Posted by Of his many works, HG Wells’ favourite piece of writing was his 1910 novel The History of Mr Polly, which was semi-autobiographical. It is indeed a beautiful 200-page story.
Reading it today, it is still remarkably modern in its message: That this world is not really designed for happiness, but is in reality a place where we are trapped in endless, relentless, suffering. But that there is an exit route from the suffering. We can change our world anytime.
He wrote in Mr Polly:
But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a great discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it.
This was the idea that the conditioning and programming of life and society need not limit us. We can change at any time. It is as simple as that.
In the beginning, the world had held Mr Polly down and suffocated him; in the end he had made his own world, populated with only those people he would let into it.
He left behind his past, his history, his identity, and became a new person with a new life. This is a beautiful philosophy. It is something we can, and should, do even today.
The story of Mr Polly was his constant struggle through life, a miserable marriage, a failing business and insolvency, lack of friends, hatred of everything in his world.
By the mid-point in his life, he believed that there was nothing worth living for. So in the story, Mr Polly set fire to his house, left his wife and the miserable life he was leading, and set out to tramp the roads in search of meaning, much like Hermann Hesse described in his novella Wandering. And he ended up changing his life for the better.
But just before he died, HG Wells wrote a short pamphlet Mind at the End of its Tether where he had renounced the idea that happiness was possible.
He wrote:
There is no way out or round or through.
The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.
What happened to his mind?
What had happened was he had transformed himself into an “outsider”, someone that fits the description of Colin Wilson’s treatise on “outsiders” set out in his 1955 book The Outsider. He no longer fitted into the world, no longer accepted the herd mentality of society and the state of the world. He wanted real change. Which strangely he had outlined years before in Mr Polly.
The History of Mr Polly was a sort-of interlude in his writing between his futuristic novels such as The Time Machine, and his change of mind-set after WWI when his positive view of the future altered.
After WWI, Wells felt the only alternative to stop a return to barbarism, and to stop the final annihilation of humanity, was a one world system of governance, a World State. Books such as The Open Conspiracy set out his changed vision. Actually, this flawed vision would in reality end freedom of spirit. But by his death just after WWII, his pessimism about the future was firmly set. Humanity as it existed would end.
We should not forget the message Wells expounded in Mr Polly though: Stop following the herd, society’s programming. Change our way of thinking. Think independently of others. Question who is in control of our lives, us or someone else? There is no time to waste, no time for regret. We can change at any time.
4 June 2025
Piers Morris Blogspot 