The door in the wall hg wells. A Summary and Analysis of H. G. Wells’s ‘The Door in the Wall’ 2022-11-16
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The Door in the Wall is a short story written by H.G. Wells, first published in 1906. The story follows the life of Leonard, a successful politician who is forced to confront the reality of his past after a chance encounter with an old man named Wall.
As a young boy, Leonard had been orphaned and taken in by a wealthy family. He was given every advantage in life, including a top-notch education and the opportunity to pursue a successful career in politics. However, despite his many accomplishments, Leonard always felt that something was missing in his life. He had always been drawn to a mysterious door in the wall of his childhood home, and had always felt a sense of longing to know what lay beyond it.
One day, while out walking, Leonard comes across an old man named Wall who seems to recognize him. Wall tells Leonard that he was once his nursemaid, and that Leonard had been injured in an accident and lost the use of his legs. Despite the best efforts of the doctors, Leonard was left paralyzed from the waist down. The wealthy family who took him in did so out of a sense of duty, but they never truly accepted Leonard as one of their own.
As Leonard listens to Wall's story, he is shocked to realize that everything he had believed about his past was a lie. He had always thought that his paralysis was the result of a childhood illness, and had never suspected that there was a deeper story behind it.
Feeling betrayed and lost, Leonard confronts the family who raised him and demands to know the truth. They reluctantly tell him the full story of his injury and reveal the existence of the mysterious door in the wall. Leonard is overcome with emotion and decides to go through the door, hoping to find some sense of closure and acceptance.
What Leonard finds on the other side of the door is a world beyond his wildest dreams. He discovers a group of people who have dedicated their lives to helping others, and who have embraced him as one of their own. Leonard finally feels a sense of belonging and purpose, and decides to dedicate his life to helping others as well.
The Door in the Wall is a poignant and thought-provoking story about the importance of identity and acceptance. It reminds us that our past does not define us, and that we are capable of overcoming even the most difficult challenges if we have the courage to embrace the unknown.
The Door in the Wall by H. G. Wells Plot Summary
My father belonged to the old school. For a while this world was so bright and interesting, seemed so full of meaning and opportunity that the half-effaced charm of the garden was by comparison gentle and remote. The Father of Science Fiction. He came into the school as my co-equal, but he left far above me, in a blaze of scholarships and brilliant performance. If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. Years later, on his way to school, Wallace accidentally encountered the door again. My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.
All this, you understand, is an attempt to reconstruct from fragmentary memories a very early experience. And it was at school I heard first of the Door in the Wall--that I was to hear of a second time only a month before his death. I became in a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy - in another world. At lunch to-day the club was busy with him and the strange riddle of his fate. You say I have success - this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I hurried through that with renewed hope.
I expect I was a good deal distraught and inattentive that morning, recalling what I could of the beautiful strange people I should presently see again. But the third time was different; it happened a week ago. He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get away, nor the course he took among the West Kensington roads. It had no appeal to me that afternoon. Then, as I said, everyone was forbidden to listen to me, to hear a word about it. The story never makes clear if that moment was or was not imaginary, but in some sense it hardly matters. Of that I am now quite assured.
I was keenly anxious to get some definite word from Gurker, but was hampered by Ralphs' presence. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed a cul de sac, and found a passage at the end. She took me to a seat in the gallery, and I stood beside her, ready to look at her book as she opened it upon her knee. There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. Oddly enough I had no doubt in my mind that they would be glad to see me. And before me ran this long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side, rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. That much the reader must judge for himself.
Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings, that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him. There was that big Fawcett--you remember him? His mother died when he was born, and he was under the less vigilant and authoritative care of a nursery governess. There he recalls a number of mean dirty shops, and particularly that of a plumber and decorator with a dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead, ball taps, pattern books of wallpaper, and tins of enamel. They played delightful games in a grass-covered court where there was a sundial set about with flowers. Anyhow, this second time I didn't for a moment think of going in straight away.
He was walking part of the way home with me; he was talkative, and if we had not talked about the enchanted garden we should have talked of something else, and it was intolerable to me to think about any other subject. . . And before me ran this long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side, rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. For one thing, my mind was full of the idea of getting to school in time - set on not breaking my record for punctuality.
A Summary and Analysis of H. G. Wells’s ‘The Door in the Wall’
Now middle-aged and a successful politician, Wallace is nonetheless dissatisfied with his life. His mother died when he was two, and he was under the less vigilant and authoritative care of a nursery governess. And I was not afraid. It seems to Redmond that, regardless of whether the green door was ever real or just some kind of hallucination, some might think the door betrayed Wallace in the end. Wallace mused before he went on telling me. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very gently against the small hand I held out, and purred. He was still a year short of forty, and they say now that he would have been in office and very probably in the new Cabinet if he had lived.
As his memory of that remote childish experience ran, he did at the very first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in. Roosevelt in 1934, and interviewed Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union in the same year. And so, in a trice, he came into the garden that has haunted all his life. And the shame and humiliation of that public weeping and my disgraceful home-coming remain with me still. But certainly the keen brightness that makes effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just at a time with all these new political developments --when I ought to be working.
I swore my story was true. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. I ran past, tugging out my watch, found I had ten minutes still to spare, and then I was going downhill into familiar surroundings. Perhaps I was suffering a little from overwork--perhaps it was what I've heard spoken of as the feeling of forty. Ralphs' behaviour since has more than justified my caution.
He doesn't care a rap for you - under his very nose. We got in barely in time, and on the way we passed my wall and door--livid in the moonlight, blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but unmistakable. It fills me with hot remorse to recall it. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the truth of his secret for me. Ralphs, I knew, would leave us beyond the Kensington High Street, and then I could surprise Gurker by a sudden frankness. That beast Fawcett made a joke about the girl in green--. Nevertheless, the young Wallace gives in to the temptation—not yet having mastered self-control—and opens the door in the wall, and finds himself in an enchanted garden filled with beautiful flowers, tamed panthers, and friendly children.
