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The Death of Masterman: A Repressed Episode in H. G. Wells's Kipps

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Harris Wilson*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana

Abstract

The article brings to light from the University of Illinois Wells Archive a substantial repressed episode from Kipps. In the episode, Masterman, the dying socialist, visits Kipps and his wife, Ann. In the course of his visit, which ends with his death, Master-man expresses his socialistic and utopian views of society. Masterman finds practical application of his views in the house Kipps is having built. But a single house proves too confining for Masterman's utopian visions and, by the time of his death, he has designed a plan for an entire utopian state. Masterman's views were to bring Kipps to an increased social and self-awareness that he never achieves in the published version of the novel. The episode is of literary value in itself, but more valuable in terms of what its omission means to the tone and structure of Kipps, and of still wider value as historical testimony to the nature of Wells's struggle to reconcile the claims of art and of propaganda in Kipps and generally through his major novels in the years from 1900 to 1910.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 1 , January 1971 , pp. 63 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Note 1 in page 69 I have not been able to determine the exact date of this decision. In the correspondence on file in the Archive with J. B. Pinker, his literary agent, Wells refers for the last time to the novel asThe Wealth of Mr. Waddy on 22 March 1899. From 23 April 1900 onward, Wells refers to the novel as Kipps.

Note 2 in page 69 Works, Atlantic Ed., 28 vols. (London, 1924–27), vin, ix. An edition of The Wealth of Mr. Waddy prepared by me appeared in the fall of 1969, published by the Southern Illinois Univ. Press.

Note 3 in page 69 Wells almost certainly wrote the episode in the last part of 1903 and early 1904. An early draft segment bears a holograph date “July, 1903,” although the handwriting is not Wells's. In his preface to A Modern Utopia in the Atlantic Edition, he notes that the book, published serially in The Fortnightly Review from Oct. 1904 to April 1905, “was done while I was completing Kipps” (ix, ix). Some of Masterman's ideas concerning a Utopian community find general expression (though not duplication) in A Modern Utopia, and Wells used Tommaso Campanula's City of the Sun, which is mentioned in the repressed episode, as source material for A Modern Utopia. Also, we can, with reasonable safety, take George Gissing as the basic, although generalized, model for Masterman. Masterman's account of his youthful poverty is consistent with Gissing's own; Wells and his wife had taken in an ill and undernourished Gissing and nursed him back to comparative health in 1901 ; and Wells was by Gissing's side when he died of double pneumonia in France on 28 Dec. 1903.

Note 4 in page 69 I am not including the complete episode in this article because of its length—about 11,000 words. Approximately one-third of my text is based on moderately revised typescript that appears to be a final draft by comparison with the typeface of what remains of Wells's final manuscript version of Kipps; another third is apparently second-draft manuscript, moderately to heavily revised typescript, in a different typeface; and the rest is holograph manuscript. The quality of paper ranges from onion skin to heavy bond. Possibly the second-draft and holograph material never reached Wells's secretary's hands, but much more probably, the final draft has been lost. Because of this mixed nature of my source, I have been unable to make direct connections between it and the final version of Kipps. The two instances in which I have been unable to decipher Wells's handwriting with certainty are placed in brackets.

Note 5 in page 69 The ellipsis marks throughout the quoted passages are Wells's own and do not represent deletions. Wells used them to indicate a pause or break in thought.

Note 6 in page 69 In 1899–1900, Wells had involved himself deeply in the planning and construction of his home, Spade House, in Folkestone. Many of the ideas expressed by Masterman are incorporated in Spade House, and the visitor today finds it astonishingly modern. It contains, for instance, central baseboard heating.

Note 7 in page 69 Wells is undoubtedly referring to John Humphrey Noyes, 1811–86, who founded the Oneida community in New York.

Note 8 in page 69 A friend of Kipps in his days as a draper's assistant.

Note 9 in page 69 Wells may have been influenced by his agent and potential publishers in his decision, although there is no evidence of this in the correspondence I have seen. Gordon N. Ray points out in “H. G. Wells Tries to Be a Novelist,” English Institute Essays, 1959 (New York, 1960), pp. 12829, 130–33, that Wells was careful in his early novels to voice iconoclastic opinions through minor, more or less disreputable characters like Chaffery in Love and Mr. Lewisham and Masterman in Kipps in order not to offend the conventional reader.