The HG Wells Collection
The collection after cleaning
A collection of First Edition HG Wells books was donated to Keble College Library this year by Geography Professorial Fellow Sarah Whatmore, who inherited it from her father, the late Colonel Denys E Whatmore.
Professor Sarah Whatmore writes:
Collecting antiquarian books was one of his great passions and it became a shared family activity in the 1960s and 1970s. My brother and I can recall many happy hours scouring dusty piles of old books over several floors in second-hand bookshops, like Thorpe’s at the top of the High Street in Guildford and Wicks in North Camp, both long gone. In those days, hunting for first editions was a serendipitous and inexpensive pastime. Before the ubiquity of internet search engines and hyper-commercialisation of first editions, we enjoyed getting to know how to identify them and evaluate their physical ‘condition’ and took great delight in unearthing a new addition.
Colonel Denys E Whatmore
Wells was one of four main authors whose works Denys collected — alongside John Buchan, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard. Their works share two features in common. First, the appeal of a ‘good story’ in which a heroic lead character invariably triumphs over an assortment of dastardly antagonists threatening the social order of the day. Second, their publication, for the most part, in the transformative period between the last decade of the 19th century and first three decades of the 20th. These authors are best known today for their adventurous, scientific, criminal or espionage ‘romances’, not least through a slew of screen adaptations and notwithstanding the exhaustive critiques of literary scholars for their dated social prejudices. However, all produced a great variety of other kinds of works, including short stories and non-fiction books, pamphlets and commentaries on social and political topics which enjoyed enormous popularity in their day.
The longest lived and by far the most prolific of them was HG Wells, and the sheer volume and diversity of his output is reflected in the collection now housed in the College library’s ‘special collections’. Comprising some 120 volumes, it includes most of his novels; a wide range of his non-fiction output on science, history, and ‘future-casting’; and several volumes of collected short works and popular pamphlets on the state of the world, technology, and warfare. The collection also includes some key volumes of literary criticism and biography about Wells and his work.
The historical period in which this torrent of work was produced gives the collection a particular relevance to Keble’s own history as the first Oxford college founded in the modern era (1870). Denys would have been delighted that it has found a home in a place of scholarship where the collection can enrich our understanding of the turmoil and excitement of the early decades of this modern era, and its social and cultural pre-occupations in which Keble was itself engaged. On his behalf, I am grateful to the College for investing in the conservation and care of the collection for the benefit of future generations.
