# Kipps
**Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul** is a comic novel by [H. G. Wells](https://www.edgepedia.org/h-g-wells), published in 1905, that follows Arthur "Artie" Kipps, a drapery assistant who unexpectedly inherits a fortune and tries to enter upper-class society before returning to his roots. Drawing on Wells's own early years behind a shop counter, it established him as one of the leading Edwardian novelists and has been adapted repeatedly for stage, silent film, sound film, television, and musical theater.[1](https://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4672/Kipps.html) • [2](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| First published | 1905, as *Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul*[2](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps) |
| Author's standing | Reportedly Wells's own favorite among his works[2](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps) |
| Autobiographical basis | Wells endured 13-hour days as a draper's apprentice as a boy of 13 before escaping retail for teaching and writing[2](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps) |
| First film version | Silent film directed by Harold Shaw for Stoll Picture Productions, released January 1921, starring George K. Arthur and Edna Flugrath[3](https://londononlocation.co.uk/films/kipps/) |
| Best-known film version | 1941 Carol Reed film with Michael Redgrave, released in the US as *The Remarkable Mr. Kipps*[4](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/27719) |
| Musical version | *Half a Sixpence* (1963), music and lyrics by David Heneker, 679 performances at the Cambridge Theatre with Tommy Steele[4](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/27719) • [5](https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2001/dec01/Wells.htm) |
| Posthumous draft | Wells's abandoned larger design published as *The Wealth of Mr Waddy* (1969)[1](https://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4672/Kipps.html) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
A small English town at the turn of the century. Arthur Kipps ([Michael Redgrave](https://www.edgepedia.org/michael-redgrave)), an orphan raised by an elderly aunt, works behind the counter of Shalford's drapery, learning the rituals of ribbon and collar boxes. His evenings belong to Ann Pornick (Phyllis Calvert), a housemaid he has loved since boyhood. Before he travels for the shop, Ann cuts a sixpence in half so each of them keeps a piece as a remembrance.[15](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/27719-THE-REMARKABLE-MR.-KIPPS)
Then the earthquake. A solicitor arrives with news that a grandfather Kipps never knew existed has left him a house and £25,000.[16](https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/181353-kipps?language=en-US) Kipps, who has never handled more than a week's wages, suddenly has more money than anyone he has ever met. The town recalibrates around him at once: tradesmen grow deferential, and the doors of respectable society swing open. He is drawn into the orbit of Helen Walshingham (Diana Wynyard), a well-bred woman who sees in the guileless heir a pliable man of means, and her circle takes on the job of making him presentable. Kipps, flattered and bewildered, lets himself be remade. Ann, who has gone into service at a boarding house, drifts out of his life, and the half sixpence stays in his pocket as an accusation.
The comedy of the middle stretch is Kipps floundering among his betters: clumsy attempts at gentility, dinner parties where he is out of his depth, and a circle of new friends whose warmth scales precisely with his bank balance. His one genuine new acquaintance is Chitterlow (played by Max Adrian), a chaotic, half-broke theatrical type who is forever writing a play, and Kipps, charmed, puts money into it. Meanwhile he is persuaded into a house-building speculation that quietly eats the fortune, and he drifts into an engagement to Helen that both parties slowly realize is a mistake. Helen is snobbish and calculating, but not a monster; the broken engagement plays as two people discovering they were never in the same story rather than as a villain unmasked.
**The film's most celebrated moment is a daydream in which Kipps watches himself leave his body.**[17](https://letterboxd.com/film/kipps/) As staged by Reed and shot by Arthur Crabtree, it is a sudden burst of visual invention in an otherwise unostentatious film: Redgrave's Kipps sees himself from outside, a double of himself stepping free, and the image gives form to what the whole story has been about, a man looking at the person his money has made and not recognizing him. Reviewers have singled it out as the sequence where the film turns from gentle costume comedy into something bolder.[17](https://letterboxd.com/film/kipps/)
The fortune, whittled away by bad advice, bad speculation, and fair-weather friends, is gone. The people who found Kipps interesting find him poor again with the same smoothness with which they found him rich. What is left is what was there at the start: Ann, whose half sixpence has waited out the whole misadventure. Kipps's small investment in Chitterlow's play, of all things, pays off when the show succeeds, giving him just enough to open a modest bookshop. He and Ann marry, settle behind the shop counter with their baby son, and end the film no richer than they began and considerably wiser.[7](https://www.reelstreets.com/films/kipps/)
### Characters
Arthur Kipps (Michael Redgrave) is the draper's apprentice turned accidental heir, guileless, earnest, and stubbornly decent. Redgrave, better known for grave dramatic parts, plays him with lanky, open-faced physicality and never winks at the audience, so the comedy comes from Kipps's real confusion rather than from our feeling superior to him.
