by David Lodge
But the most important debt Wells owed to his great precursor was in the use of the authorial voice. In Kipps, as in the novels of Dickens, it is the authorial voice that brings the characters to life, moralises on the story, and provides most of the humour. The early chapters about Kipps’s friendship with Sid Pornick exploit the Dickensian trick of describing the naiveties of the young in a knowing adult voice: ‘[Sid] produced a thumbed novelette that had played a part in his sentimental awakening; he proffered it to Kipps, and confessed there was a character in it, a baronet, singularly like himself.’ The ironic distance between the teller and the tale persists into the narrative of the hero’s adult life. Kipps is a ‘simple soul’, unable to articulate his anxieties and longings, while the other characters, blinkered by the prejudices of their class or their own selfish egos, communicate in clichés, platitudes and stock responses which Kipps can only parrot. The narrator alone is allowed to be truly eloquent – with a few exceptions, as when Minton, the senior apprentice at the Folkestone Drapery Bazaar, memorably declares to Kipps, ‘I tell you we’re in a blessed drain-pipe, and we’ve got to crawl along it till we die.’ But it is the narrator who describes the effect of this bleak pronouncement on the hero:
There were times when Kipps would lie awake, all others in the dormitory asleep and snoring, and think dismally of the outlook Minton pictured. Dimly he perceived the thing that had happened to him, how the great stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into its wheels, a vast, irresistible force which he had neither strength of will nor knowledge to escape. This was to be his life until his days should end. No adventures, no glory, no change, no freedom. Neither – though the force of that came home to him later – might he dream of effectual love and marriage.
The full hopelessness of Kipps’s plight strikes him when he falls in love with the unattainable cultured beauty who is his art teacher, Helen Walshingham, and then, as a result of Chitterlow’s reckless irruption into his life, is dismissed from his place. He goes down into the basement of the shop, deliberately upsets a box of window tickets ‘and so, having made himself a justifiable excuse for being on the ground with his head well in the dark, he could let his poor bursting little heart have its way with him for a space’.
From this lowest point in his fortunes he is rescued by the legacy from Waddy (now an offstage character who, we are told, prevented his son, Kipps’s father, from marrying Kipps’s mother, and repented of this action). This was a plot device often used by Victorian novelists to bring a story to a happy conclusion. In Kipps, however, it triggers the main action, giving the hero a chance to achieve happiness and fulfilment which he fails disastrously to seize (until the author takes pity on him and rescues him with another deus ex machina in the form of Chitterlow’s hit play). Although money is necessary to Kipps’s happiness, it is not sufficient, because he doesn’t know how to conduct himself as a ‘gentleman’, a consequence partly of his impoverished education and upbringing, but also of the limitations of his own character and intelligence. He is sponged on by Chitterlow, exploited by the Walshinghams, and brainwashed by Coote, his self-appointed mentor. Most of the time among his new friends he feels embarrassed and ill at ease, overdressed and underbred. His wealth allows him to form the attachment to Helen that had seemed an unrealisable dream, but ‘He had prayed for Helen as good souls pray for heaven, with as little understanding of what it was he prayed for’. In her company he is mainly conscious of his own inadequacy. She looks at him ‘with an eye of critical proprietorship’, noting his deficiencies ‘as one might go over a newly taken house’. Their engagement is entirely lacking in sexual passion – he is too intimidated even to attempt to kiss her. When he meets his old childhood sweetheart, Ann, he feels no such inhibition, but then finds himself in a moral and emotional dilemma from which he simply runs away – to London.
Kipps’s adventures in London constitute the comic highpoint of the novel. His prolonged and unsuccessful struggle to master the protocol of the luxury hotel where he is staying anticipates the farcical misadventures of Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean, but it also reinforces the moral of the story, that class and culture are stronger social forces than mere wealth. On his first day in the capital Kipps goes hungry because, although he has plenty of money, he can’t find a dining place in which he would feel comfortable, and only a chance meeting with Sid Pornick, who takes him home for a cosy family meal, saves him from fasting. ‘There were no serviettes and less ceremony, and Kipps thought he had never enjoyed a meal so much.’ The humiliating experience of eating next day among disdainful waiters and plutocratic diners in the hotel restaurant is enough to convert him temporarily to socialism – a concept to which he has just been introduced by Sid and the latter’s lodger, Masterman.
The mental change Kipps underwent was, in its way, what psychologists call a conversion. In a few moments all Kipps’ ideals were changed. He who had been ‘practically a gentleman,’ the sedulous pupil of Coote, the punctilious raiser of hats, was instantly a rebel, an outcast, the hater of everything ‘stuck up,’ the foe of Society and the social order of today. Here they were among the profits of their robbery, these people who might do anything with the world . . .
