A Short History of the World (3 page)

Wells's prescription for salvation was again an Edwardian one: classless boffins in white coats would take over from the plutocrats, and educate the common people. This vision was very widely shared, particularly in the United States, where the educational theories of John Dewey made the running. It had clearly been foreseen in the 1840s, and the answers to it came not through argument but either through religious obscurantism or the trumpetings of Carlyle and the Dostoyevskian satires
of
Notes from the Underworld, The Devils
and
Karamazov
. Wells himself became depressed: in
Mind at the End of Its Tether
, the message is confused and very pessimistic. Science had after all come to power, at least in the sense that governments now listened to scientists much more than in the past. Mass education had arrived. There was proper democracy in the West. But it was also a world in which the comfortable certainties of the Edwardian Progressive had gone the way of the British Empire. What would the optimists of 1900 have made of the world in the later twentieth century? Wells is the English writer of this century whom I should most like to recall from the dead.

Norman Stone

The most vivid and memorable account of Wells's life and times is his own
Experiment in Autobiography
(2 vols., London: Gollancz and Cresset Press, 1934). It has been reprinted several times. A ‘postscript' containing the previously suppressed narrative of his sexual liaisons was published as
H. G. Wells in Love
, edited by his son G. P. Wells (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). His more recent biographers draw on this material, as well as on the large body of letters and personal papers archived at the University of Illinois and elsewhere. The fullest and most scholarly biographies are
The Time Traveller
by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie (2nd edn, London: Hogarth Press, 1987) and
H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal
by David C. Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Smith has also edited a generous selection of Wells's
Correspondence
(4 vols., London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998). Another highly readable, if controversial and idiosyncratic, biography is
H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life
(London: Hutchinson, 1984) by Wells's son Anthony West. Michael Foot's
H. G.: The History of Mr Wells
(London and New York: Doubleday, 1995) is enlivened by its author's personal knowledge of Wells and his circle.

Two illuminating general interpretations of Wells and his writings are Michael Draper's
H. G. Wells
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987) and Brian Murray's
H. G. Wells
(New York: Continuum, 1990). Both are introductory in scope, but Draper's approach is critical and philosophical, while Murray packs a remarkable amount of biographical and historical detail into a short space. John Hammond's
An H. G. Wells Companion
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) and
H. G. Wells
(Harlow and London: Longman, 2001) combine criticism with useful contextual material.
H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage
, edited by Patrick Parrinder (London: Routledge, 1972), is a collection of reviews and essays of Wells published during his lifetime. A number of specialized critical and scholarly studies of Wells concentrate on his scientific romances. These include Bernard Bergonzi's pioneering study of
The Early H. G. Wells
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); John Huntington,
The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Patrick Parrinder,
Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). Peter Kemp's
H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) offers a lively and, at times, lurid tracing of Wells's ‘biological themes and imaginative obsessions', while Roslynn D. Haynes's
H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980) surveys his use of scientific ideas. W. Warren Wagar,
H. G. Wells and the World State
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) and John S. Partington,
Building Cosmopolis
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) are studies of his political thought and his schemes for world government. John S. Partington has also edited
The Wellsian
(The Netherlands: Equilibris, 2003), a selection of essays from the H. G. Wells Society's annual critical journal of the same name. The American branch of the Wells Society maintains a highly informative website at
http://hgwellsusa.50megs.com

P. P.

Wells's chief purpose in recounting the history of the world was to combat the short-sighted nationalism which had fuelled the Great War of 1914–18. Having given enthusiastic public support to the war as a significant step towards a new global order, notably in his book
The War that Will End War
(London: Palmer, 1914), he had been bitterly disappointed by the outcome, a botched peace which seemed likely to deliver only a second world war, followed by a possible collapse of civilization. ‘Human history,' he concluded, ‘becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe' (
Outline of History
, a precursor of
A Short History of the World
,
Ch. 41
) – or putting it more positively in his manifesto ‘History is One' (NY: Ginn, 1919), ‘a saner teaching of history means a better understanding of international problems, a saner national policy, and a happier world.' Wells aimed to reduce the massive raw material of his subject to a sufficiently compact form that teachers, students and general readers would be enabled to see past and present events from the overview of humanity in general.

The
Outline of History
, composed with advice from eminent historians and scientists, appeared in twenty-four fortnightly parts from November 1919 to November 1920. Book versions began to appear during 1920 and Wells's history was soon translated into numerous languages, beginning with Japanese and Swedish. By the middle of the 1920s sales in English alone had passed the half million mark. They would eventually reach two million. As late as 1941 John Huston's film version of
The Maltese Falcon
could include a passing reference to ‘Mr Wells's
history' with confidence that many cinema-goers would recognize the allusion.

Following the success of the
Outline
, Wells felt the need for a complementary account which would be briefer and more easily assimilable. He was correct in stating that his
Short History of the World
was not a simple abridgement of the
Outline
which runs to 780 pages and has hundreds of photographs, maps and black and white drawings, plus 47 colour plates. The material was restructured, rewritten and augmented; nonetheless many passages are identical. The first edition of
A Short History
(London: Cassell, 1922) featured 190 photographs and drawings, 21 maps and diagrams by J. F. Horrabin, a chronology and an index.

