Wind-Stars for Mr Wells

Norman Saunder's illustration showing the
Time Traveller rescuing Weena from the
Morlocks in The Time Machine.
(Wikimedia Commons)

In early 1888, 22 year old Herbert George Wells was recovering from an illness, some disorder of the lungs, and went to stay with an old college friend and his wife at their terraced house in Basford for a few months where he was apparently a troublesome and petulant house guest; perhaps as a result he also spent some time lodging at the Leopard Inn in Burslem. The future ‘father of science fiction’ had lived most of his life in rural or semi-rural districts and the Potteries was the first industrial landscape he had encountered. As he later wrote to local author Arnold Bennett, ‘the district made an immense impression on me’ and his memories of the area later found their way into his works. 

In the 1890s, Wells wrote a short essay entitled ‘How I Died’, in which he seemed to recount his recovery at this period. He described how after four months lying ill and convinced that he was dying, he staggered out one early spring morning to get some fresh air and take a last look at the sky before expiring, when he encountered a young girl who had got her dress caught by a bramble whilst climbing a hedge. After helping her free, the invalid stood chatting with the girl about this and that and he noted that she carried a small bunch of wood anemones that she called ‘wind-stars’. Wells was charmed by the pretty name that the innocent youngster gave her flowers and by his account the meeting - if genuine - bucked him up and he grew bored with the idea that he was dying and decided at that point to put all gloomy thoughts aside and get on with his life. It has been suggested that this pleasant meeting was the model for the time traveller’s first encounter with the childlike Eloi Weena in Wells’ first novel, The Time Machine, who presents a bunch of flowers to him for saving her life, then sits with him as he tries to communicate with her. Also in The Time Machine, a friend of the time traveller refers to a conjuror he had once seen in Burslem, while the spectacle of the Potteries at night with its numerous kilns and furnaces casting a fiery glow into the sky, is famously referenced early on in his next novel, The War of the Worlds, to describe the destruction wrought by the Martian war machines.

In addition to these famous examples there were lesser tales of his that owed something to the Potteries. In 1895, the same year that The Time Machine was published and he began work on The War of the Worlds, Wells had a short macabre horror story The Cone published, which was set in a fictional forge in Etruria, and was probably based on Earl Granville’s iron works. That story was all that remained of what Wells had originally planned to be a larger dramatic novel set in the area, but he went on to produce another work, the slightly scandalous science fiction novel (because it advocated free love) In the Days of the Comet, published in 1906, which was also set in a fictional version of the Potteries.