Before the publication of The Time Machine (1895), H. G. Wells’s early works
provide insight into the challenges of the late Victorian educational system. Wells benefited
from a unique set of educational reforms intended to provide education for the lower middle
class. He did so in the capacities of a student taking examinations to earn grants for school,
an independent learner working toward a degree, and a schoolmaster developing teaching
methods. Although designed to correct inadequacies in the system of education, said reforms
were not without controversy. Wells’s writings on cramming in science education and
complexities of studying by correspondence, as well as his Text-book of Biology, deserve to
be considered as part of a wider debate about education in the late nineteenth century.