He may be most famous for the fantasy worlds he created in his novels, but H.G. Wells was also a socialist campaigner and thinker

“I’m a socialist. I don’t think this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of everyone else.”

There’s no doubt about what H. G. Wells (1866-1946) is best known for.

Author of The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells is maybe the most famous science-fiction writer of all time.

But Wells was also a committed socialist, who studied under William Morris and read the political economy of Karl Marx.

For Wells, science fiction wasn’t only about imagining fantastical new technologies, but critiquing the injustice of modern capitalism in the real world.

H.G. Wells in 1920, photographed by George Charles Beresford

Wells was born on this day in 1866 into a precariously middle-class family in Kent.

His mum had been a domestic servant, and his dad was a professional cricketer – at a time when that didn’t pay anything like what it does today.

When Wells’s dad was injured in 1877, the family income plummeted.

Wells, who already loved to read, was forced onto the Victorian labour market, a typically horrible place for workers.

The teenage Wells found work as an apprentice draper in Southsea, and he hated it. The apprentices were forced to work 13-hour days in demeaning conditions and for little pay.

This practical experience of labour had a lasting impact on Wells’ political thought, and it went a long way to making him a socialist.

The exact same thing happened to other journeymen-turned-writers in this period, like Robert (Tressell) Noonan, author of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.

Just four years younger than Wells, Robert Tressell was also deeply influenced by the writings of William Morris

See the Robert Tressell tea towel

Wells managed to escape the toils of exploitational labour through education. He went to London to study biology at the Normal School of Science, a forerunner of Imperial College London.

And during his time in London, as well as studying science, Wells became deeply engaged in socialist politics.

He made contacts in the reformist Fabian Society, including George Bernard Shaw, and he attended lectures at the home of William Morris.

Wells found work as a teacher during the 1880s, and this kept him busy until he was able to publish his first science-fiction novel, The Time Machine, in 1895.

From then on, for the remaining fifty years of his life, Wells was able to live off his writing, becoming one of Britain’s most influential writers and journalists.

But Wells's new fame and riches didn’t undermine his socialist politics. If anything, his political views became more progressive during the twentieth century.

Wells was full of praise for William Morris's fantasy novel 'The Well at the World's End'

See the William Morris tea towel

After breaking with the Left to support the First World War in 1914, Wells became a lifelong advocate of international peace through ‘world government,’ first by the League of Nations and then, after that failed, by the UN.

He also became a critic of white racism, having earlier shared in that reactionary worldview.

In 1931, Wells signed a public letter protesting against the death sentence passed for the African-American 'Scottsboro Boys' by an all-white jury in Alabama. And in 1943 he wrote an article condemning anti-black racism in South Africa, too.

An outspoken enemy of Nazi Germany, Wells’s books were publicly burned in Berlin in 1933.

As President of PEN International – the solidarity organisation for persecuted writers – Wells oversaw the expulsion of the German branch when it banned Jewish members.

In his art, too, H. G. Wells manifested his socialist politics.

Like George Orwell after him, Wells had a knack for being (or at least appearing) prophetic.

But it was not just the foretaste of WW1 in The War of the Worlds which made him seem visionary. Some of Wells’s other books, like The Time Machine, anticipated how society would be torn apart by class division unless capitalist social relations were replaced by socialism.

More optimistically, books like A Modern Utopia (1905) imagined how the exploitation of human labour might be ended under an international socialist order.

Wells’s writing, then, wasn’t about escapism from a harsh and unjust world, only to return to the status quo once you’ve finished reading.

Like many of his successors in the genre, Wells used science-fiction to critique the real world he lived in, and give shape to a better, more just one to come.

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