Kipps by HG Wells
– a review by Anthony Cummins
HG Wells's 1905 social satire still resonates
The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011
H. G. Wells began to shed his reputation as an English Jules Verne – a tag he hated – when he swapped science fiction for social satire with this 1905 novel about an orphan's windfall. Its hero, Arthur Kipps, loses his apprenticeship at a suburban fabric shop after turning up late and hungover from a drunken night out. The next day he discovers that his grandfather has left him a stipend that frees him from ever having to work again.
The clunky plot exists merely to kickstart a comic parable of social mobility, or the lack of it. Kipps learns that wealth doesn't guarantee respect, especially if he won't stop dropping his aitches. Toffs mock the ill-advised swank of his new silk hat, and dinner at a London hotel sees him defeated by a vol-au-vent. His biggest blunder is to spurn his childhood sweetheart, a humble maid, in favour of a bien pensante university graduate who regards his betterment as her pet project.
A string of hits had made Wells highly bankable by the time he wrote Kipps. Its view of wage slavery as a fate to avoid draws on his memories of drearier days as a draper's assistant in Portsmouth, before his cleverness (and Victorian education reform) lifted him out of lower‑middle‑class toil.
You can enjoy the novel as a jolly yarn about faux pas – there's a bit of Kipps in most of us – but you also sense that Wells found its theme a little close to the bone. His narrator lords it over the luckless protagonist, whose exaggerated Kentish whine is carefully quarantined in quote marks. As social inequality threatens to rise, it's hard not to wonder – despite the happy ending – if Kipps belongs to Britain's future as well as its past.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/13/hg-wells-kipps-classics-review
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