The Research Magnificent

by H.G. Wells

The story of William Porphyry Benham is the story of a man who was led into adventure by an idea. It was an idea that took possession of his imagination quite early in life, it grew with him and changed with him, it interwove at last completely with his being. His story is its story.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Philosophy, Novels, British Literature

Library Binding

About the author

Herbert George Wells was born to a working class family in Kent, England. Young Wells received a spotty education, interrupted by several illnesses and family difficulties, and became a draper's apprentice as a teenager. The headmaster of Midhurst Grammar School, where he had spent a year, arranged for him to return as an "usher," or student teacher. Wells earned a government scholarship in 1884, to study biology under Thomas Henry Huxley at the Normal School of Science. Wells earned his bachelor of science and doctor of science degrees at the University of London. After marrying his cousin, Isabel, Wells began to supplement his teaching salary with short stories and freelance articles, then books, including The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898).

Wells created a mild scandal when he divorced his cousin to marry one of his best students, Amy Catherine Robbins. Although his second marriage was lasting and produced two sons, Wells was an unabashed advocate of free (as opposed to "indiscriminate") love. He continued to openly have extra-marital liaisons, most famously with Margaret Sanger, and a ten-year relationship with the author Rebecca West, who had one of his two out-of-wedlock children. A one-time member of the Fabian Society, Wells sought active change. His 100 books included many novels, as well as nonfiction, such as A Modern Utopia (1905), The Outline of History (1920), A Short History of the World (1922), The Shape of Things to Come (1933), and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932). One of his booklets was Crux Ansata, An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. Although Wells toyed briefly with the idea of a "divine will" in his book, God the Invisible King (1917), it was a temporary aberration. Wells used his international fame to promote his favorite causes, including the prevention of war, and was received by government officials around the world. He is best-remembered as an early writer of science fiction and futurism.

He was also an outspoken socialist. Wells and Jules Verne are each sometimes referred to as "The Fathers of Science Fiction". D. 1946.

More: http://philosopedia.org/index.php/H._...

http://www.online-literature.com/well...

http://www.hgwellsusa.50megs.com/

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a mystery, this one. The intellectual journey of a man trying to dedicate his life to the life of a true aristocrat - meaning with honor and without prejudice or jealousy. But he often can't see the proverbial forest for the trees and if I didn't know better, I'd think that Wells was advocating for some kind of Buddhist middle way.

Really interesting novel.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-research-magnificent-by-h-g-wells/

This one is generally awful. (Adam Roberts didn’t like it much either.) Benham, the protagonist, decides to make his life goal the ‘Research Magnificent’ on how to live a noble and aristocratic life; he does this from a position of immense wealth and privilege; he marries a teenager and it doesn’t work out; and he gets killed in a political riot in South Africa. There are many many tedious speeches about politics and personal vision.

There are however one or two good lines. When Benham meets his first lover:

"There was in particular Mrs. Skelmersdale, a very pretty little widow with hazel eyes, black hair, a mobile mouth, and a pathetic history, who talked of old music to him and took him to a Dolmetsch concert in Clifford’s Inn, and expanded that common interest to a general participation in his indefinite outlook. She advised him about his probable politics — everybody did that — but when he broke through his usual reserve and suggested views of his own, she was extraordinarily sympathetic. She was so sympathetic and in such a caressing way that she created a temporary belief in her understanding, and it was quite imperceptibly that he was drawn into the discussion of modern ethical problems. She herself was a rather stimulating instance of modern ethical problems. She told him something of her own story, and then their common topics narrowed down very abruptly. He found he could help her in several ways."

I don’t think I have seen much innuendo from Wells, but that did make me chuckle.

A bit later, the protagonist and his young bride go on a disastrous honeymoon in the Balkans, taking in various places which I know from a century or so later. One passage here puzzled me. The couple are stuck in Monastir (now Bitola) in (North) Macedonia, and Benham has fallen ill with measles. After they find a doctor,

"The Benhams went as soon as possible down to Smyrna and thence by way of Uskub tortuously back to Italy."

I was really puzzled by this. Uskub is now Skopje, and these days to get there from Bitola you go by the highland road through Prilep before joining the main Vardar Valley route at Gradsko or Veles; it’s 173 km according to Google. This would take you nowhere near the Aegean port of Smyrna, which is now Izmir in Turkey, 1000 km by road from either Bitola or Skopje.

I raised this question on social media, and a couple of people pointed out that ‘Smyrna’ here is obviously a mistake for ‘Salonica’, ie Thessaloniki in Greece. Back in the day, the old Via Egnatia would have taken you easily there from Bitola, and the railway back up north to Skopje had been built in 1873. Full credit to the several people who tried to convince me of a plausible route from Bitola to Izmir to Skopje, but I don’t think that’s what Wells meant.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather interesting book this one. It revolves around a man (Benham) who finds himself coming into money and becoming an aristocrat. Trying to figure out what to do with his life, he marries, travels and, through travel appears to have a veil lifted from his eyes. He decides to dedicate his life to trying to figure out and understand life.

