Kipps

by H.G. Wells

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

First published in 1905 Kipps soon became H.G Wells’ most popular novel. It is a rags to riches story of a “simple soul” Arthur Kipps, a naïve young man who finds himself suddenly struggling to keep afloat in the deep waters of unlooked for wealth. He reaches out to those he considers his betters to anchor himself in this new world, so far removed from his relatively humble life of apprentice to a Draper.

 

Young Kipps is quick to abandon his first love Ann for the allure of Helen Walsingham, whom he feels is more the match for the inevitable rise in his status which must surely follow his new found wealth.

 

Wells lets the obviously humorous side of the situation naturally unfold, whilst subtly framing Kipps’ rise and fall in the context of the hypocrisies and futilities of Edwardian English society.

Narrated by Simon Hester. With original music.

Release date: January 12, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

D.J. Taylor

 

 

When John Updike criticised Kingsley Amis for what he called his ‘fussy social judgments’ he was making a complaint about the English novel that could have been filed at practically any time over the past two hundred years: the idea that, though a work of fiction may contain romance and even melodrama, though it may purport to bring vast acreages of our national life under a single, centralising lens, at its heart is likely to lie a kind of social primer, a style guide to behaviour in which most of the questions about how human beings should think and act are reduced to simple etiquette. To a certain kind of nineteenth-century critic, particularly one with an eye trained on the view beyond the study window, even the best mid-Victorian novel could quickly transform itself into a series of immensely exacting social protocols: it was Walter Bagehot who once suggested that Thackeray’s animating force as a novelist was a determination to prove that ninth-rate people were actually tenth-rate.

No doubt Bagehot and Updike have a point – and one remembers the luckless Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim, damned for her over-bright make-up and arty skirts – and yet the ‘society’ in which most writers take some sort of interest is only the sum of its pre-occupations: the novelist set down in it tends to write about its quirks in the same spirit of enquiry that Jack London brings to the fauna of the Yukon trail, and in the knowledge that a moral judgment based on the way in which a person raises a tea cup is no less fascinating for being built on snobbery. Then there is the fact that most English novels about social advancement – most English novels, that is – have three distinct moral perspectives: the standpoint of the hero, making his or her ascent; the standpoint of the particular social group in which that ascent is being fashioned; and the standpoint of the writer himself. In a novel like Kipps, the contrasts are rendered all the sharper by the author’s own social triumphs, his quarrel with both the part of society he came from and the part in which he ended up, and the by no means inconsiderable matter of his own personality.

The theme of Kipps (1905), Wells’ second ‘proper’ novel after a high-octane grounding in scientific romance, would have been all too familiar to the great Victorians from whom he took so much of his inspiration. Essentially its concerns are those of Great Expectations (1861) or an early Thackeray sketch such as ‘Cox’s Diary’ (1840): what happens if you rescue someone from a comparatively low rung of society, give him a life-transforming sum of money and try to make a ‘gentleman’ out of him. But the difference between Artie Kipps and Thackeray’s Barber Cox, whose tuft-hunting wife inherits a fortune and destroys her family’s happiness into the bargain, is that Wells, having climbed up from society’s lower rung himself, actively sympathises with his hero. He may mock Kipps’ ambitions, he may insist that his aspirations are not worth the having, but in the end class solidarity always wins out, if only because Kipps is a backward projection of Wells himself, minus the genius – a harmless, averagely accomplished lower middle-class boy, condemned to the drudging, joyless life of the shopkeeper’s assistant, until an unexpected legacy sets him free.

Orphaned and illegitimate, with a cloud of fog hanging over almost every aspect of his early life, Kipps is brought up in the sequestered Kentish town of New Romney by an aged uncle and aunt, has his intelligence systematically warped in a pretentious private school and is then apprenticed to a dim-witted but obstreperous Folkestone draper. His salvation lies in an unforeseen twenty-six thousand pounds – two million, say, at current values – left to him by his regretful grandfather. Predictably, Kipps’ social rise begins from the moment he steps out of the lawyer’s office (the scene in which he goes back to New Romney to break the news to his relatives is one of the funniest in the book) and before two months are up he is fearfully at large in Folkestone ‘society’, tremulously engaged to a ‘lady’, living in his grandfather’s house and nervously acclimatising himself to a world of servants, dressing for dinner and genteel entertainment.

