Kipps
Kipps
Kipps is H.G. Wells' most personal and perhaps most underrated novel: a sharp, funny, quietly devastating tale of a young man who wins a fortune and loses himself. Arthur Kipps, a draper's orphan raised by relatives in a small seaside town, suddenly inherits enough money to transform his life. His well-meaning guardians ship him off to boarding school, determined to manufacture a gentleman. But Kipps finds himself adrift among wealthy classmates, desperately trying to master French verbs and genteel manners while his honest, clumsy nature keeps surfacing. He falls for Helen, a sophisticated cousin, and tries to remake himself into someone worthy of her. Yet the deeper he climbs into the middle class, the more he loses his footing. Wells drew on his own painful experiences of social mobility, and the result is both a wicked satire of Edwardian class pretensions and a poignant meditation on what it costs to become someone you're not.
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