 |
 First edition | |
| Author | H. G. Wells |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Social novel |
| Publisher | Macmillan |
Publication date | 1905 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 380 |
| Text | Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul at Wikisource |
Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul is a novel by H. G. Wells, first published in 1905. It was reportedly Wells's own favourite among his works, [1] and it has been adapted for stage, cinema and television productions, including the musical Half a Sixpence .
The eponymous character is Arthur "Artie" Kipps, an illegitimate orphan. In Book I, "The Making of Kipps", he is raised by his aged aunt and uncle, who keep a little shop in New Romney on the southeastern coast of Kent. He attends the Cavendish Academy – "a middle-class school", not a "board school" [2] – in Hastings in East Sussex. "By inherent nature he had a sociable disposition", [3] and he befriends Sid Pornick, the son of a neighbour. Kipps also falls in love with Sid's younger sister, Ann. Ann gives him half a sixpence as a token of their love when, at 14, he is apprenticed to the Folkestone Drapery Bazaar, run by Mr Shalford.
The Pornicks move away and Kipps forgets Ann. He becomes infatuated with Helen Walshingham, who teaches a woodcarving class on Thursday nights. Chitterlow, an actor and aspiring playwright, meets Kipps by running into him with his bicycle, and they have a drunken evening together that leads to Kipps being "swapped" (dismissed) from his job. Chitterlow then brings to his attention a newspaper advertisement that leads to an unexpected inheritance for Kipps from his grandfather of a house and £26,000. [4]
In Book II, "Mr Coote the Chaperon", Kipps fails in his attempt to adapt to his new position in the social hierarchy of Folkestone. By chance he meets a Mr Coote, who undertakes his social education. That leads to renewed contact with Helen Walshingham, and they become engaged. However, the process of bettering himself alienates Kipps more and more, especially since Helen makes it clear that she wants to take advantage of Kipps' fortune to establish herself and her brother in London society. Chance meetings with Sid, who has become a socialist, and then with Ann, who is now a housemaid, lead Kipps to abandon social conventions and his engagement to Helen, and marry his childhood sweetheart.
In Book III, "Kippses", the attempt to find a house suitable to his new status precipitates Kipps back into a struggle with the "complex and difficult" English social system. Kipps and Ann quarrel. Then they learn that Helen's brother, a solicitor, has lost most of their fortune through speculation. That leads to a happier situation when Kipps opens a branch of the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited) in Hythe and they have a son. The success of Chitterlow's play, in which Kipps has invested £2,000, restores their fortune, but they are content to remain shopkeepers in a small coastal town.
Kipps is a rags-to-riches study in class differences, and the novel's chief dramatic interest is in how the protagonist negotiates the intellectual, moral and emotional difficulties that come with wealth and a change of social status. Kipps is the only character in the novel who is fully developed and all events are narrated from his point of view. A narrator's voice offers occasional comments, but only towards the end of the novel does this voice speak out in a page-long denunciation of "the ruling power of this land, Stupidity," which is "a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden Goddess of the Dunciad, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life". [5]
Kipps's friend Sid becomes a socialist and houses a boarder, Masterman, who argues that society "is hopelessly out of joint. Man is a social animal with a mind nowadays that goes around the globe, and a community cannot be happy in one part and unhappy in another.... Society is one body, and it is either well or ill. That's the law. This society we live in is ill." [6] However, while Kipps admires Masterman and is in part receptive to his point of view, he tells Ann that "I don't agree with this socialism." [7] At one time Wells intended to develop Masterman into a major character who would convert Kipps to socialism, and he wrote several versions in which he played an important role at the end of the novel. [8]
The speech of Artie Kipps is a careful rendering of the pronunciation of the English language as Wells first learned it. Kipps never masters another way of speaking, and after much effort he reverts to the manner of his upbringing: "'Speckylated it!' said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm that failed to illustrate. 'Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann.'" [9]
Wells worked on Kipps for seven years, completing a draft entitled The Wealth of Mr Waddy in January 1899 and finishing the novel as it now exists in May 1904. [10] Kipps changed considerably over this period of extended drafting: the manuscript, now in the Wells Archive at the University of Illinois, consists of more than 6,000 sheets, and includes, in the words of Harris Wilson, "literally scores of false starts, digressions, and abandoned episodes." [11]
In the finished novel Book 1 and Book 2 are of roughly comparable lengths, but Book 3 is much shorter. This disproportion reflects the fact that originally the third Book contained an extended episode in which the consumptive socialist Masterman visits Kipps in Hythe and dies slowly, lecturing about revolution as he goes and speculating about the possibilities of utopian communism. Critics have praised Wells for cutting this episode, whilst also seeing it as a sign of things to come in his writing career: "Wells, in this episode, slips into the discursive and didactic; his characters are almost forgotten as they expound his own social ideas and criticism ... [it is] Wells's first substantial attempt, and acknowledged failure, since he left it out, to reconcile narrative and ideology." [12]
Wells was eager for the novel to succeed, and he harassed his publisher, Macmillan, with ideas for unorthodox publicity stunts, such as sending men with sandwich boards into the theatre district in the West End of London, or posters saying "Kipps Worked Here" outside Portsmouth & Southsea Railway Station. [13]
Though Kipps eventually became one of Wells's most successful novels, at first it was slow to sell. While 12,000 copies had been sold by the end of 1905, more than a quarter of a million had been sold by the 1920s. [14]
The novel received high praise from Henry James, but Arnold Bennett complained that it showed "ferocious hostility to about five-sixths of the characters". [15]
Wells's biographer David C. Smith calls the novel "a masterpiece" and argued that with Kipps, The History of Mr Polly , and Tono-Bungay , Wells "is able to claim a permanent place in English fiction, close to Dickens, because of the extraordinary humanity of some of the characters, but also because of his ability to invoke a place, a class, a social scene." [16]
Kipps has been adapted for other media several times.
