H.G. Wells

Later that year he entered Thomas Morley's Commercial Academy, a private school founded in 1849, following the bankruptcy of Morley's earlier school.

The teaching was erratic, and the curriculum mostly focused, Wells later said, on producing copperplate handwriting and doing the sort of sums useful to tradesmen.

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer.

Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories.

His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography.

Wells' science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the "father of science fiction".

In addition to his fame as a writer, he was prominent in his lifetime as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale.

As a futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web.

His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility and biological engineering before these subjects were common in the genre.

Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction", while Charles Fort called him a "wild talent".

Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 162 High Street in Bromley, Kent, on 21 September 1866.

Called "Bertie" by his family, he was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells, a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer and Sarah Neal, a former domestic servant.

An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they sold china and sporting goods, although it failed to prosper in part because the stock was old and worn out, and the location was poor.

Joseph Wells managed to earn a meagre income, but little of it came from the shop and he received an unsteady amount of money from playing professional cricket for the Kent county team.

A defining incident of young Wells's life was an accident in 1874 that left him bedridden with a broken leg.

To pass the time he began to read books from the local library, brought to him by his father.

He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; they also stimulated his desire to write.

In 1877, his father, Joseph Wells, fractured his thigh.

The accident effectively put an end to Joseph's career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family income.

No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations.

In October 1879, Wells's mother arranged through a distant relative, Arthur Williams, for him to join the National School at Wookey in Somerset as a pupil–teacher, a senior pupil who acted as a teacher of younger children.

In December that year, however, Williams was dismissed for irregularities in his qualifications and Wells was returned to Uppark.

Wells continued at Morley's Academy until 1880.

From 1880 to 1883, Wells had an unhappy apprenticeship as a draper at Hide's Drapery Emporium in Southsea.

His experiences at Hide's, where he worked a thirteen-hour day and slept in a dormitory with other apprentices, later inspired his novels The Wheels of Chance, The History of Mr Polly, and Kipps, which portray the life of a draper's apprentice as well as providing a critique of society's distribution of wealth.

Wells's parents had a turbulent marriage, owing primarily to his mother being a Protestant and his father being a freethinker.

When his mother returned to work as a lady's maid (at Uppark, a country house in Sussex), one of the conditions of work was that she would not be permitted to have living space for her husband and children.

Thereafter, she and Joseph lived separate lives, though they never divorced and remained faithful to each other.

As a consequence, Herbert's personal troubles increased as he subsequently failed as a draper and also, later, as a chemist's assistant.

However, Uppark had a magnificent library in which he immersed himself, reading many classic works, including Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, and the works of Daniel Defoe.

When he became the first doyen of science fiction as a distinct genre of fiction, Wells referenced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in relation to his works, writing, "they belong to a class of writing which includes the story of Frankenstein."

After a short apprenticeship at a chemist in nearby Midhurst and an even shorter stay as a boarder at Midhurst Grammar School, he signed his apprenticeship papers at Hyde's. In 1883, Wells persuaded his parents to release him from the apprenticeship, taking an opportunity offered by Midhurst Grammar School again to become a pupil–teacher; his proficiency in Latin and science during his earlier short stay had been remembered.

His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907), and the dystopian When the Sleeper Wakes (1910).

Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed "Wells's law" – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 with "O Realist of the Fantastic!".

Novels of social realism such as Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910), which describe lower-middle-class English life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole.

Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a Darwinian context.

He was also an outspoken socialist from a young age, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views.

In his later years, he wrote less fiction and more works expounding his political and social views, sometimes giving his profession as that of journalist.

Wells was a diabetic and co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (Diabetes UK) in 1934.