It was nonsense this being in love; there wasn’t such a thing as love outside of trashy novelettes.
(18-year-old Lewisham trying to talk himself out of his infatuation, Love and Mr Lewisham, page 31)

Wells took a deal of trouble writing this novel and was 33 when it was published. The protagonist, Mr G. E. Lewisham, is transparently based on Wells himself.

The story opens with Lewisham, aged 18 and teaching at a private school in provincial Surrey, exactly as Wells had done at that age. He aspires to win a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, South Kensington and subjects himself to a rigorous study regime, just as Wells did. Sure enough, Lewisham gets his scholarship to go and study in London, meets all kinds of interesting people, and falls in love, exactly as Wells did. In other words, this is an extremely autobiographical novel.

Considering this, it’s surprisingly amused by and even condescending to its hero, who is depicted as a clumsy, shy, naive poltroon.

Lewisham pretended not to hear and blushed vividly. He often wished he did not blush quite so much, seeing he was a man of one-and-twenty.

Also odd is the way that, at the start, we only get a couple of pages of his revision schedule, his daily rota of Latin, French, Physics and Mathematics, before he is distracted looking out the window at a pretty girl, Ethel Henderson and whoosh, we are whisked off into the mindset of an immature love affair.

In fact this happens throughout: we are told how hard working and studious Lewisham is but this learning is never described, whereas every flicker of feeling, every quiver about his various love affairs is described in great detail. This is a shame, frankly I’d be more interested in his serious studies than in his immature love affairs. This is especially true when he gets to London and the Normal School of Science. In real life Wells was taught by the great Thomas Henry Huxley and it was the era when Darwin’s theory of evolution had revolutionised all aspects of the life sciences as well as giving rise to all kinds of philosophical and cultural ideas such as eugenics, selective breeding, the forced evolution of man, the notion of a hierarchy of races with white men at the pinnacle and so on. So it is a great disappointment that none of these vivid and controversial ideas appear in the book. Instead the plot is derailed or sidelined into a load of nonsense about mediums and spiritualism.

And the style is odd. Wells apparently laboured long and hard over the book but the result feels arch and contrived, like eating a pillow. I’ve just read War of the Worlds and a good deal of the impact of his early scientific romances was down to his no-nonsense, factual descriptions which get right to the point. By contrast, here, in striving for some kind of social comedy, Wells’s style feels arch and contrived. Because so little really happens he has to pump it up, generally with unfortunate attempts at humour.

Mr. Bonover, having fully matured a Hint suitable for the occasion, dropped it in the afternoon, while Lewisham was superintending cricket practice.

It is characterised throughout by a contrived overworking of phraseology which I found wearing:

His once eminent discretion, though overthrown, still made muffled protests at the afternoon’s enterprise … Curiosity boarded Lewisham and carried him after the briefest struggle.

The tone is facetious throughout where facetious is defined as ‘an attempt to be funny or to appear clever’ or ‘implying dubious or ill-timed attempts at wit or humour’. I can imagine that what gave him trouble wasn’t the plot or characterisation so much as this aspect of it, getting the narrator’s attitude towards his characters right. Wells clearly wants to show us that now, at the ripe old age of 33, he has a wise and sage attitude towards his younger self and the foibles of youth, whether it be Lewisham’s immature puppy love or his immature puppy socialism. But by so continually looking down on his characters, albeit with warm indulgence, he ultimately removes any meaning from his hero’s tribulations. For me, the facetiousness is silly and undermines your engagement with the narrative.

I can see why more profound writers like Joyce or Woolf looked down on him.

Plot

So the story starts with Mr Lewisham is an 18-year-old teacher at Whortley Proprietary School, Whortley, Sussex. His wages are forty pounds a year, out of which he has to give fifteen shillings a week during term time to lodge with Mrs. Munday, at the little shop in the West Street.

He insists on being referred to as Mr Lewisham and addressed as Sir because he is, of course, only a few months older than the oldest boys in the school, indicative of his general immaturity.

A big deal is made in the opening pages of his commitment to Study, with h is small bedroom festooned with notes and papers on the wide variety of subjects he is cramming, with a view to taking further exams and qualifications, and the tight timetable he applies himself to from the minute he wakes up.

But barely has all this been explained than he is distracted by the sight of a pretty woman out the window. He has seen her at the regular church service he attends with the boys and now sees her again in the street.