At the same time, Wells’ ‘message’ is a comparatively subtle one. It is not just that social aspirations of any kind are faintly ridiculous, and that no one in their right mind would want to sacrifice the companionship of people of their own social class for dismal little dinners and mock-refined chatter about art. Rather, Wells insists, social distinctions are unavoidable because they exist in every section of society. The poorest street in Camberwell will be riven by class prejudice, this argument runs, because the dustman will always think himself superior to the rat-catcher next door. The old Kippses in their flyblown shop set the tone for their nephew’s upbringing:

 

They were always very suspicious about their neighbours and other people generally; they feared the ‘low’ and they hated and despised the ‘stuck up’ and so they ‘kept themselves to themselves,’ according to the English ideal.

 

It is the same in Kipps’ dreadful private school, most of whose inmates are sent there not for an education but to ‘demonstrate the dignity of their parents and guardians’, and possibly worse in Mr Sheldrake’s draper’s establishment, which is all sham gentility and slave-driven shop girls thanking God that at least they are a cut above skivvies.

Set against this backdrop of petty one-upmanship, in which everyone is either staring enviously at their ‘betters’ or looking down their noses at inferior competition stranded beneath the salt, Miss Walshingham, whom Kipps courts and is accepted by almost by accident, is a kind of molten goddess, as far removed from aitchdropping Flo Bates from the cash desk as a duchess from a dairy maid, by whose conniving mother and swindling solicitor brother Kipps is completely bamboozled. And yet the circle in which Miss Walshingham moves, and on which, as an interesting specimen of shabby-genteel poverty, she quietly sponges, is simply an upmarket version of the one Kipps has always known:

 

There was the same subtle sense of social gradation that had moved Mrs Kipps to prohibit intercourse with labourers’ children, and the same dread of anything ‘common’ that had kept the personal quality of Mr Shalford’s establishment so high.

 

The only thing that has been detached from this landscape of gentrified party-going and butler-haunted vestibules, thanks to the twenty-six thousand pounds, is the doubt over Kipps’ admission ticket.

Meanwhile, as Kipps is inducted into the mysteries of ‘calling’, introduced to the local vicar, who is, extraordinarily, both the Reverend and Honourable, and given an all-purpose cultural education courtesy of his fast friend Mr Chester Coote, some other judgments are moving silently into view. These, significantly enough, are Wells’ own. One of the most revealing passages involves an elaborate description of the study in which Mr Coote, a high-minded bachelor who lives with his ‘artistic’ spinster sister, occupies his leisure hours: a little bedroom ‘put to studious uses’ and featuring ‘an array of things he had been led to believe indicative of culture and refinement. These include reproductions of works by Rossetti and Watts. There is also a selection of books – ‘no worse an array of books that you find in any public library,’ Wells helpfully glosses – copies of the Bookman, a well-known middlebrow periodical of the day (‘no English paper can have been more cosily, more lavishly, more exclusively devoted to the spirit of belles-lettres’ John Gross once noted) and much sagacious advice from Mr Coote on ‘the one serious book’ a cultivated man ought to read each week.

This is Wells the switched-on metropolitan intellectual, the friend of Gissing and Henry James, having a little fun with a specimen of the faded provincial culture he had doubtless had many opportunities to observe in his youth, and as you might expect, Mr Coote (‘the exemplary Coote’) is instantly derided as the kind of man who picks up a copy of Sesame and Lilies in the same spirit that he pulls on a pair of lavender gloves, someone to whom the whole idea of ‘culture’ is at best an accessory and at worst a means to an end. At the same time there is something faintly superfluous about this demolition, the sense of a character who is not being brought into a book for his own sake but to prove a point, as well as a suspicion that it would be perfectly possible to judge Wells himself by standards even more exacting than these and find him just as wanting as Mr Chester Coote.

