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Arthur Kipps, an orphan raised by his aunt and uncle in a seaside town, is apprenticed to a draper and leads a dull, cramped life, until he unexpectedly…
Arthur Kipps, an orphan raised by his aunt and uncle in a seaside town, is apprenticed to a draper and leads a dull, cramped life, until he unexpectedly inherits a fortune from the grandfather he never knew. Suddenly a gentleman, he tries desperately to learn the manners of polite society and becomes engaged to the refined Helen Walsingham, who sets about improving him, while he still loves his childhood sweetheart, Ann Pornick, now a housemaid.
Context and significance
H. G. Wells published the comic novel in 1905, drawing on his own years as a draper's apprentice, and it was later turned into the musical Half a Sixpence. Read The History of Mr Polly and Tono-Bungay.
About the author
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.
He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.