Long story short he bumps into this pretty young woman on several occasions and falls in love with her. She is called Ethel Henderson. The crucial moment comes when he sees her scribbling on some piece of paper which then blows away in the wind and he rushes to retrieve for her. It turns out, incongruously, to be some lines that he had assigned a boy at the school and which she is writing out for him (?). This is because she is staying with the mother of this boy, a Mrs Frobisher, and offered to write out the lines as a favour. On a typically rash impulse, Lewisham offers to rescind the punishment of the lines and Ethel is everso grateful.

Lewisham takes to (pathetically) hanging round outside the Frobisher house just in order to catch a glimpse of Ethel through the windows.

The climax of this provincial puppy love is that they go for a walk around the village and surrounding countryside which goes on much longer than it ought to, well past teatime and into the evening. Nothing naughty happens except that it is a magical walk and both the young couple feel entranced, but her late arrival back at Mrs Frobisher’s house causes a scandal which gets all round the village and back to the school headmaster, Mr Bonnover, who Lewisham had already offended by refusing to supervise a sports lesson that afternoon in order to meet with Ethel. In this way ‘Love’ is directly antagonistic to Lewisham’s ambitions and to his Career.

All this is conveyed in novel’s facetious light-heartedness. The chapter describing it is titled ‘The Scandalous Ramble’ and is written thus:

His once eminent discretion, though overthrown, still made muffled protests at the afternoon’s enterprise.

Another reason they both felt so passionately about the walk is that Ethel is scheduled to go back to London within a few days i.e. it is their last chance to be together. Sometimes the facetious phraseology comes off:

And off these two young people went together in a highly electrical state

And continues to mock his characters:

The things they discovered and told each other that afternoon down by the river! – that spring was wonderful, young leaves beautiful, bud scales astonishing things, and clouds dazzling and stately! – with an air of supreme originality! And their naive astonishment to find one another in agreement upon these novel delights!

Quite clearly we are intended to find all this amusing and sweet. Their immaturity is emphasised again and again:

Going out of Immering they began to talk of the future. And for the very young lover there is no future but the immediate future.

Some of it made me smile:

‘And are you really going away from here to be an amanuensis?’ he said, and started her upon the theme of herself, a theme she treated with a specialist’s enthusiasm. (p.37)

Anyway this rash and foolish behaviour (going for a long walk after teatime) has repercussions. The scandal gets back to the school but what’s worse is the headmaster realising that Lewisham refused to help out at the school in order to go for this scandalous walk and so (I think) he’s fired. Either that or it is made clear that his position is untenable and he has to leave at the end of the next term.

Still in the first flush of Love, Lewisham is disappointed that he only receives one letter from Ethel after her return to London. The narrator archly tells us that she addresses him as simply ‘Dear’ because she had forgotten his first name. This and the reference to wittering on about herself being her favourite subject all point towards her shallowness.

Two and a half years later

Anyway, the start of chapter 8 tells us, rather abruptly, that it is two and a half years later, Lewisham applied for various jobs and didn’t get any but was delighted when his application to study at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington, was accepted.

With this leap forward in time, Lewisham is now 21 years old and trying to be A Man. He is in his third year of study at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. We are introduced to a variety of his fellow students including Smithers and Bletherley, and go up in the lift with him to the top of the building which is where Zoology is taught. It would have been interesting to learn more about his studies and the syllabus of the 1890s but instead much more emphasis is placed on the fact that he’s become a Socialist, driven by his discomfort at seeing the way, in London, that really wretched starving poverty exists only a few streets away from rows of shops packed with middle class shoppers.

Socialism

Thus he sports a Red Tie, gets into pointless arguments with his uncle (a deep-dyed conservative, pages 56 to 57) and reads the Commonweal (which, as Simon James’s excellent notes tell us, was a weekly educational paper published by William Morris’s Socialist League from 1885 to 1895). He even presents a paper about Socialism to the student Debating Society. All this is described with the book’s characteristic facetiousness:

He happened upon ‘Progress and Poverty’ just then, and some casual numbers of the ‘Commonweal’, and it was only too easy to accept the theory of cunning plotting capitalists and landowners, and faultless, righteous, martyr workers. He became a Socialist forthwith. The necessity to do something at once to manifest the new faith that was in him was naturally urgent. So he went out and (historical moment) bought that red tie! (p.53)

But it’s Love which, once again, rears its ugly head. Love and spiritualism, neither of which I’m very interested in but both of which were, presumably, subjects of great interest in the late 1890s.

