The History of Mr. Wells

Herbert George Wells, born in Bromley in 1866, did not have an ideal start in life. His father, Joseph, a one-time county cricketer, tried his hand at shopkeeping but eventually went bankrupt. Sarah, Wells’s mother, had been a lady’s maid and could do hairdressing and dressmaking, but had to devote herself instead to caring for her family.

Wells, her fourth child, was undersized and sickly. His serious health problems — near-fatal lung hemorrhages, an abscessed kidney — recurred for years, and his sense of physical inferiority, he later said, distressed him all his life.