Customer Reviews

The Spinster and the Prophet: H.G. Wells, Florence Deeks, and the Case of the Plagiarized Text

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When I heard about this book, probably on internet, I was fascinated, since I recalled Wells in his Autobiography complaining about being sued by a woman 'who conceived the strange idea that she had a copyright on human history'. Florence Deeks was Canadian, as is McKillop. The case was finally thrown out, leaving Wells poorer by today's equivalent of £25,000 and Deeks ditto by $750,000 equivalent.

Much of McKillop's book is hypothetical, dealing in states of mind and social life in Toronto, and, later, strangers in London. Much of the rest is based on court transcripts. He seems to have paid little attention to Well's 'Outline of History' - there's no evidence he read any of it, or is/was aware of its different editions.

Deeks submitted a MS of 'The Web' to two publishers; they rejected it, and in 1918 it was under consideration by McMillan in Canada. Wells's Outline first appeared in partworks from November 1919. There's no definitive proof of the fate of the MS; it's possible Wells saw it, though he denied it. To keep this review short, I'll just make comments:---

[*1*] The only quotations from Deeks are indirect, and about women, either relatively famous ones (e.g. Renaissance women such as Lucrezie de Medici and Isabella of Aragon, Martin Luther's mother, Queen Elizabeth) or women considered as women, supposedly inventors of things like dyeing and building, medical science, poetry, and clothes. (P 271). 'The Web' sounds a romanticised pioneer view, naive sentimentalism.

[*2*] Not one single passage is quoted from Florence Deeks: '.. no longer a publishable work.' (Pp 409-410) It's not on Internet (nor are images of the typescript pages. Even if Wells saw it, it's uncertain that it could have been of any value to him. Deeks of course took all her material from other others, and her case veered uncertainly between single passages, and the entire scheme of both books. McKillop doesn't describe her schema - I'd guess because it bore little relation to Wells's.

[*3*] Wells' concepts included - this is a tiny subset - 1 Tendency of English speaking races to promulgate statements - Magna Carta, U.S, Constitution, Wilson's fourteen points/ 2 Severe criticism of the use of the word `bourgeois' by Marxists to include a huge range of human types/ 3 Private enterprise after the Great War speculating in rents, not providing housing; insisting on closing state shipyards; buying up remunerative public enterprise after WW1/ 4 The importance of print to the human mind and its bearing on the political future/ 5 Distinction between race, nation, and language groups [discussing `Aryan']/ 6 Intellectual tangles due to the differences between Realism and Nominalism/ 7 `The Science of Thwarting the Common Man'. Why didn't McKillop produce the originals in Deeks?

[*4*] One of the points seized upon is the spelling of what's now rendered 'Hatshepsut' as 'Hatasu'. One of Deeks's three 'experts' - in fact none was eminent - seized on this point. Hatasu." McKillop says: '... Irwin had worked in the field [ancient Near East] and had never seen or heard of it until he started the current investigation'. Both Wells and Deeks used this spelling; therefore Wells must be a plagiarist.

The truth is the spelling was widespread; even on Internet I easily found 20 examples. Here are some: (1) 1881 `The Career of Queen Hatshepsut (Hatasu)' - English Translations of the Assyrian and Egyptian Monuments/ (2) 1883 FLINDERS PETRIE (one of the most famous Egyptologists) in 'The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh' has details on monuments of Hatasu/ (3) 1886: ANCIENT EGYPT by GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A. 10th edn has an entire chapter on Hatasu/ (4) 1891 Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers. by Amelia Edwards. `QUEEN HATASU has been happily described as the Queen Elizabeth of Egyptian history/ (5) 1904 `The Web of Indian Life' by Margaret Noble mentions Hatasu/ (6) 1905 `To-day on the Nile' Guidebook by Harry Westbrook Dunning./ (7) 1906 Prize winning sculptured panel: Queen Hatasu of Egypt by the English sculptor Countess Feodora Gleichen.

[*5*] Why would McKillop write this book? My best guess is that he's Catholic - he is 'author of scholarly work on the history of religion'. He disliked the rationalistic view of the Outline of History. Incidentally there is much emphasis on Wells's sex life - a dozen or more names, including what might be called 'groupies'. Sex and religion seem to be the psychological mainsprings of McKillop's book.

Anyone writing on Eng Lit who's tempted to assume the case for Wells as plagiarist is proven would be well advised to assume the opposite!

If you know little about H.G..Wells beyond his well-known science fiction but would like to know more, this is not a good book to begin with. A.B.McKillop takes an episode in Wells's life - his pursuit through the civil courts of Canada and England by Florence Deeks, whose fixed idea was that he had plagiarised her work in writing his hugely successful "The Outline of History" - and produces a superficially plausible argument for her cause.
We are told that Wells used the structure of her unpublished manuscript of "The Web of the World's romance"to speed his own writing process and that he quoted many words and phrases - even copying mistakes that Deeks had made. McKillop portrays Deeks as a courageous woman seeking justice and Wells as a ruthless, amoral womaniser who wins the legal battle because he is a rich, famous man and she is a poor, unknown woman. McKillop freely imagines "what may have happened" to eke out his slight "evidence".
We can't judge for ourselves the merits of Deeks's "Web" because it "is no longer a publishable work". McKillop gives us a partial list of headings to substantiate the claims that the structure was copied and numerous examples of "copied" phrases which generally consist of single words - for example, Deeks describes the nebula from which the sun was formed as "a speck". Wells used the same word to describe the earth! Gosh! Deeks only managed to find one book - a world history by the French Educationalist Duruy - to inform her on the formation on the Solar System, and the similarity of Wells's description and his never having heard of Duruy is advanced of proof of his copying. Of course McKillop does not see fit to mention that Duruy was quoting Laplace's nebular hypothesis, the accepted theory for the formation of the Solar System when Wells was a science student and writer of science fiction in the 1880s.
And the so-called "common errors". McKillop tells us that both Deeks and Wells mistakenly referred to the Phoenician "caravans" plying their trade overland, where all historians know that the Phoenicians were a seafaring people. In fact, Wells wrote that "... the Semitic Phoenicians were spreading themselves upon the seas," while "another kindred Semitic people, the Arameans...were developing the caravan routes ... of the deserts." Did McKillop actually bother to read Wells's "Outline"? Perhaps he was presuming that none of his own readers would be familiar with Wells's non-fiction...
"The Spinster and the Prophet" won for McKillop the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for "Best True Crime" 2000. I would suggest that the award was made in the wrong category.
H G Wells was no saint - but neither was he the villain depicted by McKillop. For a more balanced picture of Wells I'd recommend "H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life" by Michael Sherborne.

