Introduction
H. G. Wells conferred upon The Outline of History a
subtitle—"Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind"—that is probably
more indicative than the main title of what the work really is. For to
call a work of over one thousand pages and five hundred thousand words an
"outline" betrays our common notion of the term. But if "plain" means
plainly or clearly written so a general reader can understand it, and if
"life and mankind" means it is a history of the beginnings of life on
Earth and the subsequent development of the social, political, and
economic history of the highest life form—then we have a pretty fair
description of Wells' endeavor. Written over an amazingly short period of
time in 1918-1919 by a highly successful English man of letters, The
Outline of History caught on first in Britain and America and then
throughout the rest of the literate world, selling in its first decade
over two million copies, to highly enthusiastic professional reviews.
Wells had started a craze that lasted throughout the 1920s for copycat
"outlines" on every conceivable subject. Coming right after the carnage
of World War I, the Outline was neither unduly pessimistic and cynical
about the human condition nor Pollyannaish about humanity's future.
Instead, it pretended to offer an account of the development of the
world's civilizations up to the present, trying to convince its readers
that an enlightened future depended on a clear, unprejudiced view of the
past. Many readers must have been convinced. Even twenty years after its
initial publication, when it was in its sixth edition, The Outline of
History and its author were well enough known that in the film The
Maltese Falcon, Sidney Greenstreet's malevolent character can tell
Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) that the story of the Falcon is true, though
he will not find it in "Mr. Wells' History."
H. G. Wells was by 1918 perhaps the best-known writer in the
English-speaking world. His name may still be the most recognizable of
any author's of his generation, thanks mostly to his enduringly popular
science-fiction novels, such as The War of the Worlds (1898).
Novelist, polemicist, scientific popularizer, journalist, socialist,
futurist, and advocate of world government, birth control, and other
"progressive" measures, H. G. Wells had raised himself from humble
beginnings to a life of international celebrity and financial success.
Born in 1866, he achieved early success with his science-fiction
romances, and by 1918 had solidified that popularity and increased his
literary reputation with such serious realistic novels as
Tono-Bungay (1909). Wells was largely self-taught though he had
attended a teacher's college where he studied under the great T. H.
Huxley, Darwin's so-called "bulldog," the most prominent public apologist
for the theory of evolution. Like his mentor, Wells was an unabashed
"progressive," convinced that the world could be understood without
recourse to revelation or mythical narratives, that science ultimately
could explain the material world, and that a dispassionate "scientific"
attitude toward human endeavor was actually essential for prosperity and,
as years went on, even for the survival of the species. Occasionally
Wells' fame lapsed into infamy, for he was something of a philanderer,
fathering at least two children out of wedlock, one by the novelist
Rebecca West rather quietly, and the other not so quietly by Amber
Reeves, the young daughter of a fellow Fabian socialist. When Wells died
in 1946, there was almost universal agreement that, in the words of Dora
Russell, the philosopher Bertrand Russell's much younger second wife,
Wells had been, along with George Bernard Shaw and her husband, one of
the "great emancipators from Victorian orthodoxy."
Why then did Wells write The Outline of History? Certainly not
because he foresaw the immense financial bonanza it would become for him.
In fact, he was on a mission. If future conflagrations like the Great War
were to be avoided, a fundamental reordering of the political system had
to be undertaken. The world would have to adopt an international system
far more radical than Woodrow Wilson's proposed League of Nations. And
mankind could only unite in such a system if it had a better idea of its
common history. A "universal" history, as Wells called it, would break
down the old nationalistic, ethnic, and racial divisions by plotting,
from the beginnings of the planet, the human race's common heritage. This
may sound far too utopian, but Wells' realism should be stressed. He did
not think a "magic bullet" was found in history. Instead, he thought of
history with its progression of thought and possibility of beneficial
action as essential if humanity were to advance. In short, history will
emancipate (to use Dora Russell's word) one from mere sectarian or local
prejudices and provide an enlightened review of humanity's possibilities
to help shape a better future.
To further guarantee that The Outline of History would have the
desired impact, the amateur Wells enlisted many experts to help him. His
biggest aid was probably the magnificent eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, a work that remained justly famous as far
superior to both its predecessor editions and its successors throughout
most of the century. Wells lists over fifty specialists in his
introduction, and to the principal four he provided not only handsome
remunerations but also the honor of having their names listed on the
title page (following "with the advice and editorial help of"). Wells was
justifiably proud of his omnivorous knowledge, however he was not only
humble enough to seek advice, but shrewd enough to supply his volumes the
extra pedigree that only professional and renowned scholars could
provide.
What then did the early readers of the Outline find when they
opened the first volume of Mr. Wells' latest work? What they did not find
was another version of what Wells called the "King and Country" history,
his term for the narrowly nationalistic (and chauvinistic) history taught
in the schools. For Wells, this kind of history, with its emphasis on one
country's "heroes" and battles and accomplishments, was part of the
problem. Indeed in the first volume of the Outline, the original
British and American readers found a history that began long before their
respective nations came into existence. Readers might have been used to
such a looking back, but only in a limited way. If they were better
schooled they would expect to find a treatment of classical Greece and
Rome and of biblical history. The not-so-well-trained would only be aware
of some Bible stories. In the Outline they found both classical
and Old Testament history covered, to be sure, but placed within a much
wider scope. The Greeks were picked up, for example, when their ancestors
first ventured onto the Balkan peninsula. And their ancestors were
traced back to their first arrival in Europe. The Hebrews were made to
share their geographic territory with all the other peoples of the
region, and their relative unimportance at the time was carefully
noted.
