Love and Mr Lewisham

by H.G. Wells

Genres: Classics; Victorian Romance

Synopsis

Young, impoverished and ambitious, science student Mr Lewisham is locked in a struggle to further himself through academic achievement. But when his former sweetheart, Ethel Henderson, re-enters his life his strictly regimented existence is thrown into chaos by the resurgence of old passion. Driven by overwhelming desire, he pursues Ethel passionately, only to find that while she returns his love she also hides a dark secret. For she is involved in a plot of trickery that goes against his firmest beliefs, working as an assistant to her stepfather - a cynical charlatan 'mystic' who earns his living by deluding the weak-willed with sly trickery.

Release date: January 12, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 208

Sample

 

 

Introduction

 

 

A.C. Grayling

 

 

Most first novels tend to be largely autobiographical. Although by the time he wrote Love and Mr Lewisham H. G. Wells had published ten books – seven science fiction novels, which he called ‘fantasy romances’, three science textbooks, and a number of short stories – this was what he thought of as his first ‘proper’ novel, and it indeed draws heavily on his own life. With the exception of the timing of young Mr Lewisham’s meeting with Ethel Henderson and their subsequent re-encounter and marriage, the events of the novel closely follow Wells’ own experience. Both in literary and in biographical terms, therefore, Love and Mr Lewisham is a fully paid-up example of literary realism.

But in being so it is, for all its wit, readability and surface clarity, a darker and more complex work than it appears. It cost Wells a great effort to write it; he told friends that he had thrown away much more than he had kept, and that more time and care had gone into it than into (as he put it) a work of scientific research for the Royal Society. What reads easily is often the result of assiduous polishing and editing, and this is the case here. It follows that Wells left much between the lines that he would later (in Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica) be more frank about, especially regarding sex. The competition between aspiring mind and youthful body is, familiarly, all too often a one-sided one, but what in the Arcadia of Longus would have been a simple matter is, in Love and Mr Lewisham, the source of a tragic diversion of talent and opportunity. This, with its setting of associated themes, makes one look at Love and Mr Lewisham with a more interested and more instructed eye.

The novel tells of the effect of love on an aspiring youth, the eponymous Mr Lewisham, who at the novel’s opening is a teenage teaching assistant in a provincial town, without connections or money. He there meets the engaging but otherwise very ordinary Ethel Henderson, a young woman trapped in a net of unappetising dependencies. Some of the themes of the day – education as the doorway to opportunity for the lower classes, socialism, science, spiritualist charlatanism, and a still stifling sexual and social morality – drive the tale, which follows a course the predictability of which is a main part of its point.

Lewisham and Ethel are attracted; one day they go for a long walk which involves Lewisham neglecting his teaching duties and Ethel neglecting the possible harm to her reputation. As a result, he is dismissed from his post and she is sent back to her useless and venal mother in London to seek work as a typist. They lose contact.

Lewisham gets a place at the Normal School of Science in London, and at first shows great promise. He there establishes a friendship with the dowdy and earnest Miss Heydinger, who believes in his potential to become a Great Man and a husband for her. But then, at a spiritualist séance where Lewisham is a sceptical observer, he meets Ethel again; she is secretary to a wealthy dabbler in the occult, and she abets the fraudulent spiritualist displays of her uncle, Chaffery. Lewisham is appalled by Ethel’s involvement in deceit, but his attraction to her is rekindled in urgency, with the inevitable result that she comes to displace his commitment to education, his friendship for Miss Heydinger, and indeed his common sense.

The most poignant moment in a novel that begins with wit and light, and grows increasingly dark as the coils of consequence wind around Lewisham and Ethel, occurs at the end of the simple register office wedding that unites their destinies.

 

The little old gentleman made no long speeches. ‘You are young people,’ he said slowly, ‘and life together is a difficult thing Be kind to each other.’ He smiled a little sadly, and held out a friendly hand.

 

That is the fulcrum of the story, summarised by Wells himself as being about the diversion of a young man’s hopes by youthful infatuation and the resulting heavy commitment of an unsuitable, too young and ill-provided marriage. In our own day, infatuations and the strong sexual imperatives of youth only rarely lead to such mistakes, and in any case the mistakes are more easily remediable now. But for Lewisham and Ethel the finalities of a restrictive code meant that all sorts of possibilities were blighted by the all-too-human needs, the denial of which was the price that a chance to make progress exacted.

