H.G. Wells' "Bookish Illiteracy"

In his Experiment in Autobiography there is a point at which H.G. Wells suggests that the "caricature-individualities" of his realist novels might not seem very relevant for long, that civilization would simply have moved on.

Of course, as with so much else in Wells, his creations remain relevant precisely because civilization did not move on in the way in which he imagined. The problems with which the world was wrestling in his time remain the ones which bedevil it now--the organization of human economic and social life in line with not just the possibilities presented but the necessities imposed by the advance of technology and of knowledge broadly. Economic life, war, "sanity"--considering the situation we are in now it can feel as if society has made little to no progress at all, the past century a waste or worse that has left people scarcely trying even as the challenge has got bigger and the stakes higher.

For the moment, though, I have in mind something rather lighter than those problems, like the "bookish illiteracy" of one of those caricature-individualities he specifically raised as likely to have lost its interest before very long, Alfred Polly (of his 1910 novel The History of Mr. Polly). Mr. Polly, Wells tells us, "specialised in," as he put it, "the disuse of English." This was because, while he was fascinated by "words rich in suggestion" and "loved] a novel and striking phrase," his limited formal education left him with "little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English"--with this getting worse the more exotic the material got. To him Boccacio is "Bocashieu," Rabelais "Rabooloose."

Still, in spite of his familiarity with such figures his reading was less a matter of middlebrow chasing after classics than of omnivorousness for anything in print, at least insofar as it promised to satisfy a taste for manly adventure, which was what got him into reading in the first place. "Penny dreadfuls" were a big part of his reading diet in those early adolescent years when he was bitten by the bug, with their Haggardesque tales of tropical exploration and dives into the mysteries beneath the sea and battles where young Polly vicariously "led stormers against well-nigh impregnable forts," and "rammed and torpedoed ships, one against ten." And the habit stuck, such that later he liked "Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne."*

Considering all this it seems to me that this is all very far from being irrelevant. Indeed, those of us who have ever been bookish have likely been that before we became "literate" (How do you get to be good at reading if you don't do much of it? And who has not mispronounced words they read but did not hear?); or our taste in that reading (as we are unlikely to become enthusiastic readers if it is all a matter of "eating your vegetables"). Certainly looking back at what--and how--I read at his age I do not think I was so different. If I now bore the readers of this blog by writing about people like Balzac--and Wells' realist novels--the author favored back then was Clive Cussler, a teller of adventure stories where exploration and the sea and battles all figure very prominently (if with rather less of the Victorian sensibility that so colored Polly's consumption), while I might add that even today Dumas' Vicomte appeals to me less than does his preceding tales of Athos, Aramis, Porthos and D'Artagnan.

Of course, it may be the case that Wells did not imagine this ceasing to be the case so much as he imagined it not being the case for anyone in adulthood--that complete literacy would be universalized, and certainly that anyone bookish in inclination would not, through the premature end of a poorly conducted formal education, pronounce "Boccacio" as "Bocashieu." In that case one could give him some credit for being right about Polly-like "bookish illiteracy" becoming less relevant--though not in the way he expected or hoped. In our time it is not illiteracy that appears to be on the wane, but rather bookishness, particularly the kind associated with plain and simple literary pleasure.

* Vicomte is the third novel in Dumas' cycle about the Musketeers, after the original The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After--and not just to Polly but anyone expecting a swashbuckler in the style of the prior two apt to be a disappointment, one reason why film adaptations of Vicomte de Bragelonne are very rare next to the others. (Still, they do take part of the book--specifically the portion now remembered as The Man with the Iron Mask, where we do get some "blood and swash.")