to the care of Mr and Mrs Joseph Wells on the 21st
September 1866; behind or above a small general shop in Bromley. Mrs
Wells was the daughter of an innkeeper at Midhurst and had been in
service as a lady's maid before her marriage. Joseph Wells had had a
more distinguished career. He had been a great Kent bowler in the
early sixties, and it must have been, I think, only the year before
the subject of our essay appeared at Bromley that his father took four
wickets with consecutive balls and created a new record in the annals
of cricket. The late Sir Francis Galton might have made something out
of this ancestry; I must confess that it is entirely beyond my powers,
although I make the reservation that we know little of the abilities
of H.G. Wells' mother. She has not figured as a recognisable portrait
in any of his novels.

The Bromley shop, like most of its kind, was a failure. Moderate
success might have meant a Grammar School for young Wells, and the
temptations of property, but Fate gave our young radical another twist
by thrusting him temporarily within sight of an alien and magnificent
prosperity, where as the son of the housekeeper at Up Park, near
Petersfield, he might recognise his immense separation from the
members of the ruling class, as described in _Tono-Bungay_.

After that came "the drapery," first at Windsor and then at Southsea;
but we have no autobiography of this period, only the details of the
trade and its circumstances. For neither Hoopdriver, nor Kipps, nor
Polly could have qualified for the post of assistant at Midhurst
Grammar School, a position that H.G. Wells obtained at sixteen after
he had broken his indentures with the Southsea draper.

At this point we come up with Mr Lewisham, and may follow him in his
experiences after he obtained what was, in fact, a scholarship at the
Normal School of Science, South Kensington; but we drop that hero
again before his premature marriage and failure, to follow the
uncharted course of Wells obtaining his B.Sc. with first-class
honours; passing to an assistant-mastership at the Henley House
School, St John's Wood, and so coming by way of tutor, lecturer and
demonstrator to the beginnings of journalism, to the breaking of a
blood-vessel and thence, without further diversion, to the trade of
letters, somewhere in the summer of 1893.

I lave taken as my text the normality of Mr Wells, on the
understanding that I shall define the essential term as I will; an