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Book of the Month, November 2005
Kipps: the Story of a Simple Soul
H.G. Wells
London: Macmillan, 1905
[S.L.] II. [Wells, H.G. - 1905]
H.G. Wells’s Edwardian novel Kipps is 100 years old this year. It is one of two books published by Wells in 1905, the other being A Modern Utopia. The story traces the career of Artie Kipps through a playful childhood and apprenticeship in a drapery, through his sudden liberation following his inheritance of £26,000, and clumsy efforts to adapt to his new station in life, including his engagement to his former teacher of wood-carving. Kipps abandons pretension by stages and finds true happiness with his childhood sweetheart, Ann Pornick. He loses much of his fortune and settles down as a storekeeper. Elements of the tale are reminiscent of the author’s own life, Wells being the son of a lady’s maid and an unsuccessful small tradesman cum professional cricketer, who himself was apprenticed at the age of thirteen to the Southsea Drapery Emporium.
The novel was tremendously popular, selling 12,000 copies in the first two months of publication. It was filmed twice, as a silent film in 1922 and a sound film starring Michael Redgrave in 1941. In 1963 it was further adapted as a musical, Half A Sixpence, which was itself filmed in 1967, featuring Tommy Steele.
The text shown is the first English edition, published about a fortnight after the first American edition. The copy pictured is one of ten books by H.G. Wells given by Sir Louis Sterling in 1956 as part of the Sterling Library. It is a presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: “To Bart Kennedy from H.G.Wells. This anaemic history.” Bart Kennedy (1861-1930) was an author and lecturer whose activities included being a sailor, a labourer and tramp in the United States, an actor and an opera singer.
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