For months after The Scandalous Walk, Lewisham had hoped for more letters from Ethel but none arrive. Then he moved to London, got caught up in lots of new experiences and hard work and slowly forgot about her.

Alice Heydinger

But the narrative resumes on the day that he first takes an interest in a fellow student, Alice Heydinger, who’s older than him. The Victoria and Albert Museum is a recurring setting for his moody thoughts about love, as it is just next door to the college he’s attending. It’s here that he shares with Miss Heydinger his (totally preposterous) ambition to be some kind of Martin Luther figure for Socialism and she enthusiastically supports him.

‘I say,’ said Lewisham quite suddenly. ‘You do put—well—courage into a chap. I shouldn’t have done that Socialism paper if it hadn’t been for you.’ He turned round and stood leaning with his back to the [statue of ] Moses, and smiling at her. ‘You do help a fellow,’ he said.
That was one of the vivid moments of Miss Heydinger’s life. She changed colour a little. ‘Do I?’ she said, standing straight and awkward and looking into his face, ‘I’m … glad.’ (p.p.60)

It’s meant to be funny but it’s perilously close to being sad, these poor, naive saps with no idea about love or life, no idea about the hard financial realities of marriage and work. The signature note is, as always, an effortful facetiousness which we are meant to find charming.

So it was Lewisham enrolled his first ally in the cause of the red tie – of the red tie and of the Greatness that was presently to come. (p.62)

Spiritualism

And then, by an effortful contrivance, the gross subject of spiritualism suddenly invades the narrative, like the Titanic being rudely interrupted by the iceberg. By a contrived coincidence one of the older students at the school is a Mr Lagune and he is a firm believer in spiritualism and séances. Somehow the topic comes up in conversation in the college common room, with Mr Smithers condemning the whole thing as ‘rot and imposture’, the others being less hasty. As to this Mr Lagune, he was:

a grizzled little old man with a very small face and very big grey eyes, who had been standing listlessly at one of the laboratory windows until the discussion caught him. He wore a brown velvet jacket and was reputed to be enormously rich. His name was Lagune. He was not a regular attendant, but one of those casual outsiders who are admitted to laboratories that are not completely full. (p.63)

Anyway it eventuates in Mr Lagune inviting them all to come to a séance at his house. So Lewisham, Heydinger, Smithers and Bletherley dutifully turn up at the impressive mansion, complete with spacious hallway and stylish fittings – Lagune obviously is rich.

They are ushered into a room and introduced to the medium, a Mr Chaffery, but what stuns Lewisham is that seated next to him is none other than Ethel, his puppy love from those years ago in Whortley. The séance is very vividly described but it degenerates into chaos when sceptical Smithers grabs hold of one of the spooky pieces of ectoplasm, the lights go up and Chaffery is pretty much exposed as a fraud. More to the point, it seems to Lewisham in the confusion, as if his puppy lover Ethel is an assistant in the deceit.

After this debacle Lewisham walks Heydinger to Chelsea station. She, older and more cultured, says it all reminds him of Mr Sludge the Medium and then has to explain that this is the title of a poem by Robert Browning. But Lewisham is distant and distracted and Heydinger suddenly feels terribly alone and depressed (p.73). She knows he’s not present but can’t know it’s because he is completely distracted by this sudden revelation of Ethel as a fraudster’s assistant.

Cut to Ethel’s point of view. She comes from a poor family. When her father died her mother took in lodgers. One of these was Mr Chaffery the fake medium, and her mother ended up marrying him, making him her step-father. Through him, Ethel secured a job working as assistant to Mr Lagune in his capacity as author of numerous works of bogus philosophy:

the witless, meandering imitation of philosophy that occupied his life… Behind Ethel was the great man’s desk with its green-shaded electric light, and littered with proofs and copies of Hesperus, ‘A Paper for Doubters’, which, with her assistance, he edited, published, compiled, wrote, and (without her help) paid for and read. (p.75)

She is miserably unhappy at the trap life has landed her in and doubly unhappy that she has been revealed as a fraudster’s assistant to the only man she’s ever cared for, but also incurred the anger of Lagune who, believe it or not, didn’t realise that Chaffery was a fake.

