Wells earned a government scholarship in 1884, to study biology under Thomas Henry Huxley at the Normal School of Science. The headmaster of Midhurst Grammar School, where he had spent a year, arranged for him to return as an 'usher,' or student teacher. Young Wells received a spotty education, interrupted by several illnesses and family difficulties, and became a draper's apprentice as a teenager. Herbert George Wells was born to a working class family in Kent, England. He is at first mistaken for a bird because of his dazzling polychromatic plumage, for he is neither the Angel of religious feeling nor the Angel of popular belief, but rather the Angel of Italian art. The Wonderful Visit tells how an angel spends a little more than a week in southern England. Oppressed and uneducated, the masses cling desperately to one dream – that the sleeper will awake, and lead them all to freedom. But when he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover that the money accumulated in his name is being used to maintain a hierarchal society in which most are poor, and more than a third of all people are enslaved. During his centuries of slumber, however, investments are made that make him the richest and most powerful man on Earth. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web.Ī troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls suddenly into a sleep-like trance, from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and has been called the 'father of science fiction.'In addition to his fame as a writer, he was prominent in his lifetime as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography and autobiography. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer.

When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells