Wells trained as a science teacher: his first published books were Text-Book of Biology, and Honours Physiography, co-written with the astronomer and science writer Richard Gregory. The urge to teach his reader something for his or her own good runs through Wells’s entire career, from his early science journalism in the 1880s until his death in 1946.

Text-book of Biology

wells-570-w46t-cop-1_rv_300H. G. Wells (1866-1946). Text-book of Biology. London: W.B. Clive & Co., University Correspondence College Press, [1893].
Wells 570 W46t cop. 1

Text-Book of Biology begins with instructions in how to dissect a rabbit: this copy, originally owned by Amy Catherine Robbins, the student who became Wells’s second wife, is inscribed with the author’s cartoon of a giant rabbit dissecting H. G. Wells.

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The outline of history, being a plain history of life and mankind

worldmap_300H. G. Wells. The outline of history, being a plain history of life and mankind. London: G. Newnes, [1919-20].
Wells Q. 909 W46o 1919 vol. 2, part. 24, cop. 2

Wells believed that the cause of war was the idea of the nation state. He argued that if everyone in the world were to be correctly educated about the common evolutionary origin of all human beings, nationhood would be exposed as a fiction and war would end. The Outline of History, written after the First World War, and Wells’s best-selling book in his lifetime, was intended as a history of the world from the dawn of early man to the future World State.

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The Idea of a World Encyclopedia

nature_300H. G. Wells. ‘The Idea of a World Encyclopedia.’ Nature, 138, no. 3500 (28 November 1936) : 917-24.
Q. 505N

In his quest for worldwide education, Wells later turned to the idea of a universal encyclopedia, a World Brain, from which everyone would be able to educate themselves, and achieve greater intellectual and political freedom. In Wells’s 1936 address to the Royal Institution, published in Nature, he foresees something like the world-wide web, or a version of Wikipedia.

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The Shop of Authorship

wells-picshua-box-1_shopofauthorship_rv_300H. G. Wells. Picshua [sketch] ‘The Shop of Authorship.’ [November 1895]. Wells Picshua Box 1

Wells was an accomplished cartoonist, although the only one of his books that he extensively illustrated was his 1934 Experiment in Autobiography. This ‘picshua’ (as Wells called his cartoons) depicts Wells’s early success as a hard-working writer.

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