All this is explained to Lewisham when, to her surprise, he appears outside Lagune’s office in Chelsea at closing time, 5pm, and offers to walk her across Chelsea Bridge, beside Battersea Park and so up into the network of terraces at the Clapham Junction end of Clapham Common. Despite her protestations he says he’ll escort her like this every evening.

Lagune returns to the college common room and toughs it out. He admits there was a fake element but then weaves a clever argument pointing out that many of the students’ science lecturers in fact fake their experiments and results in order to prove to the students something they know is true.

True to his word, Lewisham does indeed meet Ethel every day after work and walk her via various routes to ‘the corner of a side road in Clapham, a road of little yellow houses with sunk basements and tawdry decorations of stone’ (p.85).

Wells leaves no mistaking that Ethel comes from a dingy lower-class background, the sordidness of her garrulous mother marrying an indigent fraud, their life in a dingy little house, all very depressing. Only Ethel’s beauty and vivaciousness keeps him coming back to meet her every day. For an impressive 67 evenings in a row he walks her home.

As Christmas approaches Lewisham dips into his small savings (he inherited £100 from his mum) and buys her a ring. She daren’t wear it for the scandal it will cause at home so wears it on a chain close to her heart. On Christmas Eve ‘these absurd young people’ as he calls them, walk 16 miles through shopping-mad London. He takes her for a meal, their first together, it is quietly emphasised that he knows nothing about cuts of meat or wine, how could he?

Cut to Miss Heydinger’s point of view. Unfortunately on one of their walks to Clapham, Ethel and Lewisham were spotted by Heydinger out with a friend, who maliciously pointed them out. From that moment Heydinger is consumed with jealousy but also frustration. She wants to give her life meaning by dedicating it to a Great Man and thought all Lewisham’s talk about Socialism meant he was the one. Yet now he’s squandering all his potential on a silly shop girl. She feels her life is empty and meaningless and bursts into tears. She becomes so depressed she misses classes at the college for three weeks and fails her exams.

Cut back to Lewisham because, for the first time in his life, he doesn’t come top in the exams, he merely heads the second class. So we find him in the Raphael Gallery at the V&A, reflecting. The time he has spent walking Ethel home has consumed half his evenings, the evenings he used to spend pitilessly studying. He reflects coolly on their circumstances: he is poor, she is even poorer, surely they have no future. Meanwhile, the walks mean that ‘his scientific career, but the Debating Society, the political movement, all his work for Humanity’ are all suffering (note the humorous exaggeration). He’ll just have to tell her no more walking home.

Obviously Ethel is upset and simply doesn’t understand why, if he spends all day learning, he has to study in the evenings, something I remember having to painstakingly explain to my parents, neither of whom went to college. Lewisham writes her letters but they are in the ‘South Kensington’ style which seems to imply that the science students prided themselves in avoiding all that romantic blether. Their brevity upsets Ethel.

Meanwhile Alice notices Lewisham’s sudden renewed commitment to study, arriving early, leaving late and no more walking shop girls home.

Except that at the next meeting of the ‘Friends of Progress’, the group of like-minded young students who supported Lewisham’s paper about socialism, Lewisham is galvanised by his old friend Dunkerley’s vision of a couple being a man and a woman who wage the great struggle of life together, as partners and equals. In his enthusiasm he insults the man who hosts these get-togethers, Parkson, by exploding in irritation at his maundering on about Pure Love and showing him a photo of a very plain young woman who he insists is the embodiment of Pure Love.

Rudely leaving Parkson standing on a street corner, Lewisham hares off towards Clapham but as he nears Ethel’s he sees two figures in the fog, Ethel and Mr Chaffery, pass by. My God! She’s gone back to helping the old fraud! And, indeed, next day in the common room Mr Lagune confirms that they are now experimenting on Ethel to see if she has clairvoyant powers i.e. can see into the future. Lewisham is incensed.

Next evening he is there to meet Ethel again and they walk to Clapham. Here, up on the common, they have a consequential conversation. When Lewisham tells her she must not be a party to these frauds she explains that if she leaves Lagune’s employ, Chaffrey insists she will have to go to the country to be a companion to his sister, a fate worse than death, and bursts into tears.

Fired up by the memory of Dunkerley’s rhetoric about true lovers against the world, Lewisham says well there is only one solution: they must get married!

