Editing Love and Mr Lewisham (section)

==Plot==
At the beginning of the novel, Mr Lewisham is an 18-year-old teacher at a boys' school in [[Sussex]], earning forty pounds a year. He meets and falls in love with Ethel Henderson, who is paying a visit to relatives. His involvement with her makes him lose his position, but he is unable to find her when he moves to London.

After a two-and-a-half-year break in the action, Mr Lewisham is in his third year of study at the [[Royal College of Science|Normal School of Science]] in [[South Kensington]]. He has become a socialist, declaring his politics with a red tie, and is an object of interest to Alice Heydinger, an older student. However, chance brings him together again with his first love at a [[séance]]. Ethel's stepfather, Mr Chaffery, is a [[Spiritualism (religious movement)|spiritualist]] charlatan, and Mr Lewisham is determined to extricate her from association with Chaffery's dishonesty.

They marry, and Mr Lewisham is forced to abandon his plans for a brilliant scientific career followed by a political ascent. When Chaffery absconds to [[Continental Europe]] with money he has embezzled from his clients, Lewisham agrees to move into his shabby Clapham house to look after Ethel and Ethel's elderly mother (Chaffery's abandoned wife). Wells's friend [[Sir Richard Gregory, 1st Baronet|Sir Richard Gregory]] wrote to him after reading the novel: "I cannot get that poor devil Lewisham out of my mind head, and I wish I had an address, for I would go to him and rescue him from the miserable life in which you leave him."<ref>Mackenzie, Norman and Jeanne (1973), ''The Time Traveller: the Life of H.G. Wells'' London. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p. 152.</ref>