 First edition | |
| Author | H. G. Wells |
|---|---|
| Original title | Bealby: A Holiday |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Methuen Publishing |
Publication date | 1915 |
| Pages | 291 |
| Preceded by | Boon |
| Followed by | The Research Magnificent |
Bealby: A Holiday is a 1915 comic novel by H. G. Wells.
Bealby is the story of the escapade of a thirteen-year-old boy when he rebels against his placement as a steward's-room boy in the great house of an estate named Shonts (his stepfather, Mr. Darling, is a gardener there) and flees—not, however, before thoroughly upsetting a weekend party where the nouveau riche couple renting Shonts is entertaining the Lord Chancellor. Bealby's week-long "holiday" has three phases.
First, he is taken up by three women in caravan, one of whom, Madeleine Philips, is a well-known actress whose beauty inspires in Bealby an adoring infatuation. Miss Philips is also the lover of a Captain Douglas, a guest at Shonts who has been wrongly blamed for wrecking the weekend party there. Captain Douglas believes he must capture Bealby and use his testimony to exonerate himself in the Lord Chancellor's eyes, but when Bealby gets wind of this he flees—not, however, before accidentally wrecking the party's bulky, yellow caravan.
Bealby then falls in with Billy Bridget, an amoral tramp who takes his money and persuades him to abet a burglary. This goes awry, and Bealby runs away. But when he buys a meal in Crayminster he is recognized as a runaway. Bealby escapes, but not before the attempt to catch him has wrought havoc in the town.
Bealby's spirit of revolt is by now thoroughly cowed, and when he chances upon Captain Douglas, who has been looking for him, he offers no resistance. Douglas takes him to London, but through no fault of Bealby's the effort to exonerate the captain in the eyes of the Lord Chancellor fails miserably.
The novel concludes with Captain Douglas renouncing his passion for Madeleine Philips and a contrite Bealby returning to Shonts and telling his mother he is willing to "'ave another go" at a career in domestic service. [1]
In addition to evoking the author's early revolt from the modest circumstances into which he was born, Bealby satirizes a variety of features of English life on the eve of World War I. These include the popularity of Hegelianism of the British Idealist school (the Lord Chancellor is an amateur philosopher), the fashion of weekend parties, the cultivation of wealthy patrons by political parties, the ill-prepared state of the British military, and the egotism of small entrepreneurs (represented by Mr. Benshaw, a Crayminster horticulturalist).
Wells modeled Captain Douglas on J. W. Dunne, an aeronautical engineer whom he had befriended and encouraged in 1902. [2] [3]
In a preface to the English edition (omitted from the U.S. edition) dedicating the book to Richard Burdon Haldane, Great Britain's Lord Chancellor. Wells warned that his book's Lord Chancellor was not "meant for him." In fact he was, but in wartime Wells wished to pay homage to Haldane's work as Secretary of War from 1905 to 1912. [4]
H.G. Wells wrote Bealby while also working on The Research Magnificent and Boon. It was serialized in England in Grand Magazine from August 1914 to March 1915, and in the United States in Collier's beginning with the 20 June 1914 issue. [5]
Biographer David C. Smith considers Bealby "a very funny book," but a "neglected" one. [6] For Michael Sherborne, Bealby, Bridget, and Douglas represent various "aspects of Wells." [7]
Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, was a British lawyer and philosopher and an influential Liberal and later Labour politician. He was Secretary of State for War between 1905 and 1912 during which time the "Haldane Reforms" of the British Army were implemented. As an intellectual he was fascinated with German thought. That led to his role in seeking detente with Germany in 1912 in the Haldane Mission. The mission was a failure and tensions with Berlin forced London to work more closely with Paris.
The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution was published in 1928 by H. G. Wells, when he was 62 years old. It was revised and expanded in 1930 with the additional subtitle A Second Version of This Faith of a Modern Man Made More Explicit and Plain. In 1931 a further revised edition appeared titled What Are We to Do with Our Lives?. A final version appeared in 1933 under its original title. Many of its ideas are anticipated in Wells's 1926 novel The World of William Clissold.
"The Empire of the Ants" is a 1905 short story by H. G. Wells about the littleness of humanity and the tenuousness of the dominion Homo sapiens enjoys on Earth. A 1977 film, Empire of the Ants, was loosely based on Wells' story.