This of course is an ironic overstatement of Kipps’s change of attitude. He continues to try to conform to the social code of the hotel, and continues to fail. His efforts to purchase the respect of the staff by extravagant tipping merely make him ridiculous – though it is only the reader, by courtesy of the authorial voice, who perceives just how ridiculous. ‘At his departure, Kipps, with a hot face, convulsive gestures, and an embittered heart, tipped everyone who did not actively resist, including an absent-minded South African diamond merchant who was waiting in the hall for his wife.’ But he does return to Folkestone to some extent a changed man – or at least a desperate and determined one. When Ann reappears in his life, as a maid at one of the bourgeois establishments where he is submitted to further social torture, for once in his life he takes control of his own destiny and persuades her to marry him. In this part of the story Wells makes deft use of the conventions that divided middle-class people from their servants to dramatise the transgressive nature of Kipps’s action – Ann, for instance, will not speak to him about personal matters at the front door of the house where she works, only in the ‘basement after nine. Them’s my hours. I’m a servant, and likely to keep one. If you’re calling here, what name please?’
Even when he is married to a woman whom he really loves, Kipps has difficulty finding a style of life that coincides with his desires because of his ambiguous social status. When he tries to get a house built he is bullied by the architect into commissioning an absurdly ostentatious and impractical dwelling (Wells’s hobby horse about domestic architecture gets a thorough airing in this sequence), and Ann causes problems by refusing to employ a proper complement of servants. In a poignant scene, she confesses that she pretended to be her own servant when some respectable visitors caught her painting the floor of their temporary home. Kipps’s reproachful dismay reveals that he is far from being liberated from bourgeois aspirations, and causes their first matrimonial tiff. This, however, is swamped by a far greater catastrophe, when Helen Walshingham’s brother embezzles Kipps’s fortune.
At this point the story seems to have reached its final reversal, with Kipps stripped of most of his wealth, and perhaps happier for its absence. He is not quite back where he started. There is just enough value in the villa he inherited from Waddy and his own half-built house to save him from bankruptcy and enable him to open a little shop – something he had always secretly wanted to do, but felt was incompatible with being a gentleman. Ann embraces the plan enthusiastically: ‘A certain brightness came into Ann’s face. “Nobody won’t be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of that!”’ The shop, surprisingly and inauspiciously in view of Kipps’s limited education, is a bookshop, belonging to a chain called the Associated Booksellers’ Trading Union, a new
speculative venture which the narrator tells us would soon fail. Kipps, however, is protected by the handsome, unexpected return on his investment in Chitterlow’s play, The Pestered Butterfly, and thus able to run his little bookshop in Hythe as a kind of hobby. There, the narrator archly and unconvincingly observes,
you may see him for yourself and speak to him and buy this book of him if you like . . . He has it in stock, I know. Very delicately I’ve seen to that. His name is not Kipps . . . but everything else is exactly as I have told you . . . (Of course you will not tell Kipps that he is ‘Kipps’ or that I have put him in this book. He hasn’t the remotest suspicion of that . . .)
The sudden changes of direction and shifts of tone in the concluding chapters of Kipps suggest that Wells was not at all certain how to end the story, and he himself confessed to Pinker that Book III was ‘scamped . . . a thing of shreds and patches, but it is quite handsomely brought off’.10 To understand Wells’s difficulties with this part of the novel it is helpful to look at his political views. Political issues were at the forefront of his mind when he was striving to finish Kipps, because of his involvement in the Fabian Society, founded in 1884, by George Bernard Shaw among others, as a kind of think-tank and talking shop for left-wing, middle-class intellectuals who espoused the gradual evolution of modern society towards socialism but rejected class struggle and violent revolution on the Marxist model. H. G. Wells was a natural recruit to the Fabians. His non-fiction books and articles called for a radical transformation of British society by the application of rational planning and new technology, sweeping away unearned privilege and opening up a decent quality of life to the masses. The Fabians hoped he would bring a new energy and eloquence to their programme and make it more appealing to the young. Wells himself was flattered to be introduced into this high-minded and exclusive intellectual milieu, and in 1903 he was elected, sponsored by G. B. Shaw and Graham Wallas.
Very soon, however, there were clashes of opinion and style between the Old Guard of the society and the new recruit. Wells felt the society had achieved too little in its twenty years of existence, and that it needed a thorough shake-up of its policies and executive officers. In this he was probably right, but his manner of proceeding was abrasive and caused considerable offence. He instigated the setting-up of a committee to consider the reform of the society and a series of dramatic and divisive debates ensued which ended in 1906 when Wells was procedurally outmanoeuvred and defeated by Shaw, after which his active involvement rapidly diminished and eventually ceased. In the Autobiography he declared: ‘no part of my career rankles so acutely in my memory with the conviction of bad judgment, gusty impulse and real inexcusable vanity, as that storm in the Fabian tea-cup.’11 Though he blames himself for the debacle, a parting of the ways was inevitable. Wells’s ‘socialism’ was not at heart democratic, but meritocratic – even, in some respects, autocratic. Early in 1905 he published A Modern Utopia, in which he envisaged a world run by an elite of wise and clever men (called rather revealingly Samurai) for the benefit of all – but an ‘all’ purged of antisocial and unproductive elements by a chilling eugenic policy. The latter part of Kipps (which was completed in 1904, and published in the autumn of 1905) shows signs, particularly in the characterisation of Sid Pornick’s lodger, Masterman, of the intellectual strain Wells was under as he struggled to define his political philosophy and to reconcile it with Fabianism.
