By Eric Fitch
This article is a companion to Eric Fitch’s article ‘H.G. Wells and the megaliths’ in Northern Earth 180 (Summer 2025).
Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was best known for his seminal science fiction, but he was a polymath – as novelist, prophet and popular educator – who spanned the Victorian and the atomic ages, and in 1920 he brought out his highly regarded, best-selling book The Outline of History,1 which was first published in fortnightly parts. The book sold worldwide, with sales reaching over two million copies including translations. It dealt with the history of the world, starting from the formation of the Earth up to the Great War. The Outline was followed by his volume A Short History of the World in 1922, which has since been updated and is still in print today.
Readers will not need to be reminded of the Arthurian connections with the land of Cornwall. Wells wrote little of the Celts in the Outline, but he obviously knew about their legends, and in the summer of 1895 he visited Cornwall on a cycling tour with Amy Catherine Robbins, his second wife. The novel in which Wells brings in an Arthurian theme is The Autocracy of Mr Parham, published in 1930, which he described as “a fantastic and imaginative romance” and was illustrated by the well-known political cartoonist David Low.
Mr Parham was a senior tutor at St Simon’s, Oxford. At a seance (the medium being a certain Carnac Williams!) he dreams that he is possessed by the spirit of a warlord from the planet Mars, and sees himself becoming a fascist dictator planning a new world.2 He then sets up a political movement called the League of Duty Paramount, adopting the title of Lord Paramount of England, and planning the overthrow of the British government, a step leading to conquering the whole world. This leads to a world war in which Britain suffers badly, ending up with Parham waking up, revealing he had only experienced a dream. Wells was using the novel to explore the different social and political opinions of the 1930s, but with the added fantasy theme. And now for King Arthur.
Parham’s vision was based on Camelot, beginning with his need to obtain minerals for gas attacks, which could only be found beneath the sea at a fictitious place named Cayme, a part of the legendary sunken land of Lyonesse off Land’s End in Cornwall, which was the home of Tristan in the Arthurian legend of Tristan and Isolde. Miraculously Lyonesse is restored, and Cayme is now seen as a town where there is a giant chemical factory. At one point Parham recalled that once as a young man he had done some walking from Land’s End to Tintagel with Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur in his knapsack. But now he mused that he had:
dreamt of the lost cities and palaces of Lyonesse until almost I could see them, like a mirage, glittering under the sun. And Lyonesse is here, and it hasn’t got any cities or palaces or knights. And it doesn’t glitter. And instead of King Arthur and his Table Round, you’ve got a crew of Camelford’s men, brewing God knows what treason.
Camelford is the name of an industrial chemist, one of the usual Wellsian technologists, representatives of sanity and a bright future for mankind, who eventually foils Parham. His name is that of a town in the valley of the River Camel which lies on the edge of Bodmin Moor, about six miles from the coast. The town’s name may derive from the Cornish cam meaning ‘crooked stream’ and alan meaning ‘beautiful’, with the addition of the English word ‘ford’. It is a contender for the location of the last battle of King Arthur himself, usually referred to as Camlann, but another local tradition has it that it was Camelot itself, as seen by Tennyson.)
At the end of Parham’s dream a bullet aimed at him hits the giant distillery, and a huge explosion brings the fantasy to a conclusion, and he wakes up from the dream he had at the seance and all is returned to normality. One of Wells’s lesser novels, The Autocracy of Mr Parham sold well, but it was not on a par with his early novels, although the philosopher Bertrand Russell approved of it, and it was one of his better novels from his later years, which I can recommend myself.
An early novel of Wells with Arthurian references was his science fiction novel When the Sleeper Wakes from 1899, revised as The Sleeper Awakes in 1910, a dystopia which influenced Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907), Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The story is based on a man named Graham who falls asleep in 1897 for 203 years. He had been taking drugs to overcome insomnia, when he fell into a coma, waking up in 2100 in an entirely different world. To his surprise he learns that the accumulated interest on his bank account has resulted in him becoming the richest man in the world. However this does not mean that he comes to rule the world, but rather he becomes entangled with the different political factions of the time, and he is finally killed in a battle. Of interest is that Wells (in 1899) describes the development of radio, television, manned flight and moving pavements (think of airports) long before their development.
The idea of a person, usually a folk hero such as Fionn mac Cumhaill, Charlemagne and Barbarossa, falling asleep for a long period is a folklore motif named ‘The magic sleep over many years’, and here we turn again to King Arthur. Graham sleeping for so long is not dissimilar to the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table lying dormant waiting for the time when the country needs them, when they wake up.
Wells was writing the novel in 1897, just two years after his cycling tour of Cornwall, and the county’s landscape and the Arthurian legends seemed to have made an impression on him. The novel begins with Graham falling into a trance at Pentargen,3 a beauty spot a few miles north of Camelford and not far from Tintagel, the place where Arthur was said to have been conceived.
An interesting point is the name of the person who came across Graham lying in a bad state, a certain Mr Isbister. This name is that of a village in the Shetland Isles, and that of a chambered cairn in the Orkneys, perhaps better known as the Tomb of the Eagles. Mixed up with the bones of over 300 people were the bones and talons of a number of white-tailed sea eagles, perhaps indicating totem activities. Wells seems to have chosen the place where the novel commences, in the most southerly part of Britain, as well as including its most northerly part, in the first paragraph!
Notes
1 I am using the 1940 final revised version by Wells of the Outline.
2 The idea of a World Government was a theme that Wells propounded in his later years, and it appeared, rather idealistically, at the end of The Outline of History as the next step in humankind’s development.
3 Pentargon near Boscastle, the latter currently being home to the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.
Works consulted
H.G. Wells and the Sleeper King, by Professor W.M.S. Russell was published in the Arthurian journal Pendragon Summer 1994, No XXIV/3, the Sleeping Lord edition. That article was an edited version of Part 1 of his essay “Folktales and H.G. Wells”, published in The Wellsian no.5 (Summer 1982), and further edited by me for publication for Pendragon. As well as being interested in British folklore and ancient sites, I am also a member of the H.G. Wells Society, as was Professor Russell, who also became the president of the now defunct Pendragon Society.
Eric Fitch has written for NE as well as the late Merry Meet, and also the books Unknown Taplow (1988), In Search of Herne the Hunter (1994, revised version 2024) and Gods, Ghosts and Goblins (2020). Unsung Britain: Scribes and Bygones will be published this autumn.