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  KIPPS

  The Story of a Simple Soul

  H.G. Wells

  Foreward By Sheila Williams

  Kipps

  by H.G. Wells

  Originally published in 1906. This work is in the Public Domain.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-091-5

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-090-8

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-092-2

  * * *

  Edited by Ashley M. King

  Cover design by Janet McDonald

  Cover artwork images by Adobe Stock

  Foreword © 2020, Sheila Williams.

  Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

  Published by

  WordFire Press, LLC

  PO Box 1840

  Monument CO 80132

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  WordFire Press eBook Edition 2020

  WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2020

  WordFire Press Hardcover Edition 2020

  Printed in the USA

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  Description

  The most successful mainstream novel of H.G. Wells, now finally back in print.

  * * *

  Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul

  Until he reached manhood, it was not clear to Kipps how he came to be under the care of an aunt and uncle, instead of having a father and mother like other little boys.

  But the elusive memories of his phantom mother that plagued him began to fade away over time. His life’s memories begin to be filled with childhood friendship and love, until that too was taken away.

  Now, after coming into an unsuspected inheritance, Kipps tries to adapt to a new social life, one that challenges him in a way he didn’t expect. With money and newfound love, one might think that Kipps would be on top of the world, but he soon finds out that he was better off without it…

  Long unavailable to readers, Kipps is a classic rags-to-riches story that addresses the moral and emotional difficulties that come with wealth and a change of social station. It will make you think, have you laughing, and capture your heart.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Book I

  1. Chapter the First

  2. Chapter the Second

  3. Chapter the Third

  4. Chapter the Fourth

  5. Chapter the Fifth

  6. Chapter the Sixth

  Book II

  1. Chapter the First

  2. Chapter the Second

  3. Chapter the Third

  4. Chapter the Fourth

  5. Chapter the Fifth

  6. Chapter the Sixth

  7. Chapter the Seventh

  8. Chapter the Eighth

  9. Chapter the Ninth

  Book III

  1. Chapter the First

  2. Chapter the Second

  3. Chapter the Third

  About the Author

  If You Liked …

  Other WordFire Press Titles

  Foreword

  A Glimpse of the Future

  Sheila Williams

  There is a superficial contention that all arguments in philosophy are just a continuation of a divide between the thinking of Plato and Aristotle. In this debate, the split between rationalism and empiricism is traced back to Plato’s concept of an a priori knowledge and Aristotle’s theory of the mind as a tabula rasa. For Plato truth is unchanging and eternal and can be determined through reasoning, while Aristotle seems to hold that we learn about the world through sensory experience. It has always seemed to me that people who make this observation about Plato and Aristotle are claiming that all further developments in Western philosophy are simply an extension of a difference of opinion between these two great thinkers.

  Similar claims have been made about two of the earliest science fiction authors—H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. People have argued that they represent all sorts of splits in fantastic literature and that these splits are the two most fundamental branches of field. Some claim the split is between the physical sciences and the social sciences. Others counter with the claim that the divide is between the pure adventurism of Jules Verne and the serious science of Wells.

  Wells himself thought that Verne’s fiction embodied the essence of science fiction, while his own work seemed to be fantasies. In his preface to Seven Famous Novels, the omnibus collection of many of his science fiction books, he wrote:

  “[Verne’s] work dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts. The interest he invoked was a practical one; he wrote and believed and told that this or that thing could be done, which was not at the time done. He helped his reader to imagine it done and to realize what fun, excitement or mischief would ensue. Many of his inventions have ‘come true.’ But these stories of mine … do not pretend to deal with possible things. … They are fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as a good gripping dream. They have to hold the reader to the end of art and illusion and not to proof and argument, and the moment he closes the cover and reflects he wakes up to their impossibility.”

  Yet, many in the science fiction field do not agree with Wells’s own interpretation of his fiction. Science fiction author and critic Paul Di Filippo says of his influence on fantastic fiction: “It’s amazing how many SF templates were first codified by H.G. Wells. Alien invasion, time travel, bioengineering, future warfare, post-apocalyptic ruination. He really pioneered much of the territory that the rest of us would dwell in.” (Asimov’s, July/August 2020)

  So it’s possible to hold that just as all developments in western philosophy are an extension of the work of Plato and Aristotle, all modern science fiction is a continuation of the work of Verne and Wells, or even Wells alone. From The Time Machine to The Island of Doctor Moreau, one area he certainly pioneered was the application of social commentary to science fiction and fantasy. Authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, George Orwell, and Suzanne Collins have continued this rich tradition.

