From the Outline of History to the World Brain

A passage from David Lodge's fascinating biographical novel, A Man of Parts, equally attentive to all of H.G. Wells's 'parts', his intellectual speculations and literary activities, and his sexual affairs.  Lodge recognizes a measure of intellectual corruption in Wells's whitening of the Russian revolution, and in his jingoistic support of 1st World War warfare, though these experiences brought in their share of disillution as well. But an interesting and original intellectual venture starts in 1918—with projects which anticipate the current interest in Big History, and the Wikipedia—or perhaps the World Wide Web, as Lodge puts it.



These disillusioning episodes had, however, positive consequences. His experience on committees concerned with the League of Nations project had convinced him that even their well-educated and well-intentioned members, including himself, were lamentably ill-informed about the history of any other nation than their own, while the British people at large knew almost nothing. It was obvious that there was no hope of getting and idea like the League to 'take' unless this ignorance was remedied, and he conceived the idea of an 'Outline of World History' which would attempt to tell the story of all mankind up to the present day within the compass of a single book. By the end of 1918 he had lined up a number of prestigious experts like Gilbert Murray and Ernest Barker to act as advisers and check his drafts for error, and Jane and others helped him with the research, but essentially he intended to write the whole thing himself. He did not of course aim to discover new facts—the facts he needed were already available in encyclopedias and other works of reference—but to bring them all together in a way that nobody had thought of doing before. As he said in an article in the magazine of the League of Nations Union:

  No one has ever attempted to teach our children the history of man as Man, with all his early struggles and triumphs, his specialization in tribes and nations, the conquests of Nature, his creations of Art, his building up of Science. . .  An enormous amount of work has to be done if we are to teach the peoples of the world what is the truth, viz., that they are all engaged in a common work, that they have sprung from common origins, and all are contributing some special service to the general end.

Originally he had conceived it as a book for older children, but as the idea developed it assumed an adult readership too. It was an enormous undertaking which occupied him for two years of 'fanatical toil', as he described it to Arnold Bennett, and ran to three-quarters of a million words, mostly his own. But the effort was fully justified in the outcome. The part-publication of The Outline of History sold extremely well, and its longer book ofrm sold more than two million copies over the next few years in Britain and America, and in numerous translations. His financial worries were now removed for the foreseeable future. He really was a rich man.

—You were also a famous man. Probably, as a result of the Outline, the most famous writer in the world in the early twenties. Surely Orwell was wrong in saying you ceased to influence young people after 1920?

—I was famous for some time after that, in the sense that the man in the street almost everywhere knew my name. My newspaper articles were syndicated all over the world, and my books continued to circulate in cheap editions and influence and educate people, including younger people. But I was no longer someone whose latest work you had to read if you wanted to keep up with fashionable ideas and trends, and this became more and more obvious as time went on. At the beginning of the 1930s I published two enormous compilations, The Science of Life and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, to form a trilogy with The Outline of History summarising modern knowledge about mankind—historical, biological, and sociological—but they weren't so successful. Later I tried to interest publishers in the idea of and encyclopaedia which would include all knowledge, but there were too many difficulties about copyright. My idea was that it should be free. I imagined an international Encyclopaedia Organisation that would store and continuously update every item of verifiable human knowledge on microfilm and make it universally accessible—a world wide web of information. I wrote a book about it called World Brain, but it didn't catch on . There was a journalist once who called me 'the man who invented tomorrow', but people weren't interested in my tomorrow any more. I was a child of the Enlightenment, a modern Enyclopaedist, an heir of Diderot, but the horrors fo the Great War had undermined faith in Reason. Intellectuals looked for salvation to fascism, or Soviet style communism, or Christianity, Roman Catholic or Anglo-Catholic, to all of which I was opposed. Between the wars I was increasingly a lone voice, crying in the wilderness, as a thinker.










See also:

Rayward, W. Boyd. "H. G. Wells's Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Re-Assessment." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50 (1999): 557-79.

         Online at ResearchGate.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220433347

         2019

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