This is a long novel narrated in the first person by 40-year-old George Ponderevo, describing in a deliberately ramshackle, digressive way, his boyhood and early manhood, his doomed early marriage and, above all, his involvement with his uncle Edward Ponderevo who shot to fame and fortune – in a ‘comet-like transit of the financial heavens’ – on the back of the quack medicine he invented and which gives the book its title, ‘Tono-Bungay’.

Three categories of H.G. Wells novel

Wells wrote a terrifying amount, over 100 books, sometimes publishing three books in a year, not to mention the numerous short stories and countless magazine articles.

Gilbert Phelps, in his introduction to the Pan paperback edition, says you can divide Wells’s novels into three categories: the scientific romances; the social comedies; and the novels of ideas. He ‘went off’ as a novelist precisely as the first flush of his extraordinary science fiction gave way to the third category, his increasingly long-winded novels addressing various social issues and designed to put the world to rights.

Phelps suggests that ‘Tono-Bungay’ holds a special position in Wells’s oeuvre as containing elements of all three categories in a kind of equipoise. 1) The narrator is presented as a devotee of scientific knowledge, an innovative engineer working on the (very new) technology of flight and the book contains serious technical accounts of manned flight (in gliders and propelled balloons), as well as a surprising amount about radioactivity in the late episode about ‘quap’.

At the same time the book contains 2) a lot of social comedy i.e. a lot of the characters are grotesques and caricatures created for comic effect. There’s a lot of Dickensian boisterousness, especially in the early chapters.

And all this is entwined with sustained attempts at 3) broader social analysis. In his way, Wells attempts to get to the root of hidebound Little England and its uptight social hierarchies, its small-minded snobbishness. Later on, the book becomes an anatomisation of modern business and finance, the sham values of advertising, the ghastly need for social acceptability of the nouveaux riches, all described in punishing detail. To summarise:

In effect [Tono-Bungay] was the watershed between Wells the predominantly creative artist and Wells the predominantly propagandistic writer.
(Gilbert Phelps in the Introduction, p.xviii)

Autobiographical

I read Tono-Bungay when I was a student and have a vague memory of the exuberant character of his uncle and its commentary on Edwardian England which I found politically energising. Rereading it thirty years later I have a completely different view. On this reading the social analysis seems to me weak and vague, the character of Uncle Edward only appears intermittently and the entire quack medicine storyline lacks detail and conviction. What comes over to me this time is that it is extremely autobiographical; the strong feeling that in his Edwardian novels Wells is writing his autobiography again and again, that it is the only ‘serious’ story that he has.

What I mean is that Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) is about a young man who escapes from drudgery working as a bullied teacher in a rubbish little private school when he wins a scholarship to study at the science college in South Kensington but is distracted from his studies when he falls in love with a beautiful but poor and rather dim young woman and ends up dropping out altogether in order to marry her. This is what happened to Wells, who escaped drudgery as a teacher in a nonky little school to study Biology at the Normal School of Science (later, Imperial College) in South Kensington, but fell in love and married his cousin who turned out to be dim and conventional.

The hero of Kipps (1905), after a promising education finds himself condemned to drudgery in a haberdasher department store in Kent just like Wells was before he managed to escape to London, as Kipps escapes by inheriting a fortune, as in a fairy story.

So Tono-Bungay feels like Well’s third go at using the material of his own life, and this time it feels closer than ever to his actual life story and maybe this explains why it often feels more vivid and, at moments, more fierce and angry, than its predecessors.

For in real life, when his family fell on hard times his mother was forced to go back into service as a housekeeper in the big country house at Up Park in Sussex where Wells as a boy observed all the snobbery of the late Victorian era, both above and below stairs – and this is precisely the plot of the first part of Tono-Bungay. It describes the boyhood of the narrator, young George Ponderevo, whose mother is housekeeper in the big old country house of Bladesover, allowing him to view the snobbery of the old lady who owns the place, and of the fleet of servants who run it, at first hand.

Bladesovery

George’s mother is housekeeper at Bladesover, a grand old country house belonging to a terrifying old lady, Lady Drew, and her forbidding friend and companion, Miss Somerville, and it’s here that young George is brought up below stairs to know his place in a fixed and centuries-old hierarchy.

Bladesover is deliberately built up into a symbol of England with its snobbishness and narrow-mindedness and conservatism, which is to become a reference point or touchstone for the rest of the book.

Bladesover illuminates England; it has become all that is spacious, dignified pretentious, and truly conservative in English life.

The narrow-minded, snobbish, philistine, bigoted, Brexit, Daily Mail, conservative England which endures down to the present day, 125 years later. The narrator calls this blinkered mindset Bladesovery.

His mother sets the tone: her husband ran off, possibly to Australia, and abandoned her with the baby, with the result that she is fierce and embittered, and has destroyed every trace of her perfidious partner. Young George never even finds out his father’s name let alone what he looked like.

His mother has become narrow, crabbed, confined to the dark spaces below stairs with the other narrow-living, dignified staff, replicating the snobbery of their betters upstairs. Against all this stuffiness and fixity young George instinctively rebels. He is:

‘Disobedient,’ said my mother. ‘He has no idea of his place…’

‘You must be a good boy, George,’ she said. ‘You must learn…. And you mustn’t set yourself up against those who are above you and better than you…. Or envy them.’ ‘No mother,’ I said.

