights. The proposal set out in his Penguin Special The Rights of Man (1940) helped to bring about the United Nations declaration of 1948. He spent the war years at his house in Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park, and was awarded a D.Sc. by London University in 1943. His last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), was a despairing, pessimistic work, even bleaker in its prospects for mankind than The Time Machine fifty years earlier. He died at Hanover Terrace on 13 August 1946. He was restless and tireless to the end, a prophet eternally dissatisfied with himself and with humanity. ‘Some day’, he had written in a whimsical ‘Auto-Obituary’ three years earlier, ‘I shall write a book, a real book.’ He had published over fifty works of fiction and, in total, some 150 books and pamphlets.
    Patrick Parrinder

Introduction
    Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) had many enemies, and his story was rather heroic. He was born into a family in humble circumstances and went through ‘Commercial School’ – a rather grand name for his apprenticeships, first as a pharmacist and then in a drapery shop. These did not work out at all well, and he enrolled in the ‘Normal School of Science, Kensington’ with a view to becoming a school-teacher. He started teaching in 1883, and taught until 1895, during which time he married. It was a miserable period for him. In the first place, his health was far from good. Also, in late-Victorian England, ‘counter-jumpers’ were despised. They could sometimes only find their way forward socially by becoming technicians, needed by society though still, in a way, despised (when Oxford University had a Professor of Engineering foisted upon it a little later, his colleagues dismissed him as ‘Professor of Jam-Making’); and school-teaching, though comparatively better-rewarded than it is now, was the lowliest of professions. Throw into this an unfortunate first marriage, and you have in Wells's misfortunes a picture of much that was wrong with England in the early twentieth century.
    His life also reflects much that was right with it. One had to show character, self-reliance, independence, and, once one had got through the initial isolation, there would be a network of friends and sympathizers who would help. In fact, initial troubles in youth give a strength of personality that carries one through middle age and old age, in a way which cannot often happen where things are far easier as in the United States. Dickens remarks that clerks should be put away in cupboards,like cheeses, before being brought out to start their work. Wells was such an English – it is much more typically English than Scottish – creation: his career up to 1896, when he was thirty, was something of a cheese-cupboard. His immediate way out of it was provided by the virtually chance discovery that he had journalistic talent. His first marriage was a bore, as was teaching science in an extremely hierarchical school of the kind that then existed. The pin in the grenade was pulled out when Wells fell in love; it exploded, and Wells, having to supply funds for both his first wife and the love affair (there were