Although largely forgotten today, H.G. Wells' "Outline of History" was one of the great bestsellers of the post-World War I era. Readers by the thousands eagerly consumed this work, a tale of humankind from the prehistoric era to the present day. Although Wells was a well-established literary figure, he had made his repoutation as a popular novelist; the appearance of the "Outline" would be somewhat akin to a similar work appearing under the signature of Tom Clancy or Stephen King today.

Florence Deeks, meanwhile, was a Canadian woman of no literary reputation or fame. But a few years earlier, she had set for herself the ambitious task of writing a history of humankind, with an emphasis on the contributions of women. She submitted her manuscript for publication, and was surprised to receive it back, rejected, only after an eight-month interval. Even more puzzling was the condition of the document--dogeared, soiled, generally well worn.

For Deeks, at least, the mystery was solved when she read a review, which led her to purchase a copy of "The Outline of History." It immediately became clear to her that Wells had based his work on hers. Not only was the general structure virtually the same, whole passages were lifted verbatim.

The bulk of this well-researched, well-written book is the saga of Deeks' unsucessful, decade-long struggle for justice in the legal system of Canada and the U.K. It becomes sadly, abundantly clear, that the authorities never considered her plagarism suit on its obvious merits. As is so often the case, reputation triumphed over the right.

A.B. McKillop has taken a now obscure literary and legal episode and brought it vividly to life again in this outstanding work. McKillop's sympathies are clearly (and correctly) with Deeks, who struggled so long for justice against overwhelming odds. Her telling of the tale is so compelling that the reader is swept up in a sense of outrage, and even though the outcome is foreordained, a wish that somehow things could turn out differently in the end. Sadly, the only true vindication for Deeks is in the pages of this book. But at least posterity will know the true story.--William C. Hall

I read this book while conducting some "extra-curricular" research on plagiarism. What I found most interesting in this book by A.B. McKillop was the incredible determination of Florence Deeks to achieve justice, even if it meant appealing to the highest courts in the Canadian and British judicial systems. Deeks lost these appeals, but A.B. McKillop's documentation of Wells' plagiarism of a woman author--in a time when women weren't really supposed to aspire to authorship--will ensure that the facts of this unfortunate case are there for anyone wanting to know where many of Well's "brilliant" ideas/plots/books really came from.

As McKillop notes, Deeks wasn't the only author Wells had stolen from. When Ms. Deeks came forward, other authors came forward with their allegations about Wells' appropriation of their ideas. But they lacked the determination which compelled Florence Deeks to pursue her case, even if it meant crossing the Atlantic, spending fortunes in legal fees, and sparring with unsympathetic judicial big wigs.

Wells' wholesale copying/minimal paraphrasing was so blatant that he even left in some of the very mistakes Deeks had made in her book manuscript, and McKillop documents such mistakes thoroughly with photos of original manuscript pages included among other evidence such as log book entries for Macmillan Publishers. Copying of errors from one text to another is a sort of basic error which gets more than a few modern plagiarists in trouble, for example, students who forget to "update" an Internet paper download.

Such errors that McKillop documents in this excellent book are the most convincing aspect of the work. Wells may continue to receive post-humous accolades and honors from the world of science fiction and from the movie industry. And irony of ironies-- the book that he plagiarized from Ms Deeks, "Outline of History" is still available in moder format under his name! And the royalties from such works continue to enrich the agents for his work, not to mention his family.

Such is the life of a plagiarist. The wordthief gets the $$$, recognition and fame, immortality as an author. Those who do things the "right" way barely scrape by, remain obscure, and are altogether forgotten.

Dr. Herbert Ulysses Quickwit

This book is foremost a look at the position of women in Canada (and the UK) in the literary and legal worlds. It is also very well written, with interesting information about H.G. Wells' personal life, his attitude toward women (including his long suffering wife and Rebecca West), his sense of self-importance and his scorn for
"unimportant" writers.

H.G.Wells' Outline of History rings more than one bell from some forgotten toddler era of one's paidaia and it comes as a shock to discover this complot behind the original bestseller, and still for many in small town public libraries their intro to world history. It is therefore significant to have record set straight. The author revives the nearly misplaced story of Florence Deeks and her manuscript's fate at the hands of her publishers and presents the convincing case for Wells' use of the text as an 'outline' prefab and accelerant for his otherwise unaccountable haste in producing his very long work. There is a curious sort of last judgment at least--the facts of the case resurface to expose the deed to history and memory. Well done sherlocking.