In setting out the novel’s denouement, Wells is true to his class: he has Kipps rebel, abandon his ladylike fiance´e for Ann Pornick, the servant girl he loved as a child, and be swindled by Miss Walshingham’s scapegrace brother. The moral of Kipps, then, is the moral of Great Expectations brought forward to the Edwardian age: don’t throw over the class you were born into; don’t imagine that the process of ‘bettering yourself’ won’t involve huge amounts of moral compromise and self-delusion, or that your relationships with the people you knew in your previous life can persist unhindered – see, for instance, the very pointed scene in which Kipps, out listening to an open-air concert with his faithful attendant Mr Coote, comes across a couple of sarcastic cronies from the draper’s shop. While there are times when Wells canvasses the relative merits of other modes of life – for example the mild bohemianism of Kipps’ play-writing chum Chitterlow, and the socialism idiosyncratically preached by Sid Pornick’s journalist lodger Masterman – the answer to the pressing question of what he actually wants from the world he surveys, and how he imagines its social arrangements might be improved, comes in an odd little passage towards the end.

The stimulus is a corking row between Kipps and Ann, in their newly built house, after a disastrous visit by the family of the Rev. G. Porrett Smith, who assume that Ann, fresh from enamelling the upstairs floor, is a servant. ‘The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives,’ Wells laments, before going on to condemn ‘the anti-soul . . . the ruling power of this land, Stupidity.’ The Kippses, he decides, are merely children – ‘children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer, and do not understand why’. So what, in the last resort, does Wells want? He wants a world in which people will behave better to each other, a world in which honest aspiration and fellow-feeling won’t automatically be snuffed out by snobbery and hidebound tradition, a world in which ‘equality’ is not a dirty world – Kipps at one point declares himself a ‘Socialist’ after a humiliating stay at a classy London hotel – but it will also be a world in which people like H.G. Wells are allowed to luxuriate and prosper. On one level, Kipps is an expose´ of an outdated social system, a life based fundamentally on the principle of fooling yourself, but it is also, you imagine, an apologia pro vita sua.

What remains is a kind of sentimental realism, in which the happy ending altogether fails to disguise some of the genuine horrors that lurk behind the wainscoting of the average late-nineteenth century interior: the out-of-work drapers’ assistants quietly starving to death in library reading rooms, tubercular journalists coughing their guts out in rented garrets. Wells was never a realist in the textbook sense of the word, and the brute matter-of-factness of a contemporary American naturalist like Dreiser or Upton Sinclair was denied him both by the tradition in which he wrote and, even more important, the view that he took of the world. In his famous essay ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ (1941), Orwell proposed that Wells was simply ‘too sane’ for the mid-twentieth landscape of marching armies and lofted flags. By the time of his death in 1946 he openly despaired at the state of the world he found himself in. Here in 1905 he was merely exasperated, confident that a little more collective action, a little more personal resonance, could change things for the better.

‘I don’t suppose there ever was a chap quite like me before’ Kipps tells his wife on the novel’s final page. In strict, taxonomic terms this is a red herring, for the English novel of the previous century is full of bewildered socio-economic migrants of the Kipps sort, ripe to be exploited by the unscrupulous predators of the gentlemanly drawing room. On the other hand, no previous novelist had Wells’ ability, born of bitter, personal experience, to decode the assumptions on which a certain kind of lower-middle-class life was based. Kipps, consequently, is a number of things all at once – a disguised autobiography, an economic clarion call, a successful attempt to extend the English novel’s social range, but it is, above all, a horribly funny book, written by a man who still believed that the most effective way of attacking something was to laugh at it.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

The Little Shop at New Romney

 

 

1

 

 

Until he was nearly arrived at manhood, it did not become clear to Kipps how it was that he had come into the care of an aunt and uncle instead of having a father and mother like other little boys. He had vague memories of a somewhere else, a dim room, a window looking down on white buildings, and of a some one else who talked to forgotten people and who was his mother. He could not recall her features very distinctly, but he remembered with extreme definition a white dress she wore, with a pattern of little sprigs of flowers and little bows upon it, and a girdle of straight-ribbed white ribbon about the waist. Linked with this, he knew not how, were clouded, half-obliterated recollections of scenes in which there was weeping, weeping in which he was inscrutably moved to join. Some terrible tall man with a loud voice played a part in these scenes, and, either before or after them, there were impressions of looking for interminable periods out of the window of railway trains in the company of these two people.