Ann Pornick (Phyllis Calvert) is the housemaid Kipps has loved since childhood, drawn with restraint and given the film's moral ballast. Her half of the sixpence is the promise the plot keeps trying to break.
Helen Walshingham (Diana Wynyard) is the well-bred woman who undertakes Kipps's polishing and nearly his permanent capture. Wynyard gives her enough self-awareness that she reads as a snob rather than a scheming villain.
Chitterlow (Max Adrian) is the theatrical, perpetually broke enthusiast whose absurd play ends up, ironically, the only sound investment Kipps ever makes.
### Sequels, prequels, and universe
Wells's story went on to a far louder afterlife. It became the West End stage musical Half a Sixpence, opening at the Cambridge Theatre on March 21, 1963 as a vehicle for [Tommy Steele](https://www.edgepedia.org/tommy-steele), who took it to Broadway in 1965 for 511 performances and starred in the 1967 film musical version. [Cameron Mackintosh](https://www.edgepedia.org/cameron-mackintosh) financed a rewritten revival that opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre in July 2016 and transferred to London's Noel Coward Theatre that November.[18](https://www.derekwinnert.com/kipps-michael-redgrave-phyllis-calvert-diana-wynyard-classic-movie-review-1836/) The novel had also been filmed once before, in 1921.[19](https://archive.org/details/Kipps)
## The novel
Wells drafted the book over several years, beginning it under the title *The Wealth of Mr. Waddy*; in the earliest, lost version Kipps did not appear at all, having been intended to enter the story later. As ultimately written, the novel centers on a shop assistant in drapery who comes into an unexpected inheritance and tries to join elite society, but learns that refinement and social standing cannot ensure that he truly belongs.[2](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps)
The opening chapters, in which the young, illegitimate Artie Kipps enters Shalford's emporium in [Folkestone](https://www.edgepedia.org/folkestone), contain Wells's fullest and bitterest description of an apprentice's life, with the drapery trade represented as a lifelong dead end. Kipps is miraculously freed from this fate when he discovers he has inherited a fortune, and he sets off on a humorous odyssey up the ranks of English society, playing the gentleman according to the rules laid out in the era's etiquette manual *Manners and Rules of Good Society*. He becomes engaged to the genteel Helen Walshingham and unwisely entrusts his investments to her crooked brother. At the point where class snobbery and social pretense appear to have trapped him just as thoroughly as the drapery trade once did, he revolts and goes back to Ann Pornick, the sweetheart of his youth, ultimately settling into a comfortable life as a small bookseller. The most memorable of the minor characters is the bohemian Chitterlow, who becomes a successful playwright.[1](https://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4672/Kipps.html)
The book's roots are semi-autobiographical. Mostly set in Kent, the novel owes much to Wells's youth working in drapery shops: at 13 he was forced to spend exhausting 13-hour days at a counter, resisting his mother's determination that he become a shopkeeper, until he left retail for teaching and finally gave up other work to write full time in 1893. One line given to the clerk Buggins crystallizes the draper's prospects: "We're in a blessed drainpipe and we got to crawl along it till we die!"[2](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps) Wells described the novel as a fragment of a much larger design, part of which survives in draft form and was published posthumously as *The Wealth of Mr Waddy* (1969).[1](https://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4672/Kipps.html)
## The 1921 silent film
Stoll Picture Productions filmed the novel with George K. Arthur as Kipps and Edna Flugrath as Ann Pornick, directed by Harold Shaw; the film was released in January 1921.[3](https://londononlocation.co.uk/films/kipps/) • [6](https://britishsilentfilmfestival.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/kipps.pdf) In November 1920 the Savoy Restaurant in London was placed at the production's disposal in the early hours to film the scene in which Kipps, at the "Royal Grand Hotel", meets his first humiliating experience among the hotel's guests, with Wells himself present during the shoot and staying in conversation with the cast until after three in the morning. *The Daily News* praised the Savoy scenes' "merit of actuality", while *Kinematograph Weekly* criticized the "long-drawn-out London scenes" as padding.[3](https://londononlocation.co.uk/films/kipps/) *The Bioscope* called it a "faithful and entertaining version" of Wells's novel and singled out Arthur's performance as the gawky linen-draper's apprentice who tried to become a "gentleman".[6](https://britishsilentfilmfestival.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/kipps.pdf)