  Eventually Wells gave up writing fantastic fiction and focused exclusively on social novels. His own favorite was the well-regarded and highly successful Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul. I’m sure you will enjoy it, too.

  Book I

  The Making of KIPPS

  Chapter the First

  The Little Shop at New Romney

  Until he was nearly arrived at manhood, it did not become clear to Kipps how it was that he was under the care of an aunt and uncle instead of having a father and mother like other little boys. Yet he had vague memories of a somewhere else that was not New Romney—of a dim room, a window looking down on white buildings—and of a someone else who talked to forgotten people, and who was his mother. He could not recall her features very distinctly, but he remembered with extreme definition a white dress she w
ore, with a pattern of little sprigs of flowers and little bows of ribbon upon it, and a girdle of straight-ribbed white ribbon about the waist. Linked with this, he knew not how, were clouded half-obliterated recollections of scenes in which there was weeping, weeping in which he was inscrutably moved to join. Some terrible tall man with a loud voice played a part in these scenes, and either before or after them there were impressions of looking for interminable periods out of the windows of railway trains in the company of these two people.

  He knew, though he could not remember that he had ever been told, that a certain faded, wistful face, that looked at him from a plush and gilt-framed daguerreotype above the mantel of the “sitting-room,” was the face of his mother. But that knowledge did not touch his dim memories with any elucidation. In that photograph, she was a girlish figure, leaning against a photographer’s stile, and with all the self-conscious shrinking natural to that position. She had curly hair and a face far younger and prettier than any other mother in his experience. She swung a Dolly Varden hat by the string and looked with obedient, respectful eyes on the photographer-gentleman who had commanded the pose. She was very slight and pretty. But the phantom mother that haunted his memory so elusively was not like that, though he could not remember how she differed. Perhaps she was older, or a little less shrinking, or, it may be, only dressed in a different way …

  It is clear she handed him over to his aunt and uncle at New Romney with explicit directions and a certain endowment. One gathers she had something of that fine sense of social distinctions that subsequently played so large a part in Kipps’ career. He was not to go to a “common” school, she provided, but to a certain seminary in Hastings that was not only a “middle-class academy,” with mortarboards and every evidence of a higher social tone, but also remarkably cheap. She seems to have been animated by the desire to do her best for Kipps, even at a certain sacrifice of herself, as though Kipps were, in some way, a superior sort of person. She sent pocket-money to him from time to time for a year or more after Hastings had begun for him, but her face he never saw in the days of his lucid memory.

  His aunt and uncle were already high on the hill of life when first he came to them. They had married for comfort in the evening, or at any rate in the late afternoon, of their days. They were at first no more than vague figures in the background of proximate realities, such realities as familiar chairs and tables, quiet to ride and drive, the newel of the staircase, kitchen furniture, pieces of firewood, the boiler tap, old newspapers, the cat, the High Street, the backyard and the flat fields that are always so near in that little town. He knew all the stones in the yard individually, the creeper in the corner, the dustbin and the mossy wall, better than many men know the faces of their wives. There was a corner under the ironing board which by means of a shawl could, under propitious gods, be made a very decent cubby house, a corner that served him for several years as the indisputable hub of the world; and the stringy places in the carpet, the knots upon the dresser, and the several corners of the rag hearthrug his uncle had made, became essential parts of his mental foundations. The shop he did not know so thoroughly—it was a forbidden region to him, yet somehow, he managed to know it very well.

  His aunt and uncle were, as it were, the immediate gods of this world; and, like the gods of the world of old, occasionally descended right into it, with arbitrary injunctions and disproportionate punishments. And, unhappily, one rose to their Olympian level at meals. Then one had to say one’s “grace,” hold one’s spoon and fork in mad, unnatural ways called “properly,” and refrain from eating even nice sweet things “too fast.” If he “gobbled” there was trouble, and at the slightest abandon with knife, fork, and spoon, his aunt rapped his knuckles, albeit his uncle always finished up his gravy with his knife. Sometimes, moreover, his uncle would come, pipe in hand, out of a sedentary remoteness in the most disconcerting way, when a little boy was doing the most natural and attractive things, with “Drat and drabbit that young rascal! What’s he a-doing of now?” And his aunt would appear at door or window to interrupt an interesting conversation with children who were upon unknown grounds considered “low” and undesirable and call him in. The pleasantest little noises, however softly you did them, drumming on tea trays, trumpeting your fists, whistling on keys, ringing chimes with a couple of pails, or playing tunes on the windowpanes, brought down the gods in anger. Yet, what noise is fainter than your finger on the window—gently done? Sometimes, however, these gods gave him broken toys out of the shop, and then one loved them better—for the shop they kept was, among other things, a toy shop. (The other things included books to read and books to give away and local photographs; it had some pretensions also to be a china shop, and the fascia spoke of glass. It was also a stationer’s shop with a touch of haberdashery about it, and in the windows, and odd corners were mats, and terra-cotta dishes, and milking stools for painting. There was a hint of picture frames, and fire screens, and fishing tackle, and air guns, and bathing suits, and tents: various things, indeed, but all cruelly attractive to a small boy’s fingers.) Once his aunt gave him a trumpet if he would promise faithfully not to blow it, and afterward took it away again. And his aunt made him say his catechism and something she certainly called the “Colic for the Day” every Sunday in the year.