Wells did everything Lewisham did in the way of teenage teaching, and of attending the Normal School for Science (founded shortly before Wells’ arrival in London by T. H. Huxley, who was one of Wells’ teachers), but he did not make his first marriage until later than Lewisham did, and marriage was not the reason for his taking longer to finish his science education. Wells was selfconfessedly a man of powerful sexual urges, and his first marriage, to his cousin Isabel, was a failure because she was unresponsive. But the lineaments of Lewisham’s story are strongly those of Wells’ own; whence its almost documentary character arises.

The realism point is a significant one for appreciating Love and Mr Lewisham, because it bears on the fact that he was intent on iterating in his own way, and from his own experience, a truth however ordinary and familiar, about aspiration and its competition with other imperatives. In an earlier period of literary history he would have had to do this by indirection, perhaps in allegory or something close to it. But by the closing decades of the nineteenth century it had become possible for fiction to address the lives and experiences of a broader and more realistically identified social range than hitherto, and to do it without undue drama – for the drama is in the ordinariness, the familiarity of the pattern.

Dickens paraded a colourful troupe of the urban poor: criminals, orphans, slum dwellers, the lower middle classes and the aspiring middle classes, but his characters are closer to types or caricatures than those in the works of Wells’ contemporaries Thomas Hardy, George Gissing and Arnold Bennett. George Eliot is cited as an innovator in English realism, though the major influences for latecentury novelists might more plausibly be Balzac and Zola across the Channel. Yet however one traces the genealogy of literary realism, it is clear that by the end of the century it was not merely permissible but interesting for novels to be about individuals like Lewisham and Ethel, and about themes – socialism, spiritualism, science – that were a current matter of discussion.

No doubt the widened literacy of the age had created a readership as interested in recognisable individuals with some of the same experiences and problems as themselves as other or earlier readers were interested in Clarissa and Lovelace, Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy. Wells had a keen sense of the actual, a trait that explains the success not only of his straight fiction but also of both his ‘fantasy romances’ and polemical writings. You might say that he was to his contemporary readers what television is to its majority audience today, and in that way anticipated the kitchen-sink realists writing novels and plays in the 1950s, perhaps even helping to prepare the way for them.

It would, though, be a mistake to relegate Wells to a place in the history of the novel as though that were the chief thing to be said. His writerly skills are sometimes under-appreciated because of the popularity and breadth of his output; for he was able to convey place, mood and situation with precision even when – as sometimes happened – he descended into archness and facetiousness. In the earlier chapters of Love and Mr Lewisham an affectionate but accurate gaze is bent on the young Lewisham’s grand designs for progress towards success in the form of his ‘schema’ and highly intellectual reading list. This is not only straight out of Wells’ own past, but the pasts of many hopeful young folk. Most who read this novel will therefore experience a pang of recognition and a stab of regret, knowing that even though we do not now have anything like the same barriers that faced Lewisham, schemas and grand designs have a general tendency to collapse at their first encounter with the real world and its testing of our commitments. Wells explores this with the deftness and facility that reveal his gift as a writer, and the fact that by the time he came to write Love and Mr Lewisham he was already an accomplished practitioner.

Writerly skill is only part of the story. The theme of the novel is a significant one for an age in which opportunities for intellectual ambition were greater than ever before, because of wider schooling and increased literacy. However, the enemies of progress, as Cyril Connolly was to call them half a century later, had not been defeated – largely because some of them, as Wells sought to show, are undefeatable. That is the observation, the commentary, that Wells felt it was worth offering; and it was not then the cliché that it might seem to some now.

At the end of the novel, Wells has Lewisham ponder the implications of the fact that Ethel is pregnant, and then base an insight upon them. At this point, remember, Lewisham has a wife, a forthcoming child, a mother-in-law, a dismal tenement home in a grim suburb of London, no qualifications, missed opportunities to regret, and limited prospects – and yet he proceeds to welcome the thought that the child is the future and the future must be served. The idea that the present must subordinate itself to the future is not, in all frankness, any more appealing in Wells’ pages than it was in the Soviet injunction to suffer today in order to build tomorrow’s glorious society.

