"The Spinster and the Prophet" by A.B. McKillop

With offices in New York and London as well as in Canada, Macmillan was the chosen house of writers from Rudyard Kipling to Lewis Carroll to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Naturally, it also published the acclaimed author of "The Time Machine" and "The War of the Worlds," Herbert George Wells. At around the time John Saul, an editor in the educational books division of Macmillan Canada, promised to give Deeks' manuscript a read, Wells wrote a letter to Macmillan New York publisher George Brett proposing a history of mankind "of about two hundred thousand words, and about one thousand maps, illustrations, full page or smaller. What do you think of the project?" he asked.

Brett not unreasonably responded that Wells has told him "nothing of the way in which you intend to write the book," pointing out that "it might be prepared from the standpoint of Social History of Mankind ... Material History of Mankind, or the purely natural development of Mankind from its physical standpoint." Wells seems not to have thought his idea through even to that extent, for his next letter was to Sir Frederick Macmillan in London, again proposing his "Universal History," this time adding only the less-than-helpful detail that it might be used in schools as "a prize book & for reading."

Starting with that vague notion, Wells appears to have produced -- without any preparation or training in history, while simultaneously writing a novel and carrying on an affair -- a two-volume book of 1,324 pages in about a year. To McKillop, a professional historian, this proposition "beggars the imagination. In mid-November 1918, nothing on the project had advanced as far as the typescript stage. By February 5, 1919, [Wells' wife] Jane had produced 50,000 to 60,000 words in typed form. Twenty days later, her husband had reached the 125,000-word mark -- halfway through the projected book. He had written between 75,000 and 80,000 words in under three weeks, researching along the way ... At the end of the year, the whole manuscript was complete. The achievement was nothing short of miraculous."

Several scholars at the time agreed, and even said so under oath when Deeks pressed suit in 1927. She'd taken a while to bring Wells to court: Her manuscript had spent a full year at Macmillan, during which Saul had put off the old spinster, promising to examine the text as soon as he had a spare moment. That moment had never come, at least not until Saul was gone. His successor had simply sent her a short (and unsolicited) rejection letter.

Then, about a year later, Deeks happened upon a review in Saturday Night magazine that praised H.G. Wells' latest, his "Outline of History." The critic, Hector Charlesworth of Toronto, wrote that, "Such a synthesis, such an interpretation of life as a cognate whole has never been attempted single-handed by any other man." While that was hardly a claim that Deeks could deny, her curiosity turned to concern as she bought Wells' tome at the local department store, and began to compare it to her own.

When her manuscript had been returned, she'd wondered why it was so tattered and dog-eared, as if it had been read and referred to repeatedly. "The Outline of History" gave her an explanation: The books had in common not only facts and phrasings, but many of the same omissions. She, too, had called Hatshepsut "Hatasu," a spelling not used by anybody since the 1890s, copied by her from one of the out-of-date books in the Toronto Public Library. From both histories, Adam Smith was missing, and much of India. Wells held, as did Deeks, that the Phoenicians traded by land rather than sea, and both called Roman general Sulla "aristocratic," when in fact he was -- a subtle but crucial linguistic distinction -- strictly patrician.

While some of these similarities were discovered by Deeks, most were found by academics she hired to help her. By the time she took Wells to court, the list of such parallels ran to many pages, and scholars were even more shocked by the inaccuracy of Wells' facts than by how quickly he'd allegedly written his manuscript. After all, he'd credited an array of experts, four mentioned on his cover page and about 100 more in his acknowledgments, for helping him work so fast. Naturally, given his connections, all were leaders in their disciplines. How, then, could they have led Wells so far afield?

Deeks' chief expert witness, University of Toronto professor William Irwin, held that the names were but a bluff. "The work has no merits that would preclude it being dependent upon an unknown writer," he told the court. "Indeed on the contrary, the striking deficiencies and inaccuracies of Mr. Wells' treatment, taken in connection with his imposing array of scholarly collaborators implies rather cogently that there is something deeply wrong." McKillop's failure to find substantive exchanges about "The Outline of History" in Wells' correspondence with any of his alleged advisors, many of them already elderly, supports Irwin's claim; the author's letters seem primarily concerned with convincing Sir E. Ray Lankester et al. to lend him their esteemed names.

In at least that respect, Wells knew exactly what he was doing. Impregnable behind his reputation, he used his brief time in court to make light of the case: Asked where he found certain passages, he cited Herodotus, who, as far as he was aware, "knew nothing of Miss Deeks." Following Wells' lead, the Canadian court seems not to have taken the spinster's case especially seriously. The newspapers made headlines of her demand for $500,000 in damages, but the judge mostly preferred to adjourn for lunch.

Next Page: Guilty of sleaze, not plagiarism

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