Herbert George Wells, known as ‘Bertie’ or ‘H. G.’ was born on 21 September 1866 in Atlas House, on the High Street of what was then the Kentish market town of Bromley. His father Joseph, a former gardener, kept a shop and played professional cricket; after his father broke his leg when Wells was ten, Wells’s mother Sarah returned to domestic service at the country house Uppark, near Midhurst, in Sussex.

Wells’s elder brothers had both been apprenticed to drapers, a trade that Sarah Wells considered to be highly respectable. Wells was apprenticed to drapers in Windsor and Southsea but was much keener to continue to be educated, and he persuaded his mother to let him become a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School. Wells’s exam results at Midhurst were so strong that he won a scholarship aimed at increasing the number of science teachers in Britain at the Normal School (now Imperial College London), under ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, the biologist T. H. Huxley. Wells drew extensively on his experiences as a student for his 1900 novel Love and Mr. Lewisham. Ill-fed, poor and increasingly discontented by both the quality of the teaching he received and the social organization of the world, Wells became more and more interested in politics and in imaginative literature, especially Plato, Blake and Carlyle. He also began writing, providing articles and ‘The Chronic Argonauts’, a time travel story, for the college magazine the Science Schools Journal.