Although small errors were gradually corrected as the text was reprinted, Wells did not actively revise the
Short History
even when it was included in Volume 27 of the Atlantic Edition of his works (NY: Scribner's, 1927; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1927), nor when it first appeared as volume 6 in the Thinker's Library (London: C. A. Watts, 1929). However, as the Second World War, which he had prophesied, drew near, he revised subsequent Thinker's Library editions to record its development. The process began in 1934 with an expansion of the last two chapters; in 1938 he added two new chapters, taking events up to the Nazi annexation of Austria; and in 1941 he inserted a further chapter covering the war, which he placed between the two chapters added previously. In 1945, in the final version produced in his lifetime, the seventy-nine-year-old Wells replaced the concluding chapter with two further ones, entitled ‘The Present Outlook for
Homo sapiens
' and ‘From 1940–1944: Mind at the End of its Tether'. It is perhaps a sign of Wells's decline in old age that, despite the promise of the final chapter title, he brought events no further than December 1941, later developments being covered solely in the revised chronological table. The new textual additions were mostly concerned with the early development of the planet and of the human race, but were not sufficiently thorough to note the discovery of the planet Pluto fifteen years previously. The final chapter of the 1945 text, with some minor revisions and new introductory
material expressing increased doubt about the future of mankind, was later reprinted as a separate volume,
Mind at the End of its Tether
(London: Heinemann, 1945).

The
Short History
formed the basis of two other titles published during Wells's lifetime. In
A Short History of Mankind
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1925), which was intended for school use, E. H. Carter reduced the text from sixty-seven to forty-three short chapters, simplifying its grammar and vocabulary. Carter added different illustrations, time charts, a subject index and a pronouncing index; he removed criticism of European imperialism, added praise of the British Empire and judiciously inserted the phrase ‘let us hope' in the final paragraph. (The title
A Short History of Mankind
, or something very similar, had originally been considered for Wells's book, but was judged to have been pre-empted when the American Hendrik Van Loon's world history
The Story of Mankind
was published in 1921.) In Germany, the last eleven chapters of Wells's
Short History
were reprinted for students of English, with an introduction and notes in German, as
A Short History of Modern Times
(Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1926).

After Wells's death, his elder son G. P. Wells brought the chronological table up to 1946 for the Thinker's Library edition of 1948. A more thorough revision was carried out by Raymond Postgate and G. P. Wells in 1965, revising Wells's text and reducing it from seventy-one to sixty-six chapters, then adding five new ones to bring events to the Cuba crisis of 1963 (London: Collins, 1965). Twenty-two years later, Philip Ziegler added an introduction and updated the book with a further chapter for
An Illustrated Short History of the World
(Exeter: Webb & Bower, in association with London: Michael Joseph, 1987).

The present Penguin Classics edition restores the original 1922 text, which has been completely reset, removing a number of misprints which accumulated in later editions such as ‘defeat' for ‘defect' (
Chapter 41
), ‘Boniface VII' for ‘Boniface VIII' (
Chapter 47
) and ‘Morally' for ‘Morelly' (
Chapter 59
). End-notes have been added, most of them to record where more recent research has altered understanding, others to clarify allusions
or to place Wells's ideas in the context of his work as a whole.

Various amendments have been made to the text, bringing it into line with Penguin housestyle for greater clarity and consistency. Numbers below 100 have been printed as words, higher numbers up to one million, and measurements, have been printed as numerals. All dates have been printed in the form ‘March 4th 1861'. Capitals have been used consistently for such proper nouns as ‘Earth' and ‘King'. Hyphens have been deleted from noun phrases like ‘made-road' and ‘sailing-ship', and in others like ‘today', ‘psycho-analysis' and ‘preoccupied' the two parts have been combined into one word. The accent has been removed from ‘rôle'. ‘Blonde' has been changed to ‘blond' as a descriptive word for a racial type and ‘brunette' to ‘brunet'. The use of commas, italics, colons and semi-colons has been checked and made consistent. Commas have also been removed from dates such as ‘October, 1864' and rationalized on the rare occasions when they might be in danger of impeding sense. Full stops have been removed from the abbreviations ‘St.', ‘Dr.', ‘
B.C.
' and ‘
A.D
.'. Single quotation marks have been substituted for doubles, with doubles employed inside singles. Chapter numbers have been changed from Roman to Arabic numerals.

Incidental spellings have generally been brought into line with house usage: for example, ‘centring' rather than ‘centering,' ‘Moslem' for ‘Moslim' and ‘judgement' for ‘judgment'. However, some idiosyncratic spellings which are particularly characteristic of Wells have been retained, e.g. ‘burthen'. His versions of place-names have also been retained on the grounds that they are intelligible to English-speakers, whereas more recent official names are sometimes unfamiliar or subject to continuing change. The one exception to this policy on place names is the potentially confusing spelling ‘Buda-Pesth', recorded in the list below of single emendations.

The sources of these emendations are indicated by date.

1924 = Labour Publishing Co., 1924, which conveniently brings together early corrections to the text

1929 = the first Thinker's Library edition, Watts, 1929

1941 = Watts, 1941, revised by Wells

1965 = Collins, 1965, revised by Raymond Postgate and G. P. Wells.

The remaining emendations are the editor's own.

It seems that the original manuscript and proofs of the
Short History
no longer exist. The Special Collections Library at the University of Illinois preserves instead what appears to be an ongoing manuscript of the
Short History
, made up of several hundred pages of holograph, typescript, and mixed holograph and corrected typescript, containing material from several editions of the book.

The present edition is the first critical edition of the
Short History
. Any errors and flaws are therefore solely the responsibility of the present editor.

I would like to thank the many people who have given me their help in preparing this edition, especially Sylvia Hardy, Patrick Parrinder, Ian and Janice Stanley, Lindeth Vasey, Sally Boyles and the staff of the London Borough of Bromley Local Studies Library.

Michael Sherborne