In short, Wells insisted on a far different idea of historical
contextualization than had usually obtained in the past. The reader would
not only find more space given to the ancient civilizations that came
into contact with the Greeks and Hebrews, but also to civilizations
completely remote from them. Thus Chinese culture is given its due, and
Confucius comes off as one of the most admired ethical teachers of the
early period—as does Buddha. And Asoka (264-227 BC), an Indian ruler whom
Wells says is the first leader to abandon warfare as a tool of state, is
valued and honored as perhaps no other political leader in the entire
volume.
One might expect that Wells, a freethinker when it came to religion,
would use the occasion to attack religion or specifically Judeo-Christian
beliefs. But nothing could be further from the truth. First he sees the
rise in prehistoric times of a "priestly class" as one of the great
moments in the advance of civilization, for they are the first "writing
class," the first "reading public." Any convincing explanation of the
purpose and potential of mankind would have to start with this. And with
Christianity, Wells masterfully combines the latest skeptical biblical
scholarship with an appreciation of the moral saneness of Jesus and the
intellectual rigor of St. Paul. As for the Jews, they are central to his
story of "progress," for with them, "the ideas of the moral unity of
mankind and of a world peace had come into the world."
Wells, as we have noted, does insist that the ancient Hebrews were far
less important in their world than any recent opinion would have. He has
the same tendency to place classical civilization in its diminished
place, doubtless in part as a reaction to its too-exclusive centrality in
liberal arts education, especially in England. But it is within Greek
civilization that Wells finds his first true hero—i.e., the first man who
could have brought about the kind of universal government that Wells
thought the world was tending to or needed to move toward. Unfortunately,
like Julius Caesar a few hundred years later, Alexander the Great proves
less than adequate to the task thanks to character defects, and the
readers are witness to what undoubtedly was an unexpectedly harsh
assessment of the Macedonian conqueror.
In short, the first readers of The Outline of History would have
found a far more tempered treatment of the civilizations most invoked in
their own time as examples of exemplary accomplishments and moral vigor.
And they would have found perfectly alien civilizations and belief
systems-many of whose modern descendents or adherents were now under
European colonial control—treated with respect and often ranked as more
important than their own Western cultural ancestry.
But the first readers would also have found that Wells thought it
necessary for them to know far more than the story of ancient and potent
civilizations. It was necessary to know something of the beginnings of
the planet and of life itself. Thus the Outline opens with "The
Earth In Space and Time," which tries to give the reader some sense of
the vastness of the universe, followed by chapters and subchapters on the
origins of life, the evolution of life from single-celled organisms up
through reptiles to mammals to early man. The chapters are proof that
Wells was a science-minded thinker in his own right and believed that a
basic knowledge of science was necessary for a "world citizen," as he
might put it. Still, one might question how necessary this is for a
history of human endeavors. But any debate on that point would obscure
the sense of empowerment this material could give to the first
readers.
We have been inundated for so long with "Big Bang" theories and popular
films about dinosaurs and documentaries on cave-paintings and the like
that we tend to forget that just about all the knowledge represented by
these topics is quite recent. Wells himself was born while most of the
great innovators in geology, astronomy, paleontology, biology, physics,
anthropology, and philology were still alive. At least in the broad
outline we are reading material today that is just as valid as it was
supposed to be in 1920. But readers in the 1920s were examining material
that in 1820 was in its entirety almost completely unknown. Surely that
first generation of readers of The Outline of History felt a sense
of intellectual pride and even ownership that we can only guess at—surely
they felt far more inclined to follow Mr. Wells in his search for a
better world when they saw how much the human mind was capable of
reconstructing, recuperating, or theorizing.
It is much the same with Wells' treatment of his scholarly "co-authors."
Until the fourth edition, Wells not only put their names on the title
page, but allowed them to argue with him in the footnotes. This has the
effect of letting his readers understand the nature of intellectual
inquiry: It proceeds by debate, not by fiat. And the mere fact that Wells
does not change the text to conform to expert opinion indicates his
continuing disagreement. Such editorial behavior, one would suspect, is
empowering, as it shows that the common man can argue with experts. After
all, it is unreasonable to expect the ordinary reader to retain many of
the names, dates, and events that inevitably assault the brain when
reading a rapid-fire history like the Outline. If the reader
emerged from the experience more tolerant, more aware of a vast scope of
time and cultures outside his own, and with the confidence that he could
play a significant and intelligent part on the world stage, then Wells
surely would have achieved his goal.
With the passing of time, it is fair to ask whether there was anything
that Wells, his first readers, and his first reviewers did not notice
that we might find offensive or at least insensitive today. The answer is
yes, and the problem lies where one probably would have guessed. In spite
of Wells' "universalizing" tendencies and his attempt to avoid
privileging certain Western traditions, he is still a child of the West,
and he clearly displays a Eurocentric bias even is his treatment of early
man, where far more attention is paid to the ancestors of modern
Europeans than to those of other groups. And he is equally prejudiced in
favor of the Indo-European family of languages (the group which includes
almost all European languages, ancient and modern). This not only proves
that Wells and his uncomplaining readers and reviewers were products of
their time, it also shows how "science" can mislead. For in both these
endeavors, Wells was dependent on the very scholars he had sought out to
keep him from error. The section on the "languages of man," for example,
is almost wholly derived from the Britannica, and represents
current or nearly current—the field was fast changing—thinking and
methodology on the subject.
But there is no reason to read The Outline of History to find
these historical "slips" or diminish Wells' accomplishment. It is far
more rewarding to read the work in its first edition for the enjoyment
and knowledge it still brings, and at the same time to intuit the wonder
and respect many ordinary readers in search of enlightenment must have
felt as they worked their way through Mr. Wells' emancipating history of
life and mankind.
William T. Ross is Professor of English at the University of South
Florida in Tampa. He is the author of H. G. Wells's World Reborn: The
Outline of History and its Companions (2002) and many other studies
of twentieth century literature and culture.
