... plainly written, packed with incident and justly admiring without being uncritical...also quite openly personal ... Three excellent full-length biographies chronicle Wells’s colorful life in full. But for a compact overview of this endlessly fascinating man and writer, Tomalin’s The Young H.G. Wells is hard to beat, being friendly, astute and a pleasure to read.
Tomalin’s short, engaging biography is a welcome addition to the conversation ... Ms. Tomalin paints a vivid picture of the upstairs-downstairs world of England’s class system, and how Wells’s experiences at Uppark shaped his views on the importance of a more just society ... Ms. Tomalin dutifully untangles Wells’s wildly complex affairs ... just as Wells crammed a lot into his full life, Ms. Tomalin crams a lot into this short biography. Occasionally, like a museum curator torn between arranging an exhibit chronologically or thematically, Ms. Tomalin opts for a mix, and the narrative lines get tangled. Too many precious pages are devoted to the history of the socialist Fabian Society, and to Wells’s relationship with its early members, Beatrice and Sidney Webb (founders of the London School of Economics) ... Given the time and space constraints of Ms. Tomalin’s project, some gaps are to be expected. Even so, a look into a few of Wells’s disappointing later books might have strengthened her argument about the superiority of his earlier work ... Ms. Tomalin segues nicely from a brief account of the demise of many of Wells’s friendships to a necessarily brisk overview of his later years and the tributes that followed his death. Her own tribute is full-hearted...Her book makes a strong case for Wells’s enduring importance.
... compact but richly informative ... [Tomalin] admits that, although she set out to write about the young Wells, she has followed him into his forties because she found him 'too interesting to leave'. The same can be said of her book.
... this slight volume may risk disappointing ... It only deals with Wells’s life up to 1911, with no suggestion that there is another volume to come; its brisk narrative pace struggles at times to accommodate descriptive summaries of several of his books; and it is not obvious that it draws on significant new sources, beyond a few letters to Amber Reeves taken from the as yet unpublished fifth volume of his correspondence. Still, it’s a very agreeable read for the most part and conveys Tomalin’s enthusiasm for much of Wells’s fiction without asking too many probing questions. Her concluding tribute is that Wells ‘wanted to reorganise the world so that everyone could enjoy it, and, if he did not succeed in that as well as he had hoped, he gave his superabundant energy to speaking and writing for the cause.’ That may seem a little too easily said: could anyone succeed in a task described in those terms—indeed, what could such ‘success’ possibly look like? The risk is that the judgment damns with flabby praise. Nonetheless, Tomalin is a weighty advocate, and her admiration may help to spark a revival in Wells’s reputation, though perhaps even her noted empathy and artistry still cannot quite re-create for us, now, what all the fuss was about.
... offers a spirited and sympathetic investigation into how a boy who lived above a smelly shop in Bromley became a writer who was at the heart of Britain’s artistic and political life, with an address book that was like a global Who’s Who ... For much of this biography, Tomalin’s approach is very successful ... If this book had ended with Wells’s early success, it would have provided a wonderful snapshot of a life. But instead it goes on to his long flirtation with Fabianism, his sometimes prickly friendships with writers like Arnold Bennett and George Gissing, his two unfulfilling marriages and much more. In fact, Tomalin continues to follow the ‘young’ Wells into his mid-forties, and also provides a long chapter on his final years and death, so in effect this is a full biography with the three dullest decades sliced out of it rather than one that focuses exclusively on his rise to fame ... Yet some readers might regret that she spends little time explaining why Wells’s writing was so successful – usually she sticks to simple, rather flat judgements ... her book resembles James’s letters to Wells, in which, according to Tomalin, James responded to the younger man’s novels with ‘admiration, affection for the writer … almost outrageous praise at times – yet with something withheld’.
Enthusiastic appreciation with a qualifying afterthought typifies [Tomalin's] approach and it serves her well, allowing her to give a rounded sense of her subject’s personality ... She shows clearly how Wells’s early struggles made him determined to enjoy life to the full and prove his worth by achieving all he possibly could, whether it was by challenging the limits of the nineteenth-century novel or trying to browbeat the Fabian Society into becoming radical populists ... She is so sympathetic to his needs that she sides with him in judging his first wife not up to the job...This seems harsh and over-reliant on Wells’s say-so ... Out of all Wells’s biographers, Tomalin strikes me as the one most drawn to him as an actual person rather than as a verbal construct, the kind of fascinating creative type she would have wanted to encounter at those literary parties she describes in her autobiography ... As in her previous books, Tomalin creates an agreeable sense throughout of a reader sharing her findings honestly and thoughtfully with others. The account is divided into short, pacy chapters in which each event is considered with empathy and presented with clarity. Academic jargon is refreshingly absent and literary analysis kept to a minimum, though she provides sound descriptions of the books and reliable indications of which are the best to read ... In tackling a subject who did so much and knew so many people, it is easy to digress or be overwhelmed by information. Tomalin resists these temptations, but not always successfully ... A little tidying would not have gone amiss ... The sequencing of the Wells–Reeves relationship from undated letters is not always convincing; nor is their transcription.
