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                           Transcriber Note:

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   text_.
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                                  THIS
                           MISERY _of_ BOOTS

                                   BY
                              H. G. WELLS

             _Author of “Socialism and the Family,” “In the
                     Days of the Comet,” “A Modern
                             Utopia,” etc._

                              [Decoration]


                                 BOSTON
                        THE BALL PUBLISHING CO.
                                  1908

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                             THIS MISERY OF
                                 BOOTS




                               CHAPTER I

                 THE WORLD AS BOOTS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE


“It does not do,” said a friend of mine, “to think about boots.” For my
own part, I have always been particularly inclined to look at boots, and
think about them. I have an odd idea that most general questions can be
expressed in terms of foot-wear—which is perhaps why cobblers are often
such philosophical men. Accident it may be, gave me this persuasion. A
very considerable part of my childhood was spent in an underground
kitchen; the window opened upon a bricked-in space, surmounted by a
grating before my father’s shop window. So that, when I looked out of
the window, instead of seeing—as children of a higher upbringing would
do—the heads and bodies of people, I saw their under side. I got
acquainted indeed with all sorts of social types as boots simply,
indeed, as the soles of boots; and only subsequently, and with care,
have I fitted heads, bodies, and legs to these pediments.

There would come boots and shoes (no doubt holding people) to stare at
the shop, finicking, neat little women’s boots, good sorts and bad
sorts, fresh and new, worn crooked in the tread, patched or needing
patching; men’s boots, clumsy and fine, rubber shoes, tennis shoes,
goloshes. Brown shoes I never beheld—it was before that time; but I have
seen pattens. Boots used to come and commune at the window, duets that
marked their emotional development by a restlessness or a kick.... But
anyhow, that explains my preoccupation with boots.

But my friend did not think it _did_, to think about boots.

My friend was a realistic novelist, and a man from whom hope had
departed. I cannot tell you how hope had gone out of his life; some
subtle disease of the soul had robbed him at last of any enterprise, or
belief in coming things; and he was trying to live the few declining
years that lay before him in a sort of bookish comfort, among
surroundings that seemed peaceful and beautiful, by not thinking of
things that were painful and cruel. And we met a tramp who limped along
the lane.

“Chafed heel,” I said, when we had parted from him again; “and on these
pebbly byways no man goes barefooted.” My friend winced; and a little
silence came between us. We were both recalling things; and then for a
time, when we began to talk again, until he would have no more of it, we
rehearsed the miseries of boots.

We agreed that to a very great majority of people in this country boots
are constantly a source of distress, giving pain and discomfort, causing
trouble, causing anxiety. We tried to present the thing in a concrete
form to our own minds by hazardous statistical inventions. “At the
present moment,” said I, “one person in ten in these islands is in
discomfort through boots.”

My friend thought it was nearer one in five.

“In the life of a poor man or a poor man’s wife, and still more in the
lives of their children, this misery of the boot occurs and recurs—every
year so many days.”

We made a sort of classification of these troubles.

There is the TROUBLE OF THE NEW BOOT.

(i) They are made of some bad, unventilated material; and “draw the
feet,” as people say.

(ii) They do not fit exactly. Most people have to buy ready-made boots;
they cannot afford others, and, in the submissive philosophy of poverty,
they wear them to “get used” to them