He knew, though he could not remember that he had ever been told, that a certain faded wistful face that looked at him from a plush and gilt framed daguerreotype above the mantel of the ‘sitting-room’ was the face of his mother. But that knowledge did not touch his dim memories with any elucidation. In that photograph she was a girlish figure, leaning against a photographer’s stile, and with all the self-conscious shrinking natural to that position. She had curly hair and a face far younger and prettier than any other mother in his experience. She swung a Dolly Varden hat by the string, and looked with obedient respectful eyes on the photographer-gentleman who had commanded the pose. She was very slight and pretty. But the phantom mother that haunted his memory so elusively was not like that, though he could not remember how she differed.

Perhaps she was older or a little less shrinking, or, it may be, only dressed in a different way . . .

It is clear she handed him over to his aunt and uncle at New Romney with explicit directions and a certain endowment. One gathers she had something of that fine sense of social distinctions that subsequently played so large a part in Kipps’ career. He was not to go to a ‘common’ school, she provided, but to a certain seminary in Hastings, that was not only a ‘middle-class academy’ with mortar-boards and every evidence of a higher social tone, but also remarkably cheap. She seems to have been animated by the desire to do her best for Kipps even at a certain sacrifice of herself, as though Kipps were in some way a superior sort of person. She sent pocket-money to him from time to time for a year or more after Hastings had begun for him, but her face he never saw in the days of his lucid memory.

His aunt and uncle were already high on the hill of life when first he came to them. They had married for comfort in the evening or, at any rate, in the late afternoon of their days. They were at first no more than vague figures in the background of proximate realities, such realities as familiar chairs and tables, quiet to ride and drive, the newel of the staircase, kitchen furniture, pieces of firewood, the boiler tap, old newspapers, the cat, the High Street, the back yard, and the flat fields that are always so near in that little town. He knew all the stones in the yard individually, the creeper in the corner, the dustbin and the mossy wall, better than many men know the faces of their wives. There was a corner under the ironing-board which, by means of a shawl, could be made, under propitious gods, a very decent cubby-house, a corner that served him for several years as the indisputable hub of the world, and the stringy places in the carpet, the knots upon the dresser, and the several corners of the rag hearthrug his uncle had made, became essential parts of his mental foundations. The shop he did not know so thoroughly; it was a forbidden region to him, yet somehow he managed to know it very well.

His aunt and uncle were, as it were, the immediate gods of this world, and, like the gods of the world of old, occasionally descended right into it, with arbitrary injunctions and disproportionate punishments. And, unhappily, one rose to their Olympian level at meals. Then one had to say one’s ‘grace’, hold one’s spoon and fork in mad, unnatural ways called ‘properly’, and refrain from eating even nice sweet things ‘too fast’. If he ‘gobbled’ there was trouble, and at the slightest abandon with knife, fork, and spoon his aunt rapped his knuckles, albeit his uncle always finished up his gravy with his knife. Sometimes, moreover, his uncle would come pipe in hand out of a sedentary remoteness in the most disconcerting way when a little boy was doing the most natural and attractive things, with ‘Drat and drabbit that young rascal! What’s he a-doing of now?’ and his aunt would appear at door or window to interrupt interesting conversation with children who were upon unknown grounds considered ‘low’ and undesirable, and call him in. The pleasantest little noises, however softly you did them, drumming on tea-trays, trumpeting your fists, whistling on keys, ringing chimes with a couple of pails, or playing tunes on the window-panes, brought down the gods in anger. Yet what noise is fainter than your finger on the window – gently done? Sometimes, however, these gods gave him broken toys out of the shop, and then one loved them better – for the shop they kept was, among other things, a toy-shop. (The other things included books to read and books to give away, and local photographs; it had some pretensions to be a china-shop and the fascia spoke of glass; it was also a stationer’s-shop with a touch of haberdashery about it, and in the windows and odd corners were mats and terracotta dishes and milking-stools for painting, and there was a hint of picture-frames, and fire-screens, and fishing-tackle, and airguns, and bathing-suits, and tents – various things, indeed, but all cruelly attractive to a small boy’s fingers.) Once his aunt gave him a trumpet if he would promise faithfully not to blow it, and afterwards took it away again. And his aunt made him say his catechism, and something she certainly called the ‘Colic for the Day’, every Sunday in the year.

