Herbert George (H.G.) Wells is an agent of the Ministry of Preternatural Affairs.
That organization is a part of Her Majesty's Intelligence services. As Wells so elegantly, and perhaps a tad pompously considering his relative young age when we first meet him, relates as to the purpose of the department, "The Ministry represents more than the interests of the British Empire. Modern science has proven that there's far more to the world than was previously dreamt of in our philosophy. There are terrible threats just around the corner, nesting among the stars, in other realities, and in the vastness of time. Threats we're ill-prepared to face. Queen Victoria created the Ministry to arm the human race against the future. The twentieth century is when everything changes. And we've got to be ready."
I mention that he is young. As the activities we have of this earnest, dedicated, and a tad brash man take place in or around 1886, Wells would be approximately 20 years old. The writing of the terrific science fiction adventure novels for which he will be remembered well to this day will not come for close to a decade and being a writer is not something he is seriously contemplating during these early years; he is too busy working on behalf of his government to make sure there is a future to write about.
But many of the ideas of the things that he will go to pen prose about got their genesis in the adventures we have of him: time travel, alien invasions, animal mutations, and others all are presented to him as problems to be faced and defeated. It would be later that he would turn such things into fiction having lived through them in his reality.
And that reality is not just his in these pages. You think of an individual of note, male or female, who lived and operated around that time and chances are you will be able to see Wells deal with them. Pierre and Marie Curie (the latter before she married), Annie Oakley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne (although he is a bit of a nasty here) and many, many, many more. Name dropping is performed quite frequently. But all these people will play important roles in those adventures and without them things would not have been as much fun.