‘Life was life then! How great the world must have seemed then! How marvellous! They were still parts of the world absolutely unexplored. Nowadays we have almost abolished wonder, we lead lives so trim and orderly that courage, endurance, faith, all the noble virtues seem fading from mankind.’
This is a novella by H. G. Wells consisting of five chapters, first published in the June to October 1899 issues of The Pall Mall Magazine. It was later included in an 1899 collection of Wells’s short stories, Tales of Space and Time.
The story appears to be set in the same London of the future as the long novel, The Sleeper Wakes, also published in 1899. The text can be said to have two components: 1. the plot, and 2. lengthy descriptions of what the society of the future, and all its attendant technology, will look like.
Part 1. The cure for love
Young Denton lives and works on one of the landing platforms of London. Arriving off a plane from Paris, a young women, Elizabeth Morris, stumbles and trips into his arms. From then on she takes trips out to the landing platform specially to visit him and they sit on one of the many benches, while he reads her poetry.
Elizabeth’s father gets wind of their romance and hires a hypnotist to talk Elizabeth out of it. This works and Elizabeth forgets about Denton. She is hypnotised into preferring Binton, the man her father thinks is a better choice for her, ‘a little man in foolish raiment knobbed and spiked like some odd reptile with pneumatic horns’.
When Elizabeth doesn’t show up for their next rendezvous Denton is upset. He vows to find her and sets off across the vast complicated city of 30 million souls. Eventually, he tracks Elizabeth down to a public festival and follows her, her chaperone (!) and father and the suitor her father approves (the hapless Binton) to a café where Denton confronts her. But although her unconscious stirs a bit, her conscious mind doesn’t recognise him. Denton gives up and goes off, distraught.
Denton resolves to forget. He seeks out the best hypnotist in town. A casual remark by the hypnotist reveals that this is the man who hypnotised his beloved into forgetting him. Angered, Denton attacks him, they wrestle to the ground, the hypnotist bangs his head and blacks out. When he comes to, Denton is standing over him with a poker. Unless he promises to hypnotise Elizabeth back into love with him, Denton will smash his head in.
The hypnotist of the future is appalled: ‘Ugh, how frightfully savage you are, Sir. This is all very unprofessional etc etc’. But he promises to do it, having no choice.
Part 2. The vacant country
Wells pauses the narrative to explain how society evolved between 1900 and 2100 when the story is set. Much of this explication overlaps with the long novel, The Sleeper Wakes, which he was working on at the same time. Both rest on the same fundamental assumption, that the fast development of technology, especially modes of transport, will depopulate the countryside and lead to the creation of monster mega-cities like London, until eventually there are only four huge towns left in all England.
The overlap extends to characters. In The Sleeper Wakes a man named Warming is credited with suggesting that the invention of Eadhamite be used to surface enormous roads. In this story the same Warming is mentioned again and credited with the detail of creating a central reservation in roadways set aside for vehicles travelling at over 100 miles per hour, on wheels of twenty or thirty foot in diameter.
So the world of this story is obviously the same as the world of The Sleeper – with the rather enormous difference that the figure of the Sleeper doesn’t figure in it at all.
Instead we are back with Denton, Elizabeth and their serio-comic love affair, told in a rather facetious style. Aware that his little story is an apology for a romance, Wells drops into a heavy-handed cod medieval style, using archaisms in long sentences which sound like William Morris. For example, when the couple decide to go and live outside the city, Drenton quits his job at the landing pad, and:
One morning near Midsummer-day, there was a new minor official upon the flying stage, and Denton’s place was to know him no more.
‘To know him no more’. In fact Well’s style is an odd combination of the visionary and scientific, when it comes to technology, buildings and machines – with the rather childish psychology of late-Victorian efforts to revive the medieval.
Imagine that going forth! In their days the sprawling suburbs of Victorian times with their vile roads, petty houses, foolish little gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height, abrupt and sheer.
All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and turnip fields of the Food Company, vegetables that were the basis of a thousand varied foods, and weeds and hedgerow tangles had been utterly extirpated. The incessant expense of weeding that went on year after year in the petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the ancient days, the Food Company had economised for ever more by a campaign of extermination. Here and there, however, neat rows of bramble standards and apple trees with whitewashed stems, intersected the fields, and at places groups of gigantic teazles reared their favoured spikes. Here and there huge agricultural machines hunched under waterproof covers. The mingled waters of the Wey and Mole and Wandle ran in rectangular channels; and wherever a gentle elevation of the ground permitted a fountain of deodorised sewage distributed its benefits athwart the land and made a rainbow of the sunlight.
Our happy couple walk out of the city, to the accompaniment of rude shouts from passing cars, and head off away from the road into the green manicured fields. They come across a shepherd who wonders at their decision to leave the city and advises them to walk towards the pile of ruins once known as ‘Epsom’, and on to another ruined settlement known as ‘Leatherhead’. Here, hot and footsore, they rummage about old ruined houses, gathering rotted furniture and some of the shepherd’s footstuffs.
