The Spinster and the Prophet: A Tale of H G Wells, Plagiarism and the History of the World
A B McKillop
496pp, Aurum Press, £18.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Audio interview with AB McKillop
Literary debts and borrowings are inevitable: any researched material undergoes transformation, whether it is facts reproduced in a non-fiction book or local colour reimagined for fiction. Conventions of acknowledgment are common, and in academic books following these is seen as essential. But there are grey areas - and sometimes they involve marriages and romantic liaisons. Recently books have revealed the unacknowledged literary debts writers such as Brecht and Joyce owed to the women in their lives. Inadequately concealed research in novels sometimes reaches the headlines too.
In The Spinster and the Prophet , Canadian historian A B McKillop combines these two themes. The phenomenon of the woman as an unacknowledged literary handmaid and the ethical issue of plagiarism join forces in a poignant and shocking story that aired publicly between 1930 and 1933. During this time, the Canadian Florence Deeks took on first H G Wells and his publishers, Macmillan, then the British privy council and the law lords. She finally attempted to petition King George V. In all these she failed. Legal and other costs came to around half a million dollars, paid by her brother and an unknown benefactor.
When lawyers refused to represent her, she became her own advocate. Her charge was that Wells's massive non-fiction work, The Outline of History , was a plagiarised version, in substantive plan and detail, of her own unpublished manuscript, The Web . Drawn to the subject via a footnote in his other researches, McKillop undertook some literary detective work of his own to uncover Deeks's story. His narrative carefully juxtaposes the two authors' lives, alternating parallel narratives until the trial gets going.
Unmarried, briefly a teacher, Deeks apparently worked hard during the four years of the first world war, writing her history of the world. In 1918 she took the manuscript to John Saul, an editor at Macmillan Canada, where it remained for six months. Meanwhile, on our own shores, in 1919 H G Wells began writing his history of the world. While knowledgeable about science, he was less sure-footed on history, and had to build up a "think tank" of experts. The book began to be published in serial form later the same year.
In Canada, Deeks read reviews, then the book itself. Shocked at what she read, she had to badger Saul to get her manuscript back. Eventually he relinquished it - well-thumbed, and torn. Her case would be that the structure of her book and Wells's were very similar, as were many of the ideas. Much of the phrasing was virtually identical too, she argued; both had the same mistakes and omissions. Deeks spent the best part of a year compiling a concordance of hundreds of verbal similarities; by the time this was done, she was certain of her ground. With her family's support, she tried to get justice, and the admission that there had been a serious act of literary piracy. Her case depended on two points: the intrinsic evidence of the verbal and structural similarities between her manuscript and The Outline of History , and the assumption that Wells had somehow seen her manuscript and plundered it. However, the apparatus of both the publishing world and the male-dominated judiciary were against her. The judges dismissed the case.
Wells and Deeks never met. He caricatured her as an obsessive spinster, and she remained unpublished; a footnote in biographies of Wells, which have perpetuated the myth of her as a monomaniacal freak. McKillop is very much on Deeks's side. Mischievously, he rounds off his neat account of the trial with a dénouement of his own. Leaping into the present tense, he tells a story whereby Saul and his boss, desperate to get Wells on their publishing list, slip Deeks's manuscript across the Atlantic. With the collusion of Catherine, Wells's devoted but much put-upon wife, they make sure that a ready-made model is there for him when he comes to write his own book. It is a persuasive thesis.
While Deeks's story is relatively new, Wells's familiar biographical details take on a darker cast. Moving from place to place and from lover to lover, but always coming back to Catherine, he does not seem an attractive character. His very fecundity - sexual and literary - serves by juxtaposition to highlight Deeks's heroic tenacity. McKillop's description of the trials, his convincing lists of mirror phrases and his rehabilitation of Deeks all demonstrate how unscrupulous the literary world can be. Plagiarism is not a new accusation to level at Wells; McKillop is in no doubt that "as writer, husband and lover, H G Wells was a vast sponge that absorbed any work or any person that served his purpose".
McKillop is sensitive to the attention feminist historians have drawn to the concealed narratives and hidden voices of women, and this rigorous and compassionate book is a valuable contribution. And he does, so far as one can tell, acknowledge all his sources in full.