Suddenly the world opened out in reality to her as sometimes it had opened out to her in wistful dreams. And she quailed before it. She dropped her eyes from his. She became a fellow-conspirator. ‘But, how — ?’ ‘I will think how. Trust me!’ (p.112)

Famous last words. In the event Lewisham is overcome with foolish enthusiasm and spends the next week finding rented rooms to move into and organising the cheapest wedding possible at a registry office. The service is as simple as can be with a cleaner called in to be a witness, then they take a broken-down old cab to the new rooms. The landlady, Mrs Gadow (German) bows them in, the servant brings some chops and then they are left alone to commence married life together!

They feel brave and magnificent! Two against the world! There is absolutely no indication that they have sex. For this couple, just holding hands a daring adventure, and Lewisham wastes his days in the college library dreaming up baby names for her. On the second evening they go for a walk to the Serpentine:

‘We are Fighting the World,’ he said, finding great satisfaction in the thought. ‘All the world is against us – and we are fighting it all.’
‘We will not be beaten,’ said Ethel.
‘How could we be beaten – together?’ said Lewisham. ‘For you I would fight a dozen worlds.’ (p.124)

It is only on page 128 that we finally find out what Lewisham’s Christian names are, namely George Edgar, as the marriage licence is read out by Ethel’s stepfather i.e. Mr Chamfrey. The nervous newly-weds have to face the her mother and stepfather sooner or later. In the event it is an shabby little occasion, with Mrs C serving up some bread, rough cheese and small beer while Mr Chamfrey turns out, not to give Lewisham the telling-off he deserves, but to be a plausible old rogue. He disconcerts Lewisham by freely admitting that he is a fraud and going on to insist that he is a master or fraudulence, has invented whole new tricks for taking in gullible spiritualists. Worse, he gives all this a pseud-philosophical justification by asserting that LIES are the very basis of civilised society, that:

that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage Individual man into the social masonry. (p.134)

Chamfrey instantly becomes the most interesting and amusing thing in the book, vastly more entertaining than weedy Lewisham, sad spinsterish Lucy or shallow Ethel. He proceeds to give a page or more of fiery cynicism, going on to state that everyone’s lives are compromised by the slaves who produce our foods and manufactured goods and keep our lives ticking along so we can get up on our hinds legs and pontificate about virtue and honour. Lewisham is bowled over and half seduced.

Their honeymoon period comes to an end after precisely one week when they are presented with their bill by Mrs Gadow and are shocked at the way all the little extras (such as coal for the fire) build up. Lewisham does some swift calculations and realises that he will burn through his inheritance in half a year. So that day, instead of cramming hard for the next exams, he spends looking at situations vacant in educational magazines and also finding out more about the market for typists (for Ethel). The reality is people need jobs.

They spend the evening applying for lots of jobs although Lewisham for the first time notices that her spelling is erratic and her punctuation primitive. He thinks he’ll be able to correct and educate her. Thus the first cracks appear. All the while he fails to revise for the botany exam he is to sit the next day.

There is a comic chapter where he visits a ‘scholastic agent’ and discovers all the swank of the students at South Kensington means absolutely nothing in the real world. Has he got a degree? No. Is he Church of England? No. Does he excel at games he can teach? No. Can he teach geography, divinity, art, shorthand, cooking, French? No. Well, the best he can hope for is £60 a year as a resident teacher. A Cambridge graduate would be happy to get £80 resident.

The agency man is sympathetic and slowly Lewisham finds himself conceding that he might, at a pinch, ‘teach’ some of these subjects. But that turns out to be the nicest agency. The next ones he tries are more upper crust and snobbishly look down on him. As to the public schools, not interested in science: ‘classics and good games’, that’s all they’re interested in, ‘good games, good form’ dontcha know? (p.151).

Wells makes some serious points such as the lack of teacher training in Britain (unlike the USA and Germany, already overtaking Britain in this as so many other things) which he campaigned for. In its way, this is the most interesting chapter in the book, shining a light on the amateurish shambles of British education.

