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| 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 ‘H. G.’ Wells was recovering from a disorder of the lungs, and went to stay with an old college friend William Burton and his wife at their terraced house in Basford for a few months, where he proved a somewhat petulant and troublesome house-guest. The future ‘father of science fiction’ had lived most of his life in rural or semi-rural districts and the Potteries was the first truly industrial landscape he had encountered. In his autobiography he noted
‘I found the Burtons and their books and their talk, and the strange landscape of the Five Towns with its blazing iron foundries, its steaming canals, its clay whitened pot-banks and the marvellous effects of its dust and smoke-laden atmosphere, very stimulating. As I went about the place I may have jostled in the streets of Burslem against another ambitious young man of just my age who was then clerk to a solicitor, that friendly rival of my middle years, Arnold Bennett.’
Indeed, the two authors later became good friends and he wrote to Bennett, ‘the district made an immense impression on me’ and his memories of the area later found their way into his works. He added that it was ‘… at Etruria my real writing began’ and it was whilst here that he concocted a curious scientific romance, ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ that became the basis of his first novel, The Time Machine.
His stay in the Potteries allowed Wells to recuperate in comfort, but as his health improved he realised that it was time to move on. He later recalled how one afternoon in June, whilst lying in a wood full of bluebells, revelling in the sunlight and the effect of the nodding flowers around him, a curious resolution swept over him. “I have been dying for nearly two-thirds of a year,” he mused, “and I have died enough.” On returning to his lodgings he told the Burtons he would be leaving them and the next day he took the train back to London. Not one to miss an opportunity for a story, in the 1890s, Wells wrote a fictionalised account of his recovery and his moment of revelation in the Potteries was made much more picturesque. Entitled ‘How I Died’, in the story he describes how after four months lying ill and convinced that he was dying, an invalid 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’. Charmed by the pretty name that the innocent youngster gave to her flowers, he suddenly realised that he was bored with the idea that he was dying and decided to put all gloomy thoughts aside and get on with his life. This imagined encounter not only echoes Wells’ real recovery, but also bears similarities to the time traveller’s first meeting with the childlike Eloi, Weena, in The Time Machine, who presents a bunch of flowers to the time traveller 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 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, ‘… a vast melodrama in the setting of the Five Towns, a sort of Staffordshire Mysteries of Paris conceived partly in burlesque, it was to be a grotesque with lovely and terrible passages’, but he went on to produce another work, the slightly scandalous science fiction novel (because it championed socialism and advocated free love) In the Days of the Comet, published in 1906, which was also set in a fictional version of the Potteries.
Reference: H. G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography, Chapter 6, part 2.