I particularly like the married travels through Slovenia, Croatia, Albania. Very vivid, very beautiful. Like with many of H G Wells’ works, quite subtle socialist undertones, his love of Russia and China. I am not sure if Wells’ was friends with Kipling, but, like with other works on similar subjects, there were Kipling references and undertones to. In part, perhaps Wells’ has been trying to find a balance between a ‘Romance Novel’ and a ‘Socialist Story’. This story definitely worked better than other works on similar subjects, perhaps more defined as a ‘Philosophical Narrative’ than anything else.

Some rather nice quotes from the book:

“No failure lasts if your faith lasts!”

“We can have no organization because organizations corrupt!”

“What does all this struggle here amount to? On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the other; suspicion everywhere....”

[Sam Hoel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book on the recommendation of Amory, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise. Not surprisingly, Amory is a poor judge of literature. Its a terribly boring novel with no literary value. It has very little value of any kind, except as a memorial of the fantasies of middle class Edwardian socialists who combined the pietistic fervor of Victorianism with dreams of fundamentally transforming human nature. Wells couldn’t have fathomed just how wrong this would go in the 20th century, but the bloody chaos of the French Revolution should have given him some sort of a clue.

Wells unknowingly creates a perfect expression of Eric Hoffer’s true believer syndrome. In his ‘magnificent’ worldview, individual humans matter little, but humanity is all-important. This prefigures Lenin, and reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s sobering portrayal of the zek victims of fanatical ideology. So many Hoffer quotes apply to Benham, Wells’ socialist aristocratic hero in this novel:

“Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk”

And most importantly: “Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.”

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

1915 saw a blizzard of publications for Wells—the mediocre comedic romp Bealby: A Holiday, the pseudonymous collection of essays, parodies, and stories Boon, two pamphlets The War and Socialism and The Peace of the World, and this restless, patchwork novel. William Benham is a troubled rich kid who feels that the proles cannot be trusted with socialism and need benign aristocratic rulers to spread the warm butter of breeding and class across the beastlier aspects of civilisation. The novel is a victim of Wells’s need to expound at length on the burning political and social schisms of the era and can’t alight on a coherent throughline for the narrative or a single issue on which to worrit—we have a mixture of musings on marriage, sex, benign kings, a wee drop of eugenics, and socialism, larded into a story of schooldays, education, first love, and travelling—making this one of the least desirable novels for anyone except weird H.G. obsessives (like me, and possibly you, if you happen to be reading this many years hence).

[Peter Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd book in which a writer gets lost in research and writing while having commitment issues about women, and poorly regarding and using his very few friends. He fails to publish anything, his closest friend gets killed because he gets dragged into the writer’s travelling research, and on the writer’s own death he leaves a further friend with the burden of making sense of his work to date. A comment on biographers maybe?

Apart from elements such as the not publishing anything, I think there is probably a lot going on here about Wells himself struggling to work out his own philosophy, while also working out in his head his own relationship issues.

I read this as it was in a collection together with Wells’ novel Kipps. How curious that both stories required the protagonists to come into unexpected money. I wonder what Wells would have done with the UK National Lottery if he was still alive and writing today…

[Jeff Mayo · Rating 1 out of 5]

The protagonist comes from wealth and privilege. He decides to make it his life goal to live life nobly and thoroughly. He marries a teenager, and then abandons her. He is the least sympathetic character Wells ever created.

[Matthew Bargas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting premise about a young man who wants to live nobly. He inherits a lot of money so that he doesn't have to work. He wants to live the 'aristocratic' life which is not what most of us think of. He is not talking about being an elitist snob, but a magnanimous benevolent despot who could solve all the problems of the world. He thinks that he can accomplish this by going around the world in an unofficial capacity and observing and interviewing people that he meets. However he is both naive and arrogant and never really achieves his goals. In his travels he is quarrelsome and frequently displays a pettiness not worthy of someone with such lofty goals. It is actually surprising that he was able to survive all of his travels. His arrogance finally gets the better of him in the end when he is shot while meddling in a riot that was none of his business.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite an interesting read! It is a book filled with historical relevancy and personal philosophy. The main character, Benham, wishes to live his life as a true "aristocrat" (think along the lines of Plato's philosopher kings), and the story follows his dogged pursuit of this idea. Written in 1915, Wells explores the nature of man and society through his idealist.

[Eduardo Briceno · Rating 2 out of 5]

For me it was just ok. A character in search of what to believe, but his philosophy doesn't make much sense. I didn't get anything out of this book. Maybe this highlights our need to have writings be internally consistent and conclusive (rather than, say, Plato's The Republic, which the character quotes), but he could have achieved that in a short story rather than a long book.

[Norman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an great book for anyone who has ever travelled. It's about a young man who has inherited a load of wealth such that he never needs to work and so decides to travel around the world to learn and improve himself so that he may benefit mankind n a philanthropic sort of way. A few dry patches but it's an interesting read...