In terms of plot, tired after a day trudging from one agency to another, Lewisham gets home and unleashes a diatribe against bishops and Christian authorities who demand that a man formally subscribe to beliefs he doesn’t actually hold, criticises the many Christian officials who don’t really believe any more, but hold the keys to all the top jobs in the land – only to discover that Ethel is a Christian (well, her superficial definition of one) and is shocked that he isn’t. Suddenly, at the end of a day when his realistic chances of getting a job have almost vanished, he discovers that there is this vast intellectual gulf between him and his new wife. Oh dear.

Ethel is cheered because she has received a smart letter from an author, a ‘Mr Lucas Holderness, the author of ‘The Furnace of Sin’ and other stories’, saying he will send her the manuscript of his novel to type up but first he needs references or, failing them, a deposit of one guinea. Thinking it cheap, Lewisham sends a guinea by reply and neither of them ever hear from Lucas Holderness again.

They argue. He comes to hate the stupid novelettes she reads. She is bored in the little room with no-one to talk to when he goes to college, so invites her mother round, who ends up spending all day every day with her. Job prospects recede. There is one last exam for him to get his degree and he knows he’s done badly. He’s told none of his fellow students he’s married, at first for the secret glamour of it, then from increasing shame.

At the end of the exam he is accosted by Miss Heydinger who tries to be helpful and supportive (she knows nothing about the secret marriage) but Lewisham is angry and rude. She invites him to walk with her through Kensington Gardens but he rudely says he has to get to Chelsea. They shake hands and say goodbye and he walks away leaving her puzzled at his coldness.

Six months later

Lewisham has got some work at the lowest end of temporary teaching. The narrative resumes on the day when they have a massive row. They argue all the time about lack of money, lack of space, her cluttering the place with trashy novels, but the bite of this argument comes from her rage that he now regularly receives letters from Miss Heydinger. This opens the door to deeper levels of resentment when he says he never shows her the letters because she wouldn’t understand the issues they discuss, such as socialism, the redemption of mankind, all the high hopes of his student days.

The series of emotions Lewisham passes through from irritation via losing his temper, to realising he’s in the wrong and getting even more angry, storming out, heading to the Kensington Library in a bitter fury, studying, having elevenses, calming down, becoming more regretful then remorseful. He acutely describes:

He knew now that he loved her, and his recent rage, his hostility, his condemnation of her seemed to him the reign of some exterior influence in his mind. He thought incredulously of the long decline in tenderness that had followed the first days of their delight in each other, the diminution of endearment, the first yielding to irritability, the evenings he had spent doggedly working, resisting all his sense of her presence. ‘One cannot always be love-making,’ he had said, and so they were slipping apart. Then in countless little things he had not been patient, he had not been fair. He had wounded her by harshness, by unsympathetic criticism… (p.173)

Ring any bells? In a similarly clichéd and predictable way Lewisham casts around for some way to make amends as he walks past a flower shop. Flowers! A huge bunch of roses! He goes in, buys and arranges to have them sent to her at their rooms at 6pm. The reader has a very strong premonition of disaster.

Sure enough the roses are not delivered and Lewisham returns to find Ethel still coldly furious. Somehow, without the roses, all Lewisham’s good intentions disappear, he finds he can’t put into words his sorrow and remorse. So nothing is said and the damage carries on. They have the most stilted dinner ever. The front doorbell rings and Lewisham is sure it is the roses but it isn’t, it’s Mr Chaffery.

Oblivious to the tense atmosphere Chaffery makes himself at home, lights a cigar, and delivers another long-winded lecture of pseudo-philosophy on the secret of happiness which starts by dividing the world of men into three types, happy men, knaves and fools. Alas, this time round his lecture is boring and preposterous, unlike the riveting cynicism of his first lecture.

Anyway, during this time the roses did arrive, but Lewisham only suspects this because he is stuck listening to bloody Chaffery when the front door bell rings and Ethel goes to answer it. She reappears in the room with no visible emotion. Only after Chaffery has finally left, does Lewisham go into the bedroom and is astonished to discover the roses did arrive and Ethel stuffed them under the valance of the bed.

She his them! Why? Because she thought they came from someone else! Lewisham guesses that it is the immature ‘poet’ who’s been sending her his poems to type up. Good grief! His realisation that she’s been carrying on with someone else; her realisation that he knows. She can’t find anything to say. Terrible scene. He says unforgivable things, calls her shallow and stupid, calls their marriage ‘accursed’, says it signalled the end of all his hopes and dreams. they never ought to have married, it has ruined his life, and on and on.