As the two grew old as he grew up, and as his impression of them modified insensibly from year to year, it seemed to him at last that they had always been as they were when in his adolescent days his impression of things grew fixed; his aunt he thought of as always lean, rather worried looking, and prone to a certain obliquity of cap, and his uncle massive, many chinned, and careless about his buttons. They neither visited nor received visitors. They were always very suspicious about their neighbours and other people generally; they feared the ‘low’ and they hated and despised the ‘stuck up’, and so they ‘kept themselves to themselves’, according to the English ideal. Consequently little Kipps had no playmates, except through the sin of disobedience. By inherent nature he had a sociable disposition. When he was in the High Street he made a point of saying ‘Hello!’ to passing cyclists, and he would put his tongue out at the Quodling children whenever their nursemaid was not looking. And he began a friendship with Sid Pornick, the son of the haberdasher next door, that, with wide intermissions, was destined to last his lifetime through.

Pornick the haberdasher, I may say at once, was, according to old Kipps, a ‘blaring jackass’; he was a teetotaller, a ‘nyar, nyar, ’imsinging Methodis’, and altogether distasteful and detrimental, he and his together, to true Kipps ideals so far as little Kipps could gather them. This Pornick certainly possessed an enormous voice, and he annoyed old Kipps greatly by calling ‘You – Arn’ and ‘Siddee’ up and down his house. He annoyed old Kipps by private choral services on Sunday, all his family, ‘nyar, nyar’ing; and by mushroom culture, by behaving as though the pilaster between the two shops was common property, by making a noise of hammering in the afternoon when old Kipps wished to be quiet after his midday meal, by going up and down uncarpeted stairs in his boots, by having a black beard, by attempting to be friendly, and by – all that sort of thing. In fact, he annoyed old Kipps. He annoyed him especially with his shopdoor mat. Old Kipps never beat his mat, preferring to let sleeping dust lie, and, seeking a motive for a foolish proceeding, he held that Pornick waited until there was a suitable wind in order that the dust disengaged in that operation might defile his neighbour’s shop. These issues would frequently develop into loud and vehement quarrels, and on one occasion came so near to violence as to be subsequently described by Pornick (who read his newspaper) as a ‘Disgraceful Frackass’. On that occasion he certainly went into his own shop with extreme celerity.

But it was through one of these quarrels that the friendship of little Kipps and Sid Pornick came about. The two small boys found themselves one day looking through the gate at the doctor’s goats together; they exchanged a few contradictions about which goat could fight which, and then young Kipps was moved to remark that Sid’s father was a ‘blaring jackass’. Sid said he wasn’t, and Kipps repeated that he was, and quoted his authority. Then Sid, flying off at a tangent rather alarmingly, said he could fight young Kipps with one hand, an assertion young Kipps with a secret want of confidence denied. There were some vain repetitions, and the incident might have ended there, but happily a sporting butcher boy chanced on the controversy at this stage, and insisted upon seeing fair play.

The two small boys, under his pressing encouragement, did at last button up their jackets, square, and fight an edifying drawn battle until it seemed good to the butcher boy to go on with Mrs Holyer’s mutton. Then, according to his directions and under his experienced stage management, they shook hands and made it up. Subsequently, a little tear-stained perhaps, but flushed with the butcher boy’s approval (‘tough little kids’), and with cold stones down their necks as he advised, they sat side by side on the doctor’s gate, projecting very much behind, staunching an honourable bloodshed, and expressing respect for one another. Each had a bloody nose and a black eye – three days later they matched to a shade – neither had given in, and, though this was tacit, neither wanted any more.

It was an excellent beginning. After this first encounter the attributes of their parents and their own relative value in battle never rose between them, and if anything was wanted to complete the warmth of their regard it was found in a joint dislike of the eldest Quodling. The eldest Quodling lisped, had a silly sort of straw hat and a large pink face (all covered over with self-satisfaction), and he went to the National school with a green-baize bag – a contemptible thing to do. They called him names and threw stones at him, and when he replied by threatenings (‘Look ’ere, young Art Kipth, you better thtoppit !’) they were moved to attack, and put him to flight.