Herbert George Wells was an English writer, prolific in many genres. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells' science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the "father of science fiction".
Love and Mr Lewisham is a 1900 novel set in the 1880s by H. G. Wells. It was among his first fictional writings outside the science fiction genre. Wells took considerable pains over the manuscript and said that "the writing was an altogether more serious undertaking than I have ever done before." He later included it in a 1933 anthology, Stories of Men and Women in Love.
The Seven Dials Mystery is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by William Collins & Sons on 24 January 1929 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year.
Half a Sixpence is a 1963 musical comedy based on the 1905 novel Kipps by H. G. Wells, with music and lyrics by David Heneker and a book by Beverley Cross. It was written as a vehicle for British pop star Tommy Steele.
Alan Beverley Cross was an English playwright, librettist, and screenwriter.
Anthony Drewe is a British lyricist and book writer for Broadway and West End musicals. He is best known for his collaborations with George Stiles.
Half a Sixpence is a 1967 British musical film directed by George Sidney starring Tommy Steele, Julia Foster and Cyril Ritchard. It was choreographed by Gillian Lynne. The screenplay by Beverley Cross is adapted from his book for the 1963 stage musical of the same name, which was based on Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul, the 1905 novel by H. G. Wells. The music and lyrics are by David Heneker.
Kipps is a 1941 British comedy-drama film adaptation of H. G. Wells's 1905 novel of the same name. The film was directed by Carol Reed and stars Michael Redgrave as a draper's assistant who inherits a large fortune. The film's costumes were designed by Cecil Beaton.
In the Days of the Comet (1906) is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells in which humanity is "exalted" when a comet causes "the nitrogen of the air, the old azote," to "change out of itself" and become "a respirable gas, differing indeed from oxygen, but helping and sustaining its action, a bath of strength and healing for nerve and brain." The result: "The great Change has come for evermore, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men."
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.
Kipps is a 1921 British silent drama film directed by Harold M. Shaw and starring George K. Arthur, Edna Flugrath and Christine Rayner. It is an adaptation of the 1905 novel Kipps by H. G. Wells. It was made by Stoll Pictures, the largest film company in the British Isles at the time. The novel was subsequently remade into the 1941 sound film Kipps directed by Carol Reed.
Christina Alberta's Father (1925) is a novel by English writer H. G. Wells set in London and environs in 1920–1922 with two protagonists: Albert Edward Preemby and his daughter, Christina Alberta.
Select Conversations with an Uncle, published in 1895, was H. G. Wells's first literary publication in book form. It consists of reports of twelve conversations between a fictional witty uncle who has returned to London from South Africa with "a certain affluence," as well as two other conversations.
The Sea Lady is a fantasy novel by British writer H. G. Wells, incorporating elements of a fable. It was serialized from July to December 1901 in Pearson's Magazine before being published as a volume by Methuen. The inspiration for the novel came when Wells caught a glimpse of May Nisbet, the daughter of The Times drama critic, in a bathing suit during her visit to Sandgate. Wells had agreed to pay her school fees after her father's death.
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 Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is a 1914 novel by H. G. Wells.
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.
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.
Certain Personal Matters is an 1897 collection of essays selected by H. G. Wells from among the many short essays and ephemeral pieces he had written since 1893. The book consists of thirty-nine pieces ranging from about eight hundred to two thousand words in length. A one-shilling reprint was issued in 1901 by T. Fisher Unwin.
Half a Sixpence is a stage musical based on the 1905 novel Kipps by H. G. Wells and the original 1963 musical, with music by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, and lyrics by Anthony Drewe and Heneker, featuring several of the original songs by Heneker, and book by Julian Fellowes.
Kipps public domain audiobook at LibriVox