This is the chief respect in which form (the need for an up-tick at the close) and sentiment overcome Wells sufficiently for a false note to sound; but there is a way of looking at it that excuses him. It is that anyone placed as Lewisham then was might well reach for the nearest justification for enduring or accepting, of making the best of the situation by having (what is natural for a would-have-been intellectual) a fine-sounding principle: ‘The Future!’

Yet, on the other hand, the Wells who is true to himself might say that the real message of the novel lies in Miss Heydinger’s wordless departure from her last discussion with Lewisham; at that sad moment she is the embodiment of the failure of hope, which is Lewisham’s own experience too. This is a bleak result, to be sure, and itself not invariably true to life; but the logic of Wells’ tale points in that direction, though while reading the early pages of the novel with their charm, wit and freshness, you wish you could expect otherwise.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

Introduces Mr Lewisham

 

 

 

 

 

The opening chapter does not concern itself with Love – indeed that antagonist does not certainly appear until the third – and Mr Lewisham is seen at his studies. It was ten years ago, and in those days he was assistant master in the Whortley Proprietary School, Whortley, Sussex, and his wages were forty pounds a year, out of which he had to afford fifteen shillings a week during term time to lodge with Mrs Munday, at the little shop in the West Street. He was called ‘Mr’ to distinguish him from the bigger boys, whose duty it was to learn, and it was a matter of stringent regulation that he should be addressed as ‘Sir.’

He wore ready-made clothes, his black jacket of rigid line was dusted about the front and sleeves with scholastic chalk, and his face was downy and his moustache incipient. He was a passablelooking youngster of eighteen, fair-haired, indifferently barbered and with a quite unnecessary pair of glasses on his fairly prominent nose – he wore these to make himself look older, that discipline might be maintained. At the particular moment when this story begins he was in his bedroom. An attic it was, with lead-framed dormer windows, a slanting ceiling and a bulging wall, covered, as a number of torn places witnessed, with innumerable strata of florid old-fashioned paper.

To judge by the room Mr Lewisham thought little of Love but much on Greatness. Over the head of the bed, for example, where good folks hang texts, these truths asserted themselves, written in a clear, bold, youthfully florid hand: ‘Knowledge is Power,’ and ‘What man has done man can do,’ – man in the second instance referring to Mr Lewisham. Never for a moment were these things to be forgotten. Mr Lewisham could see them afresh every morning as his head came through his shirt. And over the yellow-painted box upon which – for lack of shelves – Mr Lewisham’s library was arranged, was a ‘Schema.’ (Why he should not have headed it ‘Scheme,’ the editor of the Church Times, who calls his miscellaneous notes ‘Varia,’ is better able to say than I.) In this scheme, 1892 was indicated as the year in which Mr Lewisham proposed to take his B. A. degree at the London University with ‘hons. in all subjects,’ and 1895 as the date of his ‘gold medal.’ Subsequently there were to be ‘pamphlets in the Liberal interest,’ and such like things duly dated. ‘Who would control others must first control himself,’ remarked the wall over the wash-hand stand, and behind the door against the Sunday trousers was a portrait of Carlyle.

These were no mere threats against the universe; operations had begun. Jostling Shakespeare, Emerson’s Essays, and the penny Life of Confucius, there were battered and defaced school books, a number of the excellent manuals of the Universal Correspondence Association, exercise books, ink (red and black) in penny bottles, and an india-rubber stamp with Mr Lewisham’s name. A trophy of bluish green South Kensington certificates for geometrical drawing, astronomy, physiology, physiography, and inorganic chemistry, adorned his further wall. And against the Carlyle portrait was a manuscript list of French irregular verbs.

Attached by a drawing-pin to the roof over the wash-hand stand, which – the room being an attic – sloped almost dangerously, dangled a Time-Table. Mr Lewisham was to rise at five, and that this was no vain boasting, a cheap American alarum clock by the books on the box witnessed. The lumps of mellow chocolate on the papered ledge by the bed-head, indorsed that evidence. ‘French until eight,’ said the time-table curtly. Breakfast was to be eaten in twenty minutes; then twenty-five minutes of ‘literature’ to be precise, learning extracts (preferably pompous) from the plays of William Shakespeare – and then to school and duty. The time-table further prescribed Latin Composition for the recess and the dinner hour, (‘literature,’ however, during the meal), and varied its injunctions for the rest of the twenty-four hours according to the day of the week. Not a moment for Satan and that ‘mischief still’ of his. Only threescore and ten has the confidence, as well as the time, to be idle.