He tells her he is leaving forever, their marriage is over, wrestles his suitcase from under the bed, takes it and his valise into the other room and slams the door. He spends hours packing as his anger slowly fades. Everything is so silent from the bedroom he becomes alarmed. Eventually tiptoes to the door, sees her body motionless on the bed, is struck by a terrible fear, goes over calls her name, she starts back to life, she bursts into explanations of why she was kind to the wretched poet for him, because she knew they needed the money, didn’t know who the flowers had come from, didn’t know what to do with them – while Lewisham, for the second time in one day, is overwhelmed with their first love and fondness and calls himself a heel and a brute for being so cruel to her.

And thus, we suspect, a pattern is setting in. A few days later Lewisham returns from working at a miserable crammer to find Mrs Chaffery there, and she and Ethel crying. Chaffery has done a bunk and stolen what he could carry. Seems like Lagune was about to expose him. Chaffery left a long, pompous, self-justifying letter but what it boils down to, is Lewisham is now going to have to support Ethel’s mother, too.

In fact, as they discuss it, it becomes plain they will quit the rented rooms of Frau Gadow and all move into the dingy house in Clapham. This is laid out to take two lodgers but Lewisham says they will in turn buy out the lease of the house and sell it, with a view to moving to a smaller place not requiring lodgers. And this will be his life. In less than a year all his grand dreams of eminent career and being the Martin Luther of socialism have utterly vanished and shrunk down to a crappy job, a stupid wife and a grisling baggage of a mother-in-law.

When at last Mrs. Chaffery, after a violent and tearful kissing and blessing of them both – they were ‘good dear children,’ she said – had departed, Mr. and Mrs. Lewisham returned into their sitting-room. Mrs. Lewisham’s little face was enthusiastic. ‘You’re a Trump,’ she said, extending the willing arms that were his reward. (p.194)

Does that mean sex? Is that Edwardian code for sex? Is his reward for shouldering all this responsibility, sex? The thing is, in the complete absence of any mention of the sexual side of this or any other marriage from this era, a huge and vital psychological element is missing. It is all disembodied emotions and feelings and an utter gap where the physical life should be, where modern accounts might talk about make-up sex and so on.

Anyway, looked at dispassionately, what a joke his life has turned out to be.

The thing took him suddenly as being laughable; and he laughed. His laugh marked an epoch. Never before had Lewisham laughed at any fix in which he had found himself! The enormous seriousness of adolescence was coming to an end; the days of his growing were numbered. It was a laugh of infinite admissions. (p.198)

It is even more laughable when he goes to visit Mr Lagune. Here he discovers the remarkable fact that, all the time Chaffery has been conducting experiments in hypnotism and clairvoyance on a young lady, he has in fact been hypnotising Lagune with the intention of robbing him. And when he discovered that Lagune has as much as £500 in his current account he hypnotised Lagune into signing a blank check then using post-hypnotic suggestion to make him forget all about it, and fled the country with the ‘young lady’. Never too late to start anew.

More to the point, from the perspective of the book as a Bildungsroman or story of a protagonist’s growth and maturing, with Chaffery’s flight:

he realised more vividly than he had ever done before the narrow range of his experience, the bounds of his imagination. These people also – with grey hair and truncated honour – had their emotions. (p.197)

So many people, and all with their own stories, feelings, convictions and grievances. The sheer weight of them is overwhelming. No wonder we spend most of our lives ignoring most other people. It’s just too much information to take in.

Losing Miss Heydinger

The penultimate chapter sees Lewisham making an appointment to see Miss Heydinger in Battersea Park and there, shamefacedly, telling her he is married, was married before the final exams when she was so solicitous for him. And…and his wife wants her to stop writing to him. She doesn’t understand that they’re letters about Socialism and Humanity (because she’s too stupid) all she knows is it hurts her and Lewisham has pledged to stop hurting her.

Obviously she’s very upset but it’s more complicated than that. It’s not that she loves him, as such, it’s that she has geared herself to support him, to be the woman behind the man who will do great things. And so it’s not just losing a relationship it’s losing the entire meaning she has given her life. She stares into the distance her face white with grief.

She tries to seduce him back to her vision, saying Ethel doesn’t need to know and for a few minutes he is swayed and begins to think, well what harm would it do? But a moment’s reflection tells him she would find out sooner or later and the hurt would be all the more unhealable. No, he is resolute, he needs to simplify his life. And as he stumblingly pours this out Miss Heydinger’s face gets whiter and whiter until she stands up, shakes his hand, says goodbye and stalks off.