  As the two grew old while he grew up, and as his impression of them modified insensibly from year to year, it seemed to him at last that they had always been as they were when, in his adolescent days, his impression of things grew fixed. His aunt he thought of as always lean, rather worried-looking, and prone to a certain obliquity of cap, and his uncle massive, many-chinned, and careless about his buttons. They neither visited nor received visitors. They were always very suspicious about their neighbors and other people generally; they feared the “low” and they hated and despised the “stuck-up,” and so they “kept themselves to themselves,” according to the English ideal. Consequently, little Kipps had no playmates, except through the sin of disobedience. By inherent nature he had a sociable disposition. When he was in the High Street, he made a point of saying “Hello!” to passing cyclists, and he would put his tongue out at the Quodling children whenever their nursemaid was not looking. And he began a friendship with Sid Pornick, the son of the haberdasher next door, that, with wide intermissions, was destined to last his lifetime through.

  Pornick, the haberdasher, I may say at once, was, according to Old Kipps, a “blaring jackass”; he was a teetotaller, a “nyar, nyar, ’im-singing Methodis’,” and altogether distasteful and detrimental, he and his together, to true Kipps ideals, so far as little Kipps could gather them. This Pornick certainly possessed an enormous voice, and he annoyed Old Kipps greatly by calling, “You—Arn” and “Siddee,” up and down his house. He annoyed Old Kipps by private choral services on Sunday, all his family “nyar, nyar-ing”; and by mushroom culture; by behaving as though the pilaster between the two shops was common property; by making a noise of hammering in the afternoon, when Old Kipps wanted to be quiet after his midday meal; by going up and down uncarpeted stairs in his boots; by having a black beard; by attempting to be friendly; and by—all that sort of thing. In fact, he annoyed Old Kipps. He annoyed him especially with his shop doormat. Old Kipps never beat his mat, preferring to let sleeping dust lie; and, seeking a motive for a foolish proceeding, he held that Pornick waited until there was a suitable wind in order that the dust disengaged in that operation might defile his neighbor’s shop. These issues would frequently develop into loud and vehement quarrels, and on one occasion came so near to violence as to be subsequently described by Pornick (who read his newspaper) as a “Disgraceful Frackass.” On that occasion, he certainly went into his own shop with extreme celerity.

  But it was through one of these quarrels that the friendship of little Kipps and Sid Pornick came about. The two small boys found themselves one day looking through the gate at the doctor’s goats together; they exchanged a few contradictions about which goat could fight whi
ch, and then young Kipps was moved to remark that Sid’s father was a “blaring jackass.” Sid said he wasn’t, and Kipps repeated that he was, and quoted his authority. Then Sid, flying off at a tangent rather alarmingly, said he could fight young Kipps with one hand, an assertion young Kipps with a secret want of confidence denied. There were some vain repetitions, and the incident might have ended there, but happily, a sporting butcher boy chanced on the controversy at this stage and insisted upon seeing fair play.

  The two small boys under his pressing encouragement did at last button up their jackets, square and fight an edifying drawn battle, until it seemed good to the butcher boy to go on with Mrs. Holyer’s mutton. Then, according to his directions and under his experienced stage management, they shook hands and made it up. Subsequently, a little tear-stained perhaps, but flushed with the butcher boy’s approval (“tough little kids”), and with cold stones down their necks as he advised, they sat side by side on the doctor’s gate, projecting very much behind, staunching an honorable bloodshed, and expressing respect for one another. Each had a bloody nose and a black eye—three days later, they matched to a shade—neither had given in and, though this was tacit, neither wanted anymore.