But just think of the admirable quality of such a scheme! Up and busy at five, with all the world about one horizontal, warm, dreamybrained or stupidly hullish, if roused, roused only to grunt and sigh and roll over again into oblivion. By eight three hours’ clear start, three hours’ knowledge ahead of everyone. It takes, I have been told by an eminent scholar, about a thousand hours of sincere work to learn a language completely – after three or four languages much less – which gives you, even at the outset, one each a year before breakfast. The gift of tongues – picked up like mushrooms! Then that ‘literature’ – an astonishing conception! In the afternoon mathematics and the sciences. Could anything be simpler or more magnificent? In six years Mr Lewisham will have his five or six languages, a sound, all-round education, a habit of tremendous industry, and be still but four and twenty. He will already have honour in his university and ampler means. One realises that those pamphlets in the Liberal interest will be no obscure platitudes. Where Mr Lewisham will be at thirty stirs the imagination. There will be modifications of the Schema, of course, as experience widens. But the spirit of it – the spirit of it is a devouring flame!

He was sitting facing the diamond-framed window, writing, writing fast, on a second yellow box that was turned on end and empty, and the lid was open, and his knees were conveniently stuck into the cavity. The bed was strewn with books and copygraphed sheets of instructions from his remote correspondence tutors. Pursuant to the dangling time-table he was, you would have noticed, translating Latin into English.

Imperceptibly the speed of his writing diminished. ‘Urit me Glycerae nitor’ lay ahead and troubled him. ‘Urit me,’ he murmured, and his eyes travelled from his book out of window to the vicar’s roof opposite and its ivied chimneys. His brows were knit at first and then relaxed. ‘Urit me!’ He had put his pen into his mouth and glanced about for his dictionary. Urare?

Suddenly his expression changed. Movement dictionary-ward ceased. He was listening to a light tapping sound – it was a footfall – outside.

He stood up abruptly, and, stretching his neck, peered through his unnecessary glasses and the diamond panes down into the street. Looking acutely downward he could see a hat daintily trimmed with pinkish white blossom, the shoulder of a jacket, and just the tips of nose and chin. Certainly the stranger who sat under the gallery last Sunday next the Frobishers. Then, too, he had seen her only obliquely . . .

He watched her until she passed beyond the window frame. He strained to see impossibly round the corner . . .

Then he started, frowned, took his pen from his mouth. ‘This wandering attention!’ he said. ‘The slightest thing! Where was I? Tcha!’ He made a noise with his teeth to express his irritation, sat down, and replaced his knees in the upturned box. ‘Urit me,’ he said, biting the end of his pen and looking for his dictionary.

It was a Wednesday half-holiday late in March, a spring day glorious in amber light, dazzling white clouds and the intensest blue, casting a powder of wonderful green hither and thither among the trees and rousing all the birds to tumultuous rejoicings, a rousing day, a clamatory insistent day, a veritable herald of summer. The stir of that anticipation was in the air, the warm earth was parting above the swelling seeds, and all the pine-woods were full of the minute crepitation of opening bud scales. And not only was the stir of Mother Nature’s awakening in the earth and the air and the trees, but also in Mr Lewisham’s youthful blood, bidding him rouse himself to live – live in a sense quite other than that the Schema indicated.

He saw the dictionary peeping from under a paper, looked up ‘Urit me,’ appreciated the shining ‘nitor’ of Glycera’s shoulders, and so fell idle again to rouse himself abruptly.

‘I can’t fix my attention,’ said Mr Lewisham. He took off the needless glasses, wiped them, and blinked his eyes. This confounded Horace and his stimulating epithets! A walk?

‘I won’t be beat,’ he said – incorrectly – replaced his glasses, brought his elbows down on either side of his box with resonant violence, and clutched the hair over his ears with both hands . . .

In five minutes’ time he found himself watching the swallows curving through the blue over the vicarage garden.. . .