Lives of Houses by Kate Kennedy

Author:Kate Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

15

H. G. Wells at Uppark

LAURA MARCUS

The West Sussex country house Uppark (or Up Park) played a significant role in the early part of H. G. Wells’s life, and its influence can be felt throughout his thought and work. In 1880 Wells’s mother, Sarah, left the family home in Bromley, Kent, to become housekeeper at Uppark where, as a young woman, she had once been a lady’s maid. During the years of her housekeeping position (which lasted until 1893), the young H. G. Wells spent substantial periods of time at the house. In his autobiography, published in the 1930s, Wells suggested that the country house was, in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century heyday, the foundation of “nearly all that is worth while in our civilization to-day.”1 A starker picture of the country house and social hierarchy is given in his novel Tono-Bungay (1909), in which Uppark becomes the country house Bladesover. The very architecture of Uppark (redesigned by Humphrey Repton in the early nineteenth century), with its extensive underground passages, along which servants, invisible to outside observers, would wheel laden trolleys between the kitchens and the main house, is expressive of its social and class relations, and was one possible influence on Wells’s representations of upper and lower kingdoms in his early fictions.

Uppark had, like almost all houses of its kind, been extensively remodelled over the course of its history. When Sir Matthew Fetherstonhaugh and his wife, Sarah (née Lethuillier), bought the house from Charles, Earl of Tankerville, in 1747, they began an ambitious programme of building and furnishing, probably employing the architect James Paine for the majority of the work (details of the commission and alterations have not survived). The house was further developed by Sir Matthew’s son Henry (Harry) Fetherstonhaugh, who employed first Humphrey Repton, one of the most highly regarded landscape designers and architects of his day, and, after Repton’s death, the neo-classical architect Charles Heathcote Tatum.

FIGURE 15.1. Uppark exterior; the south front of the main house showing the steps to the entrance at Uppark House and Garden, West Sussex. (Photo copyright © National Trust Images /Andrew Butler)

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