Mr. Egbert Elvesham is very rich, very old, and childless. When he chooses an impoverished medical student to be his heir, the young man is delighted at his good fortune. But the bequest comes with significant strings attached...

A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.

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H.G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer prolific in many genres. He was born in Bromley, Kent, the fourth and youngest child of former domestic servants turned shopkeepers. When the shop struggled financially, Wells was apprenticed as a draper – an unhappy experience, which he later used in novels such as 'The History of Mr. Polly' and 'Kipps'. He was released from apprenticeship to become a pupilteacher at Midhurst Grammar School, which allowed him to selfeducate and work his way via a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London. He began writing by contributing short articles to periodicals such as The Pall Mall Gazette. As an author, Wells is perhaps best remembered today for his science fiction – he is regarded as one of the founders of the genre, and many of his works have achieved the status of classics, including The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). From a young age Wells was an active socialist, and his later writing moved away from science fiction and tackled wider social and political themes, in novels such as 'TonoBungay' (1909) and 'The History of Mr. Polly' (1910). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times.

'The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham' first appeared in the May 1896 edition of The Idler magazine. It was later reprinted (with minor variations in the text) in three short story collections: 'The Plattner Story and Others' (1897), 'The Country of the Blind and Other Stories' (1913) and 'Tales of the Unexpected' (1924). The text read here is taken from the original 1896 magazine printing.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2021.