ith papersand a writing-table drawer-full," and the novel is by implication what his friend White, who has promised to "see after your book," has produced to acquit himself of the promise, since the papers themselves are "an indigestible aggregation."
Benham is a man of means due to curious circumstances: his mother left his father, a schoolmaster, for a wealthy man named Nolan who died soon thereafter, but not before leaving "about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs. Benham and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed himself to have injured." His mother subsequently marries a great London surgeon and becomes Lady Marayne; her indiscretion is forgiven and she enjoys a position of privilege.
The bulk of the novel recounts Benham's effort to live nobly, which brings him into conflict with his mother, with his friend Prothero, a schoolboy chum who becomes a
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...
don
Don, don or DON and variants may refer to:
Places
*County Donegal, Ireland, Chapman code DON
*Don (river), a river in European Russia
*Don River (disambiguation), several other rivers with the name
*Don, Benin, a town in Benin
*Don, Dang, a vill ...
, and with his wife, Amanda, a young woman he loves passionately but then leaves behind in England to travel the world (India, Russia, China) in search of wisdom.
It is in
Johannesburg
Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a megacity, and is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. According to Dem ...
, South Africa, that Benham is fatally shot while attempting to stop soldiers firing at strikers.
Themes
The body of the novel is preceded by a 55-page "prelude" entitled "On Fear and Aristocracy" that explains Benham's lifelong perplexity at the failure of human beings to be noble, and his early belief that the conquest of fear is the essence of the noble life. The six chapters of the novel, which tell Benham's life story, explore this perplexity. Benham dies in the midst of his quest, but his papers show that he has arrived at the tentative conclusion that there are four impediments, or "limitations" as he labels them, that keep human beings from living nobly: (1)
fear
Fear is an intensely unpleasant emotion in response to perceiving or recognizing a danger or threat. Fear causes physiological changes that may produce behavioral reactions such as mounting an aggressive response or fleeing the threat. Fear ...
; (2) self-indulgences, including
sex
Sex is the trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing animal or plant produces male or female gametes. Male plants and animals produce smaller mobile gametes (spermatozoa, sperm, pollen), while females produce larger ones ( ova, of ...
; (3)
jealousy
Jealousy generally refers to the thoughts or feelings of insecurity, fear, and concern over a relative lack of possessions or safety.
Jealousy can consist of one or more emotions such as anger, resentment, inadequacy, helplessness or disgus ...
; and (4)
prejudice
Prejudice can be an affective feeling towards a person based on their perceived group membership. The word is often used to refer to a preconceived (usually unfavourable) evaluation or classification of another person based on that person's per ...
(by the last he means "the most remarkable array of influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the purely personal dissensions between man and man.")
According to biographer David C. Smith, in ''The Research Magnificent'' Wells is "directly treating the early days of his life with
Rebecca West
Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books ...
, during which her possessive drive sometimes repelled him, but his sexual need brought him back"; features of his relationship with West include "the pet names, the violent and passionate early encounters, and the words, gestures, and 'business' which Wells needed so badly in his romantic life . . . and not in a comic way as was so often his method for dealing with such matters."
[David C. Smith, ''H.G. Wells: Desperately Human: A Biography'' (New Haven and London, 1986), p. 377.] It was during the writing of this book that Wells's son by Rebecca West,
Anthony West, was born.
References
External links
* ''
The Research Magnificent'' at the
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, ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Research Magnificent
Novels by H. G. Wells
1915 British novels