Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 1.pdf/20

Rh in Sussex, and she was maid to Miss Featherstonehaugh of Up Park, Petersfield. But long before he was born (in 1866) his parents had left "service." His father had sunk a small inheritance in an unsuccessful crockery shop at Bromley in Kent, and was staving off bankruptcy by earning money as a professional cricketer. He was a swift and subtle bowler, and made a record at a match between Kent and Sussex at Hove in 1862 by clean bowling four wickets in succession. The writer was the youngest of four children. The home was poverty-struck and shabby but not unhappy; if food was sometimes rather short there was plenty to read, for Joseph Wells had a taste for reading and would go to sales to pick up a cheap lot of books whenever opportunity offered. Moreover Bromley possessed a Literary Institute with a lending library, and there was a small middle-class Academy kept by a teacher of some ability, Mr. Thomas Morley, which the writer attended. Before he was thirteen he had acquired the reading habit and he was filled with curiosity about this world in which he found himself. He read everything but the novels of Sir Walter Scott, which bored him indescribably, though he read and learned by heart much of "Marmion" and "The Lady of the Lake." Books bought haphazard at sales make an uneven library. The contents and omissions of the Bromley book-shelves were equally notable. Washington Irving was much in evidence in a cheap collected edition. Chaucer's works, Grote's "History of Greece," Humboldt's "Cosmos," George Eliot's "Middlemarch," bound volumes of Punch, an old edition of Captain xii