At night they watch the stars and Denton recites poetry. For the first few days they are happy. They have brought food and so are not hungry, but become bored. Denton tries to dig the soil with a spade but doesn’t have the muscles and gives up after half an hour. That night it rains and then hails. They get soaking wet. Then they hear the howling of dogs and are attacked by a pack of six or seven shepherd dogs. Denton fights them off with the sword (!) he’s brought from the city but is going down when Elizabeth leaps in with the spade. The whipped dogs make off.
Our hero and heroine decide that maybe their destiny lies, after all, in the city. All this is, on one level, a satire against the ‘back to nature’ movements of Wells’s own time.
Part 3. The ways of the city
More social prophecy elaborating on the inevitable advent of the Great Cities. Technologically it was inevitable, but nobody foresaw the concentration of greed and vices, luxury and tyranny it would bring with it.
(The trouble with Well’s prophecies is that they are more based on rhetoric rather than on facts. The concentration of the population into supercities, the creation of superhighways, the invention of super-vehicles – all this sounds very futuristic. And yet Wells lived long enough to see it all completely disproven. In fact, the exact opposite took place – which was the creation of suburbia, sprawling along ‘ribbon developments’ spreading out from conurbations. Sure, cities got bigger, but by spreading out not up.)
Anyway, now back in the city, Denton and Elizabeth have a baby, a step which often places fragile family finances under strain. He can’t get a job. They have to sell all their carefully acquired Victorian antiques, and move into a smaller place. For six weeks Denton gets a job as a hat salesman in a women’s hat boutique. Cue satire about women then and now.
But he’s sacked and they have to consign the baby to a state-run crèche (as everyone else does). Finally, having completely run out of money and been evicted from their hotel, they are forced to fall into the clutches of ‘the Labour Company’.
As explained in The Sleeper Awakes, this Labour Company grew out of the olden-time Salvation Army. It offers work and food and lodging to the absolutely destitute. In return you give it your thumb prints, wear its uniform of shapeless blue (denim?) and do what work it tells you. You sell your soul. By now the Labour Company has a worldwide monopoly of managing poverty. Nobody starves to death in the streets or sleeps rough as they did in Wells’s day: but a third of the whole world’s population is on the books of the Company, making it the biggest single organiser of labour.
And so our unlucky lovers find themselves press-ganged into doing menial labour. Elizabeth is inducted into tapping out patterns in metal sheets which are used as templates for decorating tiles. She sits with other bitchy women in an all-women’s workshop. Denton tends a pump which is part of the vast system for using seawater to flush out the city’s enormous sewage system. They become hardened and degraded by their work. Their baby sickens and dies in the crèche. Their hair turns grey. Life sours.
One night Elizabeth asks Denton to take her back up to the seat on the landing platform where they first met. He apologises for ruining her life; she should have married the promising young chap her father had chosen for her. She demurs. They look up at the stars and feel part of something larger than themselves.
Part 4. Underneath
Denton is moved to a new job down among the really hard-core, lifelong serfs, a race which has its own dialect. These lowlifes correctly diagnose Denton as snooty and disdainful or, in the cant, ‘topside’. He rejects a couple of overtures of friendship and when he turns down an offer of bread during a break, the offerer tries to force it on him, and the resulting scuffle turns into a fight in which Denton is knocked to the ground. Other proles bait him but the swart man who hit him calls them off. The shift resumes and Denton worries about what’ll happen at the end – sure enough the albino and the ferret-faced man start baiting him again, but the prole who hit him tells them to lay off.
Denton goes through the circuitous route typical of these narratives of the future city up to a moving way and is surprised when the swart man follows, sheepishly apologises and asks to shake his hand. Blunt as he’s named, offers to teach Denton how to fight, but Denton manages to insult the man by again refusing. That night Denton and Elizabeth lie silently next to each other till Denton sits up and wonders out loud: civilisation has nothing to do with them anymore. He sees their lives in their full inconsequentiality. He wonders about committing suicide. But realises neither of them have it in them top end their lives. They sleep.
Next day Denton is knocked to the floor again, until Blunt intervenes. This time Denton sheepishly asks Blunt if he can take him up on his offer of lessons in fighting, fighting dirty and effective. Blunt trains him. Denton is tall and apt. A few days later Whitey picks on him and Denton surprises everyone by grabbing the kicking foot, heeling Whitey over into the ashes, following up with a knee on his chest and a hand round his throat. Immediately, all the others become his pal. He has won respect.
He returns to the Labour Company apartment he shares with Elizabeth, elated. Life is good. He is a man. She listens then bursts into sobs. It’s alright for men, they can fight and express their masculinity. Whereas she is dying by degrees. And she has been asked to leave him.
Part 5. Bindon intervenes
This final section is Wells at his best and worst. It is a prolonged satire on self-satisfied, self-dramatising Bindon, the ideal match Elizabeth’s father had found for her. We are told the origin of his wealth (three lucky speculations, after which he stopped gambling for good) followed by a lifetime devoted to what he thought of as particularly wicked and corrupt sins, but were in fact very ordinary and commonplace.
