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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This essay places H. G. Wells in the context of the anthropological and sociological investigations into the origins of man that received great impetus in the late nineteenth century from archaeological finds and ethnographic studies. His knowledge of the work of Edward Clodd on primitive, prehistoric man informs his notion of human intellectual development and evolution. Wells saw himself as a sociologist, but regarded this field as essentially a creative rather than scientific one. Modernity, for Wells, came to require an acceptance of the tensions between relatively recent civilized codes of behaviour and an inherited primitive instinct.
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This essay is an attempt to come to terms with Wells's anthropological and sociological thinking in the 1890s, and to see this as part of a cultural formation that says much about the transition from Victorian to modern(ist) society. Most readings of Wells in the 1890s tend to foreground his scientific and prophetic writings, and the scientific discourse in his work. Many of his novels and short stories deal with the potential disasters of an unregulated modern science (stolen bacteria, crashing aeroplanes), and a society in transition through the discovery or invention of new technologies. I am arguing, however, for the importance of his sense of culture, and that his connections with the emerging discipline of sociology place his work in a grey area between literature and science, just as that discipline found itself so placed. Indeed, Wells fought a long battle in the press against those who called themselves 'scientific sociologists': Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Kidd, and J. B. Crozier (Wells sought a chair of sociology for himself in the period around 1904). (1) He saw his brand of sociology as related to utopianism; the work of Comte, Spencer, Kidd, and Crozier, he said, were interesting intellectual experiments of extraordinary little permanent value, and the proper method of approach to sociological questions is the old, various and literary way, the Utopian way, of Plato, of More, of Bacon, and not the nineteenth century pneumatic style, nor by its constant invocation to biology and 'scientific' history and its incessant unjustifiable pretension to exactitude and progress. (2)
Wells's 'sociological' fictions are mostly rooted in modern-day Victorian England, and never permit the sociologist-author himself to step outside of his own frame of reference. I am always fond of pointing out to students that it is the Psychologist in Wells's Time Machine who presses the little lever on the model and sends it into the future; Wells's future is in fact an analysis of the identity of modern-day man, who, like Graham in When the Sleeper Wakes, is the real constructor or originator of this future.
Wells always rejected the Spencerian promotion of progress for the more Darwinan cocktail of chance, coincidence, and contingency. As Roslynn Haynes notes in a reading of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells bases his system of natural evolution on Darwin's trinity of chance, waste, and pain, the workings of nature being seen as without design, 'careless of the type', and inducing suffering in those creatures unfit or unable in the struggle for survival. (3) This recognition, indeed, suffuses Anticipations, Wells's sociological analysis of modern society, a book often recently condemned for what is seen as a Wellsian argument for a eugenic solution to the problems of the working-classes. However, the book needs to be seen as the culmination of his 1890s researches into primitivism, which led him to a recognition that culture needs to be planned in order to offset the painful workings of instinct and nature. (Wells was pleased to receive a letter from Sidney Low suggesting that Anticipations was better than Kidd's Social Evolution (1894), to which Wells responded mischievously, 'I could eat Kidd'. (4)) The utopian or imaginative sociology of Wells appears to argue for a more cautious relationship between the sociologist and his subject: that in some ways it is the onlooker, the sociologist, who has the most to learn and benefit from any analysis of the Other. Wells retains a literariness in his scientific thinking that complicated, or even confused, his evolutionary thinking. In the mid- to late 1890s, as part of a group of writers and thinkers that included Grant Allen, Edward Clodd, and George Gissing, and through correspondence with the emerging novelist Joseph Conrad, Wells found himself drawn into debates that embraced new thinking around the origins of man, prehistory, primitivism and savagery, ritual and cultural survivals, and the new evolution of man, which itself established a scientific opposition to the Church.
The relationship between Wells and Clodd repays some discussion for what it can tell us of an aspect of Wells's work that is much neglected: his understanding of and imaginative engagement with the primitive past. Anthropology in the 1890s was a booming subject, and closely linked to the exciting discoveries in archaeology and the popularity for new collections of ethnographical artefacts in museums. Following the lead of Edward Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), in order to understand the position and character of late Victorian culture, researchers travelled the globe to study primitive 'untouched' civilizations. They were closely followed by the novelists who wanted to capture something of the spirit of adventure in such explorations: Rider Haggard, for instance, went as far as Mexico to discuss Aztec culture with J. Gladwyn Jebb before writing Montezuma's Daughter (1893). In a similar way, Grant Allen translated James Frazer's ideas in The Golden Bough (1890) into novelistic form in works like The Great Taboo (1890); and painters like Gauguin began to consider the aesthetic interest of Pacific primitivism. All of this occurred as Wells was beginning to contemplate a future in writing, at the beginning of the 1890s. The interest of all of these writers in the concept of taboo is particularly important, reflected in Wells, for example, in the Eloi's fear of the wells with towers and their fear of the dark, a concept he describes in 'A Story of the Stone Age' as primitive and instinctual.
Alongside this anthropology and the studies of primitive mythologies came the work on primitive man and the archaeological excavations in Europe and England in search of Hominid fossils and remains. The most significant publication in this field in England was probably Sir John Lubbock's Prehistoric Times of 1865 (with revised editions in 1869, 1872, 1878, and 1890), but in the mid-1890s a series of books appeared making the subject accessible to the intelligent general reader. Wells recalled something of this period in 'The Grisly Folk and their War with Men' (Storyteller Magazine, April 1921): 'Can these bones live?'
Could anything be more dead, more mute and inexpressive to the inexpert eye than the ochreous fragments of bone and the fractured lumps of flint that constitute the first traces of something human in the world? We see them in the museum cases, sorted out in accordance with principles we do not understand, labeled with strange names. Chellean, Mousterian, Solutrian and the like [...] Most of us stare through the glass at them, wonder vaguely for a moment at that half-savage, half-animal past of our race, and pass on. 'Primitive man,' we say. 'Flint implements. The mammoth used to chase him.' [...] there are the soundest reasons for believing that these earlier so-called men were not of our blood, not our ancestors, but a strange and vanished animal, like us, akin to us, but different from us [...] Flint and bone implements are found in deposits of very considerable antiquity; some in our museums may be a million years old or more, but the traces of really human creatures, mentally and anatomically like ourselves, do not go back much earlier than twenty or thirty thousand years ago. True men appeared in Europe then, and we do not know from whence they came [...]. (5)
Wells here gives three examples of early Stone Age man from the Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic periods: Homo erectus, Neanderthal, and Homo sapiens, thus displaying his...
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