And after that they broke the head of Ann Pornick’s doll, so that she went home weeping loudly – a wicked and endearing proceeding. Sid was whacked, but, as he explained, he wore a newspaper tactically adjusted during the transaction, and really it didn’t hurt him at all . . . And Mrs Pornick put her head out of the shop door suddenly and threatened Kipps as he passed.

 

 

2

 

‘Cavendish Academy’, the school that had won the limited choice of Kipps’ vanished mother, was established in a battered private house in the part of Hastings remotest from the sea; it was called an Academy for Young Gentlemen, and many of the young gentlemen had parents in ‘India’ and other unverifiable places. Others were the sons of credulous widows anxious, as Kipps’ mother had been, to get something a little ‘superior’ to a board school education as cheaply as possible, and others, again, were sent to demonstrate the dignity of their parents and guardians. And of course there were boys from France.

Its ‘principal’ was a lean long creature of indifferent digestion and temper, who proclaimed himself on a gilt-lettered board in his front area, George Garden Woodrow, F.S.Sc., letters indicating that he had paid certain guineas for a bogus diploma. A bleak whitewashed outhouse constituted his schoolroom, and the scholastic quality of its carved and worn desks and forms was enhanced by a slippery blackboard and two large yellow out-of-date maps – one of Africa and the other of Wiltshire – that he had picked up cheap at a sale. There were other maps and globes in his study, where he interviewed inquiring parents, but these his pupils never saw. And in a glass cupboard in the passage were several shillingsworth of test-tubes and chemicals, a tripod, a glass retort, and a damaged Bunsen burner, manifesting that the ‘Scientific laboratory’ mentioned in the prospectus was no idle boast.

This prospectus, which was in dignified but incorrect English, laid particular stress on the sound preparation for a commercial career given in the Academy, but the army, navy, and civil service were glanced at in an ambiguous sentence. There was something vague in the prospectus about ‘examinational successes’ – though Woodrow, of course, disapproved of ‘cram’ – and a declaration that the curriculum included ‘art’, ‘modern foreign languages’, and ‘a sound technical and scientific training’. Then came insistence upon the ‘moral well-being’ of the pupils, and an emphatic boast of the excellence of the religious instruction, ‘so often neglected nowadays even in schools of wide repute’. ‘That’s bound to fetch ’em,’ Mr Woodrow had remarked when he drew up the prospectus. And in conjunction with the mortar-boards it certainly did. Attention was directed to the ‘motherly’ care of Mrs Woodrow, in reality a small partially effaced woman with a plaintive face and a mind above cookery, and the prospectus concluded with a phrase intentionally vague, ‘Fare unrestricted, and our own milk and produce’.

The memories Kipps carried from that school into after-life were set in an atmosphere of stuffiness and mental muddle, and included countless pictures of sitting on creaking forms bored and idle; of blot licking and the taste of ink; of torn books with covers that set one’s teeth on edge; of the slimy surface of the laboured slates; of furtive marble-playing, whispered storytelling, and of pinches, blows, and a thousand such petty annoyances being perpetually ‘passed on’ according to the custom of the place; of standing up in class and being hit suddenly and unreasonably for imaginary misbehaviour; of Mr Woodrow’s raving days, when a scarcely sane injustice prevailed; of the cold vacuity of the hour of preparation before the bread-and-butter breakfast; and of horrible headaches and queer, unprecedented internal feelings, resulting from Mrs Woodrow’s motherly rather than intelligent cookery. There were dreary walks when the boys marched two by two, all dressed in the mortar-board caps that so impressed the widowed mothers; there were dismal half-holidays when the weather was wet, and the spirit of evil temper and evil imagination had the pent boys to work its will on; there were unfair dishonourable fights, and miserable defeats and victories; there was bullying and being bullied. A coward boy Kipps particularly afflicted, until at last he was goaded to revolt by incessant persecution, and smote Kipps to tolerance with whirling fists. There were memories of sleeping three in a bed; of the dense leathery smell of the schoolroom when one returned thither after ten minutes’ play; of a playground of mud and incidental sharp flints. And there was much furtive foul language.

‘Our Sundays are our happiest days,’ was one of Woodrow’s formulae with the inquiring parent, but Kipps was not called in evidence. They were to him terrible gaps of inanity, no work, no play – a drear expanse of time with the mystery