Wells enjoys satirising the religion of the year 2100, which has, apparently, splintered into any number of commercially-minded sects. Thus Bindon goes to meet a priest of the Huysmanite sect (a jokey reference to Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of the defining text of the fin-de-siecle Decadence, Against Nature), who recommends a ‘spiritual retreat’ in a beautifully-located green area high in the city with sunlight and open air and reassuringly posh company.
Bindon had been so put out by Denton winning Elizabeth off him that he determined to ruin their lives, and to a large extent succeeded. It turns out that Bindon is behind much of their misfortune, has gotten Denton sacked from various jobs and so on.
But then Bindon visits some doctors about a growing pain in his sides and is told (in frustratingly vague terms – so much in Wells is vague and imprecise) that all his sins, well, rotten lifestyle (I think we are meant to deduce that this just means eating and drinking to excess) have caught up with him. Turns out he has only days to live.
Bindon goes back to his luxury apartment, surveys his luxury possessions, wonders how the world will manage to carry on without his rare and precious personality in it, considers writing a sonnet for posterity, but instead goes to see Elizabeth’s father. If he must leave this earth, if he cannot have the obstinate Elizabeth back, well, at least he can impress her with his largesse.
So this broadly comic figure dies and leaves Elizabeth all his money, and the story ends with Denton and Elizabeth restored to middle class life, admiring the sun set over the Surrey Hills from their penthouse apartment high on the city’s walls, miles and miles from the underground hellholes they had been inhabiting.
The satire on Bindon is quite funny, because he is such a recognisable type of the self-dramatising drunk. His encounters with the doctors who show absolutely no sympathy are funny. As is his deluded self-pity.
But it is a terrible end to the story, a real cop-out. It is like the fairy tale ending of Oliver Twist when, after hundreds of pages of misery among the proles, Oliver turns out to be the heir to a fortune.
Denton is given some spuriously high-falutin’ thoughts about how many generations mankind has lived through and how many are still to come and will we ever, Elizabeth, O will Mankind ever Understand the World He Lives In?
Thoughts
Reading these lesser texts by Wells suggests two things:
1. Like Kipling, Wells was more than an author, he created an entire climate of thought – partly because he was so damn prolific, and partly because he banged on and on about the same things. As Kipling had the Empire, so Wells in numerous ways tackled the same central idea, that the fast-changing technology of the 1890s would change everything, transforming society, culture and people out of all recognition.
2. The price of his productiveness was the extreme unevenness of his texts. In this one I liked:
- The way it reinforces, amplifies and expands on ideas put forward in The Sleeper Wakes, but handled much more soberly and clearly than that novel, so the reader actually knows what’s going on. The overlap between the two texts makes the world they describe that much more real and believable.
- The difficulty Denton has fitting in with the proles in the Underworld. Having done lots of manual labour, factory and warehouse jobs myself, while being bookish, I know how hard it is to fit in with illiterate or uneducated workmen. This passage feels like it derives from Wells’s own experiences of coming down in the world and being forced – like Dickens – to go out and earn a living at a tender age. The feeling of embarrassed self-consciousness, bitterness and chagrin is conveyed very well.
But this latter is just one element in a text which feels, again, all over the place in terms of focus, character, plot and style. The medievalisms which accompany his depiction of the couple’s early lovey-dovey phase, the facetiousness with which he describes Bindon’s would-be ‘decadence’, both contrast wildly with the brutality of the fight scenes, and all of these run up against his sci-fi prophecy mode, in which he explains the working of the future city in an antiseptically logical style.
A Story of Days To Come is full of interesting ideas, sometimes exciting scenes, sometimes genuinely felt emotion and yet, in total, it feels like an incredible mish-mash, a gallivanting gallimaufrey of a story.
The technology of the future
Each home has a phonographic machine which reads out the news (there are no print newspapers any more), which also includes an electric clock, calendar and engagements reminder. Much like a modern ipad or smart phone.
Men don’t have to shave because every scrap of hair has been removed from their bodies.
All power is generated by windmills and waterfalls i.e. is renewable.
Households, family life, domestic servants have all disappeared. People live in small apartments and commute to communal halls to eat.
As for food – animal bodies, animal fat, animal eggs have all been replaced by nutritious pastes and liquids. Food circulates on plates on conveyor belts, as in a Japanese sushi restaurant.
Nobody attends school. Young people take their lessons by ‘telephone’ from the best teachers, lecturers, instructors in the world.
London has a population of 30 million. The countryside has been completely depopulated. There are only four mega-cities in Britain. Vast roads hundreds of feet wide on which vehicles with wheels thirty feet across snake across the empty landscape. The cities have built upwards, so that the rich inhabit buildings like palaces towards the top, while down below level after level, descending to ground level and below, live millions of workers.
After a woman has a baby it is sent to a crèche where it is reared by robots with pink fake boobs which supply milk.
Kinematographs project moving images on huge screens. Phonographs blare out advertising slogans.
Related links
Related reviews
- H.G. Wells reviews
- A Man of Parts by David Lodge (2011)
- Science fiction reviews
- Fiction of the 1890s
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