posted on 10 Mar 2025

Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul by H.G. Wells

Published in 1905, Kipps is a slightly curious novel – a picaresque social satire which at times reads almost like a trial run for the more developed and to my mind more successfully executed The History of Mr Polly (reviewed here). But that said, it remains an extremely enjoyable novel for anyone who likes Wells’s particular type of politically informed, socially aware Edwardian satire.

Arthur Kipps is one of Wells’s little men – working class (perhaps even lower-working class), uneducated, lacking confidence, socially insecure and as an orphan who scarcely remembers his parents perhaps insecure too in his own sense of self. Raised in New Romney by an aunt and uncle who have strong, repressive ideas about working class respectability, he is apprenticed as a teenager (indentured would be a more accurate description) to Mr Shalford, a Folkestone draper whose ‘emporium’ is the grandly titled Folkestone Draper’s Bazaar, where he will be condemned to a life of thankless, tedious toil, like all apprentices as easily recruited as he might be dismissed, a very similar experience to that of Wells himself in his early life and which he forever rebelled against. Eventually – Kipps is a bit of a shaggy dog story – we get to the meat of the novel, which is really about social mobility, snobbery and class antagonism. 

Kipps is sent to a low-quality boarding school where what passes for education does little to equip him for any kind of life other than retail servitude. (Wells, with social exactitude, acknowledges that ‘within the sphere of gentlemen’ there may exist ‘modest, refined, gentlemanly little people…who may even dabble in the professions and counterless trades’ – one imagines he may have in mind wine merchants or bespoke tailors and the like; but one can be sure that drapers’ apprentices do not meet such standards.) Kipps’s guardians try to forbid his friendship with their rather more working class neighbours whose children, Sid and Ann Pornick, are in fact quite dear to Kipps – Sid is his first real friend and Ann his first sweetheart – but both are lost, separated by Kipps’ apprenticeship, Sid’s move to London to work as a mechanic, and Ann’s move to work in domestic service in the Folkestone suburbs. Throughout the novel we will see relationships sometimes accidentally and sometimes deliberately severed by chance circumstances of class, background and behaviour.

The early parts of the book are mainly about the life of what is probably a fairly realistically drawn draper’s apprenticeship in the early years of the twentieth century. In what little time off he and the other apprentices get Kipps meets Chitterlow, a sponging would-be playwright, the first of a number of extravagantly drawn characters whose aim is to take Kipps in hand and develop his character, his grasp of the world, of manners, of social mores. This is especially so after Kipps discovers that the grandfather he never met has left him his fortune – property and investments producing ‘twelve hundred pounds or so a year’. Overnight, Kipps is elevated into the middle-class-with-private-means – or would be, but for his own social ineptitude, appalling ignorance and lack of self-confidence.

He becomes engaged to Helen Walshingham, whom he meets when she tutors an art class he attends. Helen belongs to a circle of Arts-and-Craftsy Folkestone intellectuals who aspire to London society. She and her friend and sometime-chaperone Chester Coote are the next characters to take Kipps in hand.

Kipps is essentially a rags-to-riches story, and in this guise has lived on in several film adaptations – including the early star vehicle for Tommy Steele, Half a Sixpence, and a stage musical. But for all its knockabout humour, Kipps is a more socially complex novel than these various ‘light’ adaptations might suggest. Here’s an example of what I mean. It becomes apparent relatively early on that Kipps has begun to doubt his romance with Helen. He adored the idea of Helen – her cultured appreciation of music and the arts, her savoir-faire and poise – but she herself intimidates him and his real affection is for his childhood sweetheart Ann Pornick. But what finally brings him to this realisation takes some describing. At a dinner he and Helen attend, Helen arrives wearing evening dress, including a magnificent gown of revealing décolletage. And Kipps finds that where once Helen had been ‘a delicately beautiful dream, a thing of romance and unsubstantial mystery’, here in ‘her final materialisation…the last thin wreath of glamour about her was dispelled.’ And worse than this, he suddenly sees from Coote’s fleeting, censorious expression that Helen has over-reached herself: local Folkestone society does not merit full evening dress and to not know this is a shameful faux-pas.

Almost as hurriedly as he engaged her, Kipps decides he cannot marry Helen and instead proposes to Ann Pornick. There are still more reversals and (not entirely unexpected) successes to come but I’ll leave the plot details there.

Kipps has some marvellous touches and some extremely funny tirades – hateful estate agents, the need for rational house-building, the self-evident good sense of socialism, the arrival of impossibly modern ‘corridor trains’ – but at times I felt I was having to labour at it a bit. I think the problem is that unlike The History of Mr Polly, where one feels some genuine emotional involvement with the characters and the novel unfolds with a lovely lightness of touch, a sort of joy in invention, in Kipps these qualities seem missing and almost all the characters are only really plot devices to move Kipps up or down or across the social hierarchy. 

But what I did enjoy is the depiction of Kipps’s ‘three worlds’ – New Romney and the marshes, the Edwardian gentility of Folkestone, and London in all its allure and awfulness. And of these, it is Folkestone that really leaps off the page, for Wells was describing not just a place he knew but one he loved. He lived there for thirteen years, eventually commissioning a house built to his own design – just as Kipps does, in fact. Perhaps they had both arrived at the place where they felt happiest.

 

Alun Severn

March 2025

 

H. G. Wells elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

 

The Autocracy of Mr. Parham by H.G.Wells

 

The History of Mr Polly by H.G. Wells

 

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

 

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells