H.G. Wells and his Hammond No 2 Typewriter

In 1899, H.G. Wells's second wife, Amy Catherine “Jane” Robbins (1872-1927), transcribes Wells's handwritten story on a Hammond Model 2 typewriter.

In 1899 H.G. Wells - who had four years earlier written The Time Machine - decided it was time to buy a typewriting machine for himself. Or rather, for his then wife to transcribe his stories. According to renowned British biographer and journalist Claire Tomalin, in her book The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World, published last November, Wells’s “own writing had deteriorated ‘to a state unfit for the human eye to look upon’. Wells, by then living back in Sandgate in Kent, at the rented Arnold House, took himself two miles up the Sandgate Road to Folkestone, to the Folkestone branch offices of Frederick James Parsons (1844-1900), bookseller, printer and publisher. Earlier in 1899 Parsons, as part of his expansion and diversification, had taken on the agency for the Oliver typewriter and had had it demonstrated regularly, from January through to May, in “Parsons’s Library” at 86 Sandgate Road, next to the Folkestone General Post Office. But through the advertising pages of the Folkestone Express and Sandgate Advertiser, Wells was aware of another American machine, the Hammond, available for sale in Ramsgate, threequarters of an hour by train further north in Kent. "Time is too short to write in the old way," the Hammond advertising said. "The Hammond Typewriter ought not only to be found in the office but in the schoolroom and the home." And the Hammond was clearly a faster machine than the Oliver. The Hammond’s “speed capabilities” had been amply demonstrated in mid-October 1889 at the New York company’s then London headquarters, at 326 High Holborn, by none other than Edward James Manning (1865-1938), as much one of history’s greatest typewriter mechanical engineers as a speed merchant at the Hammond keyboard. The Pall Mall Gazette reported, “Mr Manning operates at the rate of 150 words per minute on the Hammond type-writer and he challenges the world to produce equal results on any other machine.” In that 1889-91 period “he was acknowledged to be the most rapid typewriter operator in the world”.

There was one other point of difference for Wells, a seemingly mere one pound. The Oliver was selling for £22 and the Hammond for £21. Wells was earning about £600 a year, so £22 was almost two weeks’ income (he was paid £1 for a short story in 1888). Wells had married his second wife, Amy Catherine “Jane” Robbins (1872-1927) in late October 1895, and would come to think of her as much a secretary as a wife. But at the time Wells made his typewriter choice, neither could type. Tomalin says Jane “made fair copies of his work” on War of the Worlds, and these were sent to a paid typist. Tomalin writes that the Hammond was “bought … for Jane” and Wells himself “declared it unusable, and immediately learnt to use it himself, just to show he could”.

Amy Catherine “Jane” Robbins

Notwithstanding the deterioration in Wells’s handwriting, Jane still had to read it to type his work. “Jane learnt quickly once she was allowed to try [the Hammond typewriter], and from now on she typed all his work: it is to be hoped she had her own study,” writes Tomalin. While later living in Spade House in Southgate (the couple had moved in by early December 1900), Tomalin notes that Jane “typed in the dining room”.

Wells and Jane punting down the river.