Englishman
The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language, a West Germanic language, and share a common history and culture. The English identity is of Anglo-Saxon origin, when they were known in ...
Edwardian
The Edwardian era or Edwardian period of British history spanned the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910 and is sometimes extended to the start of the First World War. The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 marked the end of the Victori ...
eras, Harry Mortimer Smith. As in other novels of this period, in ''The Dream'' Wells represents the present as an "Age of Confusion" from which humanity will be able to emerge with the help of science and common sense.
Synopsis
In circa 4,000 A.D., a biologist named Sarnac is taking a holiday among mountains and lakes with his lover, Sunray. With four other holiday travellers, they visit some 2,000-year-old "ancient remains f war deadthat had recently been excavated" in a nearby valley. A little later, after a brief afternoon nap, Sarnac awakens from "a very vivid dream." The rest of the novel consists of Sarnac's recounting of the dream, with occasional discussion of its particulars with his companions. Sarnac's dream brings with it total recall of the complete life of Harry Mortimer Smith. Smith's life and the institutions that structure it are the subject throughout the novel of a running commentary from the point of view of the achieved Utopia of 2,000 years later.
Harry Mortimer Smith was born in 1891 or 1892 in the fictional town of Cherry Gardens, in an area bordering the
South Downs
The South Downs are a range of chalk hills that extends for about across the south-eastern coastal counties of England from the Itchen valley of Hampshire in the west to Beachy Head, in the Eastbourne Downland Estate, East Sussex, in the eas ...
on the southern English coast. His father is a greengrocer who has trouble supporting his family because of the ignorance of birth control. He profits from the sale of produce from the nearby estate of Lord Bramble, where Harry Mortimer Smith's mother's brother, Uncle John Julip, works as head gardener.
Harry unwittingly exposes this theft when he is sent to work at Lord Bramble's estate, and as a result his uncle loses his job and comes to depend on the Smith household. Uncle John debauches Harry's weak-willed father, leading him to yield to the temptation to drink and bet on horses. The only person in the household that Harry esteems is his older sister Fanny, whom he helps run away to rejoin a lover in London. Harry's parents are scandalised by Fanny's sudden departure; shortly afterwards Smith ''père'' dies after being struck by an automobile.
Harry and his sister Prue go with their widowed mother to a boarding house in the central London district of Pimlico run by Matilda Good, a friend of the family. Wells was proud of some of the minor characters he sketched in this part of ''The Dream.''.
By chance, in London Harry reestablishes contact with his sister Fanny, who has become the
kept woman
A mistress is a woman who is in a relatively long-term sexual and romantic relationship with a man who is married to a different woman.
Description
A mistress is in a long-term relationship with her attached mister, and is often referred to ...
of an important publisher. This connection enables Harry to gain employment at Thunderstone House and the publishing firm of Crane & Newberry, where his star is still rising at the end of his life. In this part of the novel Wells analyses the importance of and limitations of popular publishers in the years before the First World War.
The conclusion of ''The Dream'' is chiefly concerned with Harry Mortimer Smith's love life. Just before going to fight in France he meets Hetty Marcus, the daughter of a farmer. They marry, but when Harry discovers that Hetty has been unfaithful to him in his absence and is carrying another man's child, he divorces her—despite the fact that he is still deeply in love with her. Wells uses the occasion to comment on English sexual mores of the day: "We had no
sexual education
Sex education, also known as sexual education, sexuality education or sex ed, is the instruction of issues relating to human sexuality, including emotional relations and responsibilities, human sexual anatomy, sexual activity, sexual reproduc ...
at all, only concealments and repressions. Our code was still the code of jealousy—thinly disguised. The pride and self-respect of a man was still bound up with the animal possession of women—the pride and self-respect of most women was by a sort of reflection bound up with the animal possession of a man. We felt that this possession was the keystone of life. Any failure in this central business involved a monstrous abasement, and against that our poor souls sought blindly for the most extravagant consolations. We hid things, we perverted and misrepresented things, we evade the issue."H.G. Wells, ''The Dream'' (New York: Macmillan, 1924), p. 260 (Ch. 6, §7).
Harry Mortimer Smith soon marries a woman who works at his place of business. They have a child, and his career prospers. But he becomes involved with Hetty again, and his life is abruptly ended in the early 1920s when he is murdered by Sumner, her jealous husband.
In an epilogue, Wells's characters discuss inconclusively the possibility of human
immortality
Immortality is the concept of eternal life. Some modern species may possess biological immortality.
Some scientists, futurists, and philosophers have theorized about the immortality of the human body, with some suggesting that human immorta ...
and the possibility of memories surviving death.
World War I
Smith becomes a soldier fighting against the Germans in
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
:
Nowadays of course nobody reads the books of the generals and admirals and politicians of that time, and all the official war histories sleep the eternal sleep in the vaults of the great libraries, but probably you have all read one of two such human books as
Enid Bagnold
Enid Algerine Bagnold, Lady Jones, (27 October 1889 – 31 March 1981) was a British writer and playwright known for the 1935 story ''National Velvet''.
Early life
Enid Algerine Bagnold was born on 27 October 1889 in Rochester, Kent, daughte ...
's '"Diary without Dates" or Cogswell's "Ermytage and the Curate" or
Barbusse
Henri Barbusse (; 17 May 1873 – 30 August 1935) was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party. He was a lifelong friend of Albert Einstein.
Life
The son of a French father and an English mother, Barbusse was born in Asnièr ...
's "Le Feu" or Arthur Green's "Story of a Prisoner of War" or that curious anthology, "The War Stories of Private Thomas Atkins"; and probably you have seen photographs and films and also pictures painted by such men as
Nevinson Nevinson is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
* Christopher R. W. Nevinson (1889–1946), English painter, etcher and lithographer
* Gennie Nevinson, Australian actress
* George Nevinson (1882–1963), British water polo player
* ...
Muirhead Bone
Sir Muirhead Bone (23 March 1876 – 21 October 1953) was a Scottish etcher and watercolourist who became known for his depiction of industrial and architectural subjects and his work as a war artist in both the First and Second World Wars.
A ...
and Will Rothenstein. All of them, I can certify now, are very true books and pictures. They tell of desolation passing like the shadow of an eclipse across the human scene."
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...