## The 1941 Carol Reed film
The second screen version, *Kipps*, was directed by [Carol Reed](https://www.edgepedia.org/carol-reed) from a screenplay by Sidney Gilliat, produced by Twentieth Century Productions and distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox, with a British release date of 27 April 1941. It was shot in black and white at the Gaumont-British Studios in London, where production was completed in late December 1940.[4](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/27719) Michael Redgrave played the adult Kipps, with Diana Wynyard as Helen Walshingham, Phyllis Calvert as Ann Pornick, Arthur Riscoe as Chitterlow, and [Michael Wilding](https://www.edgepedia.org/michael-wilding) as Ronnie Walshingham; [Cecil Beaton](https://www.edgepedia.org/cecil-beaton) designed the costumes.[4](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/27719) The score was by Charles Williams, a leading composer of light music.[5](https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2001/dec01/Wells.htm) In the United States the film was released as *The Remarkable Mr. Kipps*.[4](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/27719) • [7](https://www.reelstreets.com/films/kipps/)
The film follows the novel's broad arc: the apprentice is dismissed from the store after a drunken night out, discovers from an old newspaper cutting that a house and fortune have been left to him, becomes engaged to Helen, and allows her brother to safeguard his fortune, before a chance meeting with Ann convinces him whom he really loves. Chitterlow's play, which Kipps has backed, proves a hit and leaves the couple enough money to start a small business.[8](https://content.yudu.com/web/449tp/0A44cs2/29-08-1941/html/7.html) Runtime figures differ across references: the AFI Catalog records the original British release at 112 minutes, while Rotten Tomatoes lists 1 hour 26 minutes and the Dutch VPRO guide lists 108 minutes.[4](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/27719) • [9](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kipps) • [10](https://www.cinema.nl/db/383609-kipps)
Contemporary and later critical response was mixed. Variety's reviewer formed the impression that Reed "wasn't exactly comfortable in the director chore on this type of limp yarn", while Bosley Crowther of *The New York Times* praised Reed for revealing each detail "with all the art of a miniaturist's hand". [George Orwell](https://www.edgepedia.org/george-orwell), writing in *Time and Tide*, welcomed that "a novel has been filmed and remained recognizable".[9](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kipps) A later retrospective notes the film was not a box-office or critical success at the time and that Redgrave was widely thought miscast, though his performance is now seen as giving Kipps a distinction and charm beyond a literal reading of Wells's "little man"; the film was also criticized for neutralizing the political thrust of the novel.[11](https://oldyorkeronline.com/kipps/)
## Later adaptations
The novel was adapted for the stage as early as 1912.[1](https://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4672/Kipps.html) In 1960 ITV broadcast *Kipps* as an eight-part serial with 22-year-old South African-born Brian Murray in the title role and Diana Fairfax as Helen Walshingham. Playwright Clive Exton spent three months shaping the novel into half-hour episodes, at times incorporating large passages of Wells's text verbatim and closing the final episode with the novel's original words; the production pursued period accuracy down to 1901 newspaper front pages and a sourced 1904 car.[2](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps)
