It is a mystery that HG Wells’s characters would have been quick to leap on, but one that would doubtless have enraged the fastidious Wells himself: what is the origin of the quote chosen by the Royal Mint and attributed to him on the new Wells £2 coin?
Intended to mark 75 years since the death of the author, the coin has already been criticised for depicting the “monstrous tripod” featured in The War of the Worlds with a fourth leg, and for giving his Invisible Man a top hat, which the character never wore. Then the Wells expert Prof Simon James spotted the quote chosen for the edge of the coin: “Good books are warehouses of ideas.” James and his fellow academic Adam Roberts, a vice-president of the Wells Society, could source no such quote in Wells’s writing – although it is credited to him on various inspirational quote websites.
“Wells is one of those authors who is often given as the author of misattributed or invented quotations on the internet – there’s a notorious one about seeing a human being riding a bicycle for which neither I nor any other Wells scholar has been able to identify a source,” said James. “Surely the Royal Mint hasn’t just plucked a quotation off the net without checking the source … has it?”
Author Eleanor Fitzsimons solved the mystery. She tried searching Wells’s writing for a quote with “warehouses” in it, and found an approximation in his obscure work Select Conversations With an Uncle (Now Extinct) and Two Other Reminiscences. That quote, however, is not what appears on the coin: it reads, “Good books are the warehouses of ideals.”
“I absolutely love solving literary mysteries,” said Fitzsimons, whose biography The Life and Loves of E Nesbit features an appearance from Wells; Nesbit taught her fellow author how to play badminton, and he seduced her daughter.
Unfortunately for the Royal Mint, not only is the Wells quotation inaccurate, the actual sentiments expressed are likely to be far from what the author intended. The words are spoken by a character who believes that ideals should be hidden away in books, and goes on to say that “there is a time for ideals, and a time when they are better out of the way”.
“The correct quotation is not Wells speaking in his own voice, but in the voice of a character whose opinion is definitely not always to be trusted. English academics exhort our students to check the original source when they can – what a shame the Royal Mint didn’t think to do so before producing all these coins with a letter missing,” said James, adding that Wells had an antipathy to 19th-century notions of high culture: “He would have been all for people reading The Republic or The Origin of Species or Wells’s own work … [but] the notion of ‘books are wonderful’ would make his blood boil.”
The error echoes a previous literary mistake by the Royal Mint: the £10 Jane Austen bank note was printed with the quote, “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” – a line spoken not by Austen but by her character Caroline Bingley, who has no interest in books at all.
Asked about the source of its quotation, the Royal Mint told the Guardian that “Good books are the warehouses of ideas” was “widely associated with HG Wells”.
Its four-legged tripod, meanwhile, is “an interpretation of the various machines in War of the Worlds”, and the invisible man is “wearing a Victorian top hat to signify the era”.
It added that all themes considered for Royal Mint coins go through a planning and design selection process governed by an independent panel known as the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, which includes experts in art, heraldry, typography, sculpture, history and numismatics. It did not mention that any literary experts had been consulted.
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