Surviving drafts of the novel show that originally Masterman was given several opportunities to expound the doctrine of socialism to Kipps, who was to be genuinely converted and resolve to bring up his son by its light.12 In the finished novel Masterman is given much less scope, and is a much more ambiguous character, a malcontent rather than a genuine reformer, embittered by his ill-health and other misfortunes, raging against the injustices and corruption of the social system and anticipating its imminent self-destruction with gloomy relish. He seems to be something of a parasite on the Pornicks, and Sid’s awed regard for him is portrayed as naïve. Kipps’s own verdict is, ‘Bit orf ’is ’ead, poor chap.’ This unsympathetic portrayal is all the more puzzling because the character was partly based on George Gissing, whom Wells regarded as a good friend, and whose death in December 1903 had upset him very much. Perhaps in a clumsy effort to disguise the model for his fictional character, Wells gave him the name of another writer and politician of radical views, C. F. G. Masterman, who was not amused, though he reviewed the novel favourably and later became a good friend and supporter of Wells.
What seems to have happened, then, is that in the process of writing Masterman’s exposition of socialist theory Wells concluded that he didn’t really believe in it himself, and so couldn’t in good faith show his hero embracing it. Therefore in the final version of the novel the character of Masterman was reduced in stature, to such an extent that he hardly has any function at all. Kipps’s rebellion against bourgeois values is not ideological in motivation, but personal, emotional and opportunistic. Just how tenuous it is, is revealed when he quarrels with Ann over a trivial breach of social decorum, provoking an exasperated outburst from the author:
The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives!
As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night . . . Above them, brooding over them . . . there is a monster, a lumpish monster . . . It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, it is the ruling power of this land, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow . . . I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh . . .
But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses as they are . . . as things like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children – children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer, and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them!
In this remarkable passage Wells comes perilously close to scuttling his own novel. He renounces the stance of genial comic detachment which he has adopted as narrator up to this point, and adopts a prophetic, even apocalyptic, tone. The lives of Arthur and Ann Kipps are seen as tragic rather than comic, but they are ‘stupid little tragedies’, mere symptoms of a much bigger and all-embracing malaise. One senses that the author would like to sweep away the whole social system to which his characters (and the masses of people like them) belong, in order to create his model state – and too bad if they perish in the process. But the author relents, the genial comic mask is quickly replaced, the story of the Kippses is resumed and brought to a happy conclusion – represented by, of all things, a shop, an idealised instance of ‘the great stupid machine of retail trade’ that had formerly oppressed and enslaved the hero.
Though he privately acknowledged its flaws, Wells had faith in his book and was determined that it should be a success when it was finally published, in October 1905. He wrote to his publisher, Macmillan, in August:
It is, I feel, the most considerable book (from the point of view of a possible popularity) that you have so far published for me, and I think that now is the time for a very special effort to improve my position with the booksellers and book-buyers . . . I look to you for some able and sustained advertisement and I will confess that I shall feel it is you and not me to blame if Kipps is not carried well over 10,000 copies.13
The eminent publisher was not used to being hustled by his authors in this fashion and did not take kindly to it, but Wells pestered him both in person and by letter after publication with schemes to promote the novel: men with sandwich boards parading the streets, advertisements in theatre programmes, leaflets for subscribers to the Times Book Club, and even posters at Portsmouth & Southsea Station saying ‘KIPPS WORKED HERE’. How many of these suggestions were adopted is not known, but the authorial pressure seems to have had some effect, for, after a sluggish start, sales improved steadily in November and December and by Christmas 12,000 copies of Kipps had been sold – the best Wells had so far achieved with any book.14 By 1910 it had sold 60,000 in a cheap
er edition, and it has always been one of the most popular of his novels.
The reviews at the time of publication were generally excellent, but probably none of them gave Wells as much pleasure as a private letter from Henry James:
What am I to say about Kipps but that I am ready, that I am compelled, utterly to drivel about him? He is not so much a masterpiece as a mere born gem – you having, I know not how, taken a header straight down into the mysterious depths of observation and knowledge, I know not which and where, and come up again with this rounded pearl of the diver. But of course you know yourself how immitigably the thing is done – it is of such a brilliancy of true truth. I really think that you have done, at this time of day, two particular things for the first time of their doing among us. (1) You have written the first closely and intimately, the first intelligently and consistently ironic or satiric novel. In everything else there has always been the sentimental or conventional interference of which Thackeray is full. (2) You have for the very first time treated the English ‘lower middle class’, etc. without the picturesque, the grotesque, the fantastic and romantic interference, of which Dickens, e.g., is so misleadingly, of which even George Eliot is so deviatingly, full. You have handled its vulgarity in so scientific and historic a spirit, and seen the whole thing all in its own strong light.15