... well-researched ... all of Wells’s life emerges here as she takes us carefully through three important, overlapping profiles of one of England’s enduring, most widely read and cited literary artists ... it is this biography’s last profile of Wells as a prolific, original storyteller that ensorcelled me as a young reader and, as a writer, cemented my respect for him ... Would that I could mention all the illuminating details in this biography ... Tomalin’s account of his early years educates and entertains, despite the difficulty of delivering the large life and legacy of H. G. Wells in a single volume.
In her subtitle, she implies that she’ll be explaining how the Victorian author was Changing the World. Unfortunately, her narrative does not address this feat. Instead, Tomalin sticks to a careful recitation of facts, often information Wells himself laid out in autobiographical writings and other publications. Some of these 'facts' were merely Wells’ memories or interpretations made years later in public venues, but the biographer uses them uncritically to build her narrative ... In a strange editorial choice, she sometimes crafts elaborate defenses of Wells and overly aggressive criticisms of those around him ... Tomalin writes so uncritically of her subject that she seems almost blindly sympathetic to the self-absorbed young man ... what she doesn’t supply is any significant interpretation of Wells as a writer. Rather, she summarizes the main points of some of his work ... ... she refrains from presenting any discussion of how Wells’ writing might illuminate his interior life and thought process—an essential part of a literary biography.
... thoroughly engaging ... candidly and disarmingly swivels the spotlight back toward orthodoxy by highlighting almost exclusively Wells’s childhood, adolescence, and early maturity ... One almost gets the sense that, nearing her ninth decade, Tomalin vicariously supped from the record of Wells’s stupendous outpouring of energy. It’s a sprightliness that she passes on to the reader. The elder Wells, much feted for his early accomplishments but somewhat ignored for his late-life endeavors, may not have been, we can intuit, quite so charming or delightful ... The best of Tomalin’s insights sparkle with deceptive simplicity ... Tomalin is likewise excellent in her identification of the authors who influenced the early Wells’s thinking and literary aesthetics ... Though short, The Young H.G. Wells contains a few repetitions, sometimes convenient, other times unnecessary. This leads me to a related observation: I can appreciate Tomalin wanting us to have a decent understanding of what the Fabian Society represented, but the chapter in which she leaves Wells behind in order to ground us in the group’s history was, for me, a slight misfire. The book’s closing chapter, however, which presents a panoramic view of Wells’s last decades, as seen through his relationships, is understated and touching.
... sprightly ... Tomalin leans heavily on Wells’s 1934 memoir An Experiment in Autobiography, which sometimes lends a dutiful air to proceedings, particularly during the scene-setting of the early years. A bigger problem is the way paraphrase can slip into endorsement ... such terms of approval sit ill with Wells’s conduct as portrayed here ... Tomalin’s decision to restrict herself to the 'young' Wells never strikes the reader as anything but pragmatic, despite her explanation that she found herself particularly drawn to the phase of his best-remembered fiction. In any case, Tomalin keeps pace with her subject into midlife, in part, she says, because he continued to behave like a young man, which is rather a polite way to call him immature.
I’m going to betray my own interests here, but I found Wells the Writer a great deal more interesting than Wells the Lover ... The love stuff drags and the book stuff soars. Enough 'Amberissima', let’s get back to Gissing, Gosse, Arnold Bennett, Henry James and the literary gents Wells knew and rivalled and riled.
... as literary biographer Tomalin engagingly elucidates, Wells was a man of many interests, talents, and, indeed, foibles ... Tomalin is a consummate storyteller, illuminating myriad absorbing details to show the many dimensions of this complicated icon of twentieth-century literature.
The acclaimed literary biographer delivers a compelling portrait of the formative years of the iconic British author ... Tomalin covers her subject’s many shortcomings, but she has an empathy for him and a deep understanding of a young man impelled to reach for everything within his grasp. She ends her story with Wells in his early 40s, noting that she was reluctant to part company with this complicated genius. Readers of this excellent biography will agree ... A vivid portrait of the early years of an author of astounding vision, who predicted many of the horrors of the 20th century.
A large cast of literary friends and political relationships add color, including Beatrice Potter Webb, Winston Churchill, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Stephen Crane, among others. Well-researched and matter-of-fact, Tomalin’s account is worth a look for literature lovers.