Resignation

In the final chapter they have settled into a new house, one of a terrace sloping down towards the Junction. And he and Ethel have an inarticulate moment. She comes across him holding the Schema which he so carefully wrote out in those far-distant days at Whortley, now yellowed and curled. And she is sympathetic to his lost dreams and ambitions, but he mans up and reassures her that was all childish play. The adult world is work and strife. She goes downstairs to make dinner with her mum, leaving Lewisham to stare out the window at the first stars. Somewhere in the mix, rather obscurely, there’s been a garbled reference to the Baby, the Child, so I think we are to take it that Ethel is pregnant and Lewisham is enjoying the prospective glow of fatherhood.

By these last pages you feel as if you have been on an emotional rollercoaster and lived an intense life. it ends a much better book than the beginning and a lot of the middle. Some kind of crabbed wisdom.

Thoughts

The introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, by Professor Gillian Beer, makes a number of useful points, but I particularly liked two of them:

1. The ending – the protagonist’s acceptance of a life of poverty and insignificance – is the weakest part, possibly because it departs most from Wells’s own life. Wells married young to a woman who lacked his intellect and ambition and after just two years ran off with a student of his with whom he had a much better intellectual rapport. Thus Lewisham’s early ambitions and the agonies of his love for Ethel are all based on Wells’s experience, but the total capitulation at the end is the opposite of what happened and so comes over as thin, undramatised and unconvincing.

2. On the face of it a sort of Bildungsroman (‘a novel that deals with the formative years of the main character, and in particular, with the character’s psychological development and moral education’) Love and Mr Lewisham is surely just as much, or more, an affectionate, sympathetic description of ordinary humdrum lives, a portrait of the little people, the pokey constricted lives of the numberless millions who thronged London’s streets.

Simon’s lessons

Don’t let puppy love interfere with your studies. There will be plenty of time for ‘love’ later, but only one opportunity to gain the qualifications you’re going to need to secure a decent life.

Don’t get married until you’re settled in a career and confident of job and income.

Marry someone your intellectual and educational equal or you’ll end up having to either educate them up to yours – which is doomed to failure, sounds like condescension and causes resentment – or sink to their level – which crushes the soul and breeds regrets.

Humour

I’m being harsh on Wells’s facetious humour. If you relax, quite a lot of it is drolly funny.

All the Friends wore red ties except Bletherley, who wore an orange one to show that he was aware of Art… (p.102)

He and Ethel have a huge row at the end of which:

He hesitated with the door half closed, then opened it wide and slammed it vehemently. Thereby the world was warned of the justice of his rage, and so he passed with credit into the street. (p.170)

Old books, old prose

I prefer to read older books because the prose is more interesting than most contemporary writers’ styles. I enjoy the surprise and mystery of older writers’ unexpected phraseology, peculiar turns of phrase and fugitive meanings. When Lewisham and friends attend the séance:

Smithers coughed, one might imagine with a warning intention.

Isn’t that a great phrase, ‘with a warning intention’, a phrase which makes you stop and ponder its several possible interpretations. And then the whole thing is given added ambiguity with the casual insertion of ‘one might imagine’. Who is the one in question? Would one be imagining correctly? There are only nine words in this sentence and yet how pregnant with meaning and mystery. That kind of thing pretty much never happens in modern writing which a thousand creative writing courses have thrashed all colour, juice and interest out of. Here are some other random phrases which caught my eye and provided moments of colour and curiousness.

She had stopped crying, she was one huge suspense, not daring even to look at his face. (p.77)

A pause of further moral descent, and a whack against an obstacle. (p.149)

He stared hostility for a space. (p.167)

Mrs. Chaffery, with a keen eye to Lewisham’s behaviour, nodded tearfully over an experienced handkerchief. Lewisham grasped the essentials of the situation forthwith, and trembled on the brink of an expletive. (p.191)

Credit

Love and Mr Lewisham by H.G. Wells was published in 1900 by Harper Brothers. References are to the 2005 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

Related links

• Love and Mr Lewisham online

Related reviews

• H.G. Wells reviews
• Fiction of the 1890s
• Edwardian reviews