**Half a Sixpence.** The story's most famous afterlife is the musical *Half a Sixpence*, with a book by Beverly Cross and music and lyrics by David Heneker, which opened in London in 1963 starring Tommy Steele and ran 679 performances at the Cambridge Theatre in 1963–64; Steele recreated the role of Arthur Kipps in the 1965 Paramount film version directed by George Sidney.[4](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/27719) • [5](https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2001/dec01/Wells.htm) The title echoes the sixpence that Ann cuts in half as a friendship token in the story.[4](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/27719) In 2016 the book was rewritten by [Julian Fellowes](https://www.edgepedia.org/julian-fellowes) for a Chichester Festival Theatre and Cameron Mackintosh production, with adaptations of the original songs plus new music by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe; a filmed version aired on Sky Arts, with Charlie Stemp as Kipps.[12](https://www.noda.org.uk/show-reports/kipps-the-new-half-a-sixpence-musical) • [13](https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/dec/30/julian-fellowes-turns-half-a-sixpence-rewrite-kipps-into-winning-fun)
## Themes and standing
The novel is read as a comic treatment of class aspiration and social mobility: a lower-middle-class protagonist struggles with his reality, and Wells's use of romance transmutes what could be a miserable story into romantic fantasy, placing the book in the tradition of the English Bildungsroman.[2](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps) • [14](https://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2496/1/2496_507.pdf) Alongside works such as *Tono-Bungay*, *The History of Mr Polly*, and *Ann Veronica*, it belongs to Wells's novels of social comment rather than his scientific romances.[5](https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2001/dec01/Wells.htm) Today the novel survives principally as a period piece, but its afterlife in stage, film, and musical adaptations, most famously *Half a Sixpence*, has kept it in circulation.[1](https://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4672/Kipps.html) • [2](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps)
## References
1. [Kipps, JRank Literature encyclopedia](https://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4672/Kipps.html)
2. [Kipps (1960 ITV serial), Television Heaven](https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/kipps)
3. [Kipps [Unseen] (1921), London on Location](https://londononlocation.co.uk/films/kipps/)
4. [The Remarkable Mr. Kipps (1941), AFI Catalog of Feature Films](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/27719)
5. [H.G. Wells and Music, Philip Scowcroft, MusicWeb International (2001)](https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2001/dec01/Wells.htm)
6. [Harold Shaw, Great Britain, 1921, British Silent Film Festival (reprinting The Bioscope, 27 January 1921)](https://britishsilentfilmfestival.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/kipps.pdf)
7. [Kipps, Reelstreets](https://www.reelstreets.com/films/kipps/)
8. [Kipps synopsis, Kinematograph Weekly supplement, 29 August 1941](https://content.yudu.com/web/449tp/0A44cs2/29-08-1941/html/7.html)
9. [Kipps (1941), Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kipps)
10. [Kipps (1941), VPRO Cinema](https://www.cinema.nl/db/383609-kipps)
11. [Kipps film review, Old Yorker (2016)](https://oldyorkeronline.com/kipps/)
12. [Kipps, the New Half a Sixpence Musical, NODA (2022)](https://www.noda.org.uk/show-reports/kipps-the-new-half-a-sixpence-musical)
13. [Julian Fellowes turns Half a Sixpence rewrite Kipps into winning fun, The Guardian (2021)](https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/dec/30/julian-fellowes-turns-half-a-sixpence-rewrite-kipps-into-winning-fun)
14. [Doctoral thesis on Wells and the English Bildungsroman, Durham University e-theses](https://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2496/1/2496_507.pdf)
15. [https://catalog.afi.com/Film/27719-THE-REMARKABLE-MR.-KIPPS](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/27719-THE-REMARKABLE-MR.-KIPPS)
16. [https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/181353-kipps?language=en-US](https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/181353-kipps?language=en-US)
17. [https://letterboxd.com/film/kipps/](https://letterboxd.com/film/kipps/)
18. [https://www.derekwinnert.com/kipps-michael-redgrave-phyllis-calvert-diana-wynyard-classic-movie-review-1836/](https://www.derekwinnert.com/kipps-michael-redgrave-phyllis-calvert-diana-wynyard-classic-movie-review-1836/)
19. [https://archive.org/details/Kipps](https://archive.org/details/Kipps)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Adaptations of literature, stage, and other media › Films based on novels, novellas, and short fiction › Films based on early 20th-century literature*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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