A Modern Utopia is a 1905 novel by H. G. Wells.
The Wonderful Visit is an 1895 novel by H. G. Wells. With an angel—a creature of fantasy unlike a religious angel—as protagonist and taking place in contemporary England, the book could be classified as contemporary fantasy, although the genre was not recognised in Wells's time. The Wonderful Visit also has strong satirical themes, gently mocking customs and institutions of Victorian England as well as idealistic rebellion itself.
Meanwhile is a 1927 novel by H. G. Wells set in an Italian villa early in 1926.
The Story of a Great Schoolmaster is a 1924 biography of Frederick William Sanderson (1857–1922) by H. G. Wells. It is the only biography Wells wrote. Sanderson was a personal friend, having met Wells in 1914 when his sons George Philip ('Gip'), born in 1901, and Frank Richard, born in 1903, became pupils at Oundle School, of which Sanderson was headmaster from 1892 to 1922. After Sanderson died, while giving a lecture at University College London, at which he was introduced by Wells, the famous author agreed to help produce a biography to raise money for the school. But in December 1922, after disagreements emerged with Sanderson's widow about his approach to the subject, Wells withdrew from the official biography and published his own work separately.
The New Machiavelli is a 1911 novel by H. G. Wells that was serialised in the English Review in 1910. Because its plot notoriously derived from Wells's affair with Amber Reeves and satirised Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was "the literary scandal of its day."
The Future in America: A Search After Realities is a 1906 travel essay by H. G. Wells recounting his impressions from the first of half a dozen visits he would make to the United States. The book consists of fifteen chapters and a concluding "envoy".
First and Last Things is a 1908 work of philosophy by H. G. Wells setting forth his beliefs in four "books" entitled "Metaphysics," "Of Belief," "Of General Conduct," and "Some Personal Things." Parts of the book were published in the Independent Magazine in July and August 1908. Wells revised the book extensively in 1917, in response to his religious conversion, but later published a further revision in 1929 that restored much of the book to its earlier form. Its main intellectual influences are Darwinism and certain German thinkers Wells had read, such as August Weismann. The pragmatism of William James, who had become a friend of Wells, was also an influence.
The Passionate Friends is a 1913 coming of age novel by H. G. Wells detailing the life and travels of a young man. It is notable as the first introduction of Wells's notion of an "open conspiracy" of individuals to achieve a world state.
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is a 1914 novel by H. G. Wells.
An Englishman Looks at the World is a 1914 essay collection by H. G. Wells containing journalistic pieces written between 1909 and 1914. The book consists of twenty-six pieces ranging from five to sixty-two pages in length. An American edition was published the same year by Harper and Brothers under the title Social Forces in England and America.
The Undying Fire, a 1919 novel by H. G. Wells, is a modern retelling of the story of Job. Like the Book of Job, it consists of a prologue in heaven, an exchange of speeches with four visitors, a dialogue between the protagonist and God, and an epilogue in which the protagonist's fortunes are restored. The novel is dedicated "to All Schoolmasters and Schoolmistresses and every Teacher in the World."
Experiment in Autobiography is an autobiographical work by H.G. Wells, originally published in two volumes. He began to write it in 1932, and completed it in the summer of 1934.
The Bulpington of Blup is a 1932 novel by H. G. Wells. It is a character study analyzing the psychological sources of resistance to Wellsian ideology, and was influenced by Wells's acquaintance with Carl Gustav Jung and his ideas.
All Aboard for Ararat is a 1940 allegorical novella by H. G. Wells that tells a modernized version of the story of Noah and the Flood. Wells was 74 when it was published, and it is the last of his utopian writings.
The Holy Terror is a 1939 work by H. G. Wells that is in part an analysis of fascism and in part a utopian novel.
Joan and Peter, a 1918 novel by H. G. Wells, is at once a satirical portrait of late-Victorian and Edwardian England, a critique of the English educational system on the eve of World War I, a study of the impact of that war on English society, and a general reflection on the purposes of education. Wells regarded it as "one of the most ambitious" of his novels.
Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, generally known as Anticipations, was written by H.G. Wells at the age of 34. He later called the book, which became a bestseller, "the keystone to the main arch of my work." His most recent biographer, however, calls the volume "both the starting point and the lowest point in Wells's career as a social thinker."
Bealby; A Holiday public domain audiobook at LibriVox