H.G. Wells is the grandfather of Science Fiction. His early works from the 1890s, like The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, set the tone for the new genre. He foresaw airplanes and genetic engineering, was the first to suggest that 
nuclear weapons were possible (in 1914!) and in 1933 predicted the outbreak of World War II in 1940—only a few months off. And of course he is the author of The Time Machine, more or less creating our entire subgenre of time travel.
But if Wells himself were somehow summoned from the Beyond (which, by the way, he thought utter rubbish) and asked what were his own favorite titles within the hefty Wellsian canon, he’d probably pull out some dusty tomes like Kipps, Tono-Bungay, The History of Mr. Polly or Love and Mr. Lewisham. And you’d say, “Tono-Bungay? Is that really a thing, ghost of H.G. Wells?”
The truth is that from the very beginning, Wells enjoyed writing domestic, even romantic, literary fiction, in the light caricaturist style of The Pickwick Papers and Jerome K. Jerome.
His non-science fiction tends to have an autobiographical slant. In Love and Mr. Lewisham, for example, we are introduced to the title character as a young teacher at Whortley Proprietary School, much as Wells himself was a teacher at Midhurst Grammar School. Lewisham goes on, like Wells, to win a scholarship at the Royal College of Science (then called the Normal School). Both are men of great ambition from the humble middle classes (Wells’ father was a professional cricketer, his mother a domestic servant) whose careers suffer in the pursuit of love (in Lewisham’s case it is Ethel Henderson, while in Wells’ real life it was his student Amy Catherine Robbins, who became his second wife). Likewise Arthur “Artie” Kipps, the main character of Kipps, shares some of the details of Wells’ own childhood, such as being apprenticed to a draper at the age of 14. The title character in The History of Mr. Polly is also in the drapery trade; he is unhappily married to his first cousin, just like his author. (Wells’ first wife was his cousin Isabel.)
Of course, H. G. Wells’ personal life can be seen, just faintly, in the background of The Time Traveler as well. In chapter 8, the Time Traveler explores the ruins of a large museum that he calls “the Palace of Green Porcelain” and comments “Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington!” He may have been thinking of the South Kensington Museum, which was near the Normal School and survives today as the Science Museum. A chapter in Love and Mr. Lewisham, “In the Gallery of Old Iron”, also takes place in the South Kensington Museum:
The gallery is long and narrow and dark, and set with iron gates, iron-bound chests, locks, bolts and bars, fantastic great keys, lamps, and the like, and over the balustrade one may lean and talk of one’s finer feelings and regard Michael Angelo’s horned Moses, or Trajan’s Column (in plaster) rising gigantic out of the hall below and far above the level of the gallery.
The description of this gallery is not unlike the gallery of machinery where the Time Traveler grabs a lever to use as a weapon against the Morlocks:
I went slowly along, puzzling about the machines, and had been too intent upon them to notice the gradual diminution of the light, until Weena’s increasing apprehensions drew my attention. Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness.
Both novels were written in the 1890s, shortly after Wells concluded his studies at the Normal School, and so it is not surprising that the museum he so obviously cherished should show up in b
oth a novel about a young married couple and a wild tale about a scientist with a time machine.
Science also plays a large part in both stories—the Time Traveler with his machine and Mr. Lewisham in his studies, which involve biology, chemistry and such. There is also an episode in which Lewisham and a colleague, Smithers, unmask a fraudulent medium during a séance. And both characters adjust their view of the world using an empirical approach, forming hypotheses which are later refined as more information is available. The Time Traveler, after first, takes the Eloi to be the sole evolutionary descendants of humankind. Then he discovers the Morlocks:
But my mind was already in revolution; my guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment. I had now a clue to the import of these wells, to the ventilating towers, to the mystery of the ghosts, to say nothing of a hint at the meaning of the bronze gates and the fate of the Time Machine!
Mr. Lewisham has likewise to adjust his expectations as he gains worldly experience. Filling out an application at an employment agency, he runs against the brick wall of class distinction:
As Lewisham filled up the form with his multitudinous “’ologies” and “’ographies,” a youth of ducal appearance entered and greeted the precise young man in a friendly way. Lewisham, bending down to write, perceived that this professional rival wore a very long frock coat, patent leather boots, and the most beautiful grey trousers. His conceptions of competition enlarged. The precise young man by a motion of his eyes directed the newcomer’s attention to Lewisham’s waterproof collar, and was answered by raised eyebrows and a faint tightening of the mouth. “That bounder at Castleford has answered me,” said the new-comer in a fine rich voice. “Is he any bally good?”
So while the domestic and sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells seem at first worlds apart, his questing personality comes through in both works—it is the same artist, writing about his dreams one day and the waking world around him the next. And in both cases he writes i
n the same polished, slightly fussy but always lucid style, as though he were writing literature, and not in a lowly popular genre called Science Fiction. Which, in the 1890s, didn’t really exist yet anyway.
During his own lifetime, it was his domestic fiction and social observations that made Wells’ reputation. He was seen as Dickens’ worthy successor, and some critics went so far as to compare him to Tolstoy; he was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Love and Mr. Lewisham and his other domestic novels may have fallen by the wayside, but the dusty volumes are still worth hunting down in the library or used bookstore. They are time machines of a different sort—perfect little capsules that transport the reader vividly to Edwardian England, when walls were decorated with oleographs, borax beads were used in the lab, wearing a bright red tie identified one with Socialism, and couples married before they lived together. A chapter of Love and Mr. Lewisham is describes how Lewisham and Ethel set up their rooms together after eloping:
She was suddenly domestic. Hitherto he had seen her without a hat and jacket only on one indistinct dramatic occasion. Now she wore a little blouse of soft, dark red material, with a white froth about the wrist and that pretty neck of hers. And her hair was a new wonderland of curls and soft strands. How delicate she looked and sweet as she stood hesitating there. These gracious moments in life! He took two steps and held out his arms. She glanced at the closed door of the room and came flitting towards him…
Quite a departure from Morlocks and attacking aliens! But this other side of H.G. Wells is, in its own way, just as new and strange.
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