So these opening chapters describe the narrator’s boyhood as the son of the housekeeper in a rural grand house in Kent and vividly depict the elaborate social system whereby everyone is born into a ‘place’ and expected to remain there for life, victims of ‘that snobbishness which is the distinctive quality of English thought’.

True to form George rebels and causes trouble and after a climactic incident, he is exiled from the house, sent off to stay with his mother’s cousin to work in his seedy little bakery in horrible Chatham. This man, Nicodemus Frapp, represents the servile tradition perfected, and is a sort of caricature of incompetent simplicity. He is a Christian but made to represent a small-minded English type of intolerance and narrow-mindedness. George has to sleeps in same bed as Fripp’s two sons, which leads not to furtive teenage sex, as you might expect in a modern novel, but to the boys having fiery debates about the existence of God where George finds himself goaded into mocking the boys’ ignorant faith which eventually leads to a big fight and George runs away, walking the 20 or so miles back to Bladesover and presenting himself, unrepentant, to his exasperated mother.

It’s at this point that he is sent to live with another cousin of his mother’s, Edward Ponderevo, a pharmacist in Wimblehurst, 26 or 7, married, impatient, ambitious, with a joking supportive wife, Susan – Uncle Edward and Aunt Susan, and thus the Bladesover part of the book ends and the young adult part begins.

Critique of Bladesovery

When I was a student I think I thrilled to Wells’s repeated skewering of the Little England mindset, the kind of provincial ignorance I myself had to run away from in order to embrace the bigger world of ideas and experiences.

Wells puts some effort into trying turn Bladesover into a theory of British society. This has at least two distinct aspects.

1. Static analysis

The first is the static analysis or historical theory, the notion that Bladesover represents the fundamental social structure of England and the historical theory that it has been this way since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In the narrator’s view, English society was crystallised around the rule of the Whig landed gentry who owned all the land, who ran it from big houses, around whom was a constellation of other roles and jobs – the wide array of servants who served them in their homes, and then the professions (doctor, lawyer, architect and so on) who serviced their needs from local towns or cities. The entire paraphernalia of politics, the House of Commons and House of Lords, the awards system and so on, everything was constructed around the needs and demands of the landed aristocracy and had been so from 1688 to the time when the protagonist is a boy at Bladesover in the 1880s (p.80).

The cultural result of all this is that the aristocracy own culture, can afford to be cosmopolitan, have broad horizons and so on, while virtually everyone else is indoctrinated into the naive and blinkered belief that British is best, that this is the greatest country in the world, that foreigners with their silly languages and fancy cooking are ghastly and so on and so on, the Daily Mail, Daily Express mentality.

The serfs have completely assimilated the social structure which entirely benefits their betters, and aggressively champion their own subjugation – just like poor Northerners in our time fooled into voting for the Conservative party, the party of oligarchs and millionaires and non-doms. They love their own enslavement and react violently against anyone who suggests they think for themselves. They have the Daily Mail to do their thinking for them, to tell them who to hate and why – which is, broadly speaking, anyone who wants to change any aspect of the present most excellent state of the country.

Thus it is that, at various moments throughout the book, the narrator reverts to his theory of Bladesovery to explain this or that aspect of hidebound, snobbish English society (p.150). Even when he goes up to London to stay with his Uncle, who’s moved there, he, at first, sees the vast capital as an extended Bladesover, the Bladesover system devised to provide a golden life for aristocrats and their hangers-on in the law and the city, and drudgery for everyone else…

There have been no revolutions, no deliberate restatements or abandonments of opinion in England since the days of the fine gentry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the days when Bladesover was built; there have been changes, dissolving forces, replacing forces, if you will; but then it was that the broad lines of the English system set firmly. . . . The fine gentry may have gone; they have indeed largely gone, I think; rich merchants may have replaced them, financial adventurers or what not. That does not matter; the shape is still Bladesover…

2. Dynamic analysis

Having established, and repeatedly embellished, this reading of the theoretical, historical framework of British society, the novel then goes on to describe George’s dawning realisation that the system is, in fact, falling to pieces, and chronicles his slow, slow disillusion with the state of English society.

Specifically, George starts out as a very young man thinking everywhere will be as ordered and structured as life at Bladesover. Even after his personal life starts going awry he continues to work on the assumption that there is someone, somewhere, in control:

I still clung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane and just organisation…

Only slowly does he realise that no one’s in control and all is mess and muddle.

Just as I had always imagined that somewhere in social arrangements there was certainly a Head-Master who would intervene if one went too far, so I had always had a sort of implicit belief that in our England there were somewhere people who understood what we were all, as a nation, about. That crumpled into this pit of doubt and vanished…

‘I’ve had false ideas about the world,’ I said…

And:

Everybody who is not actually in the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost orientations. We have never broken with our tradition, never even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in quivering fact in the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have slackened, the old habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether come undone… (p.13)

This realisation is demonstrated by the whole story of Tono-Bungay, which is only a kind of glorified cough medicine but becomes a worldwide bestseller due to his uncle’s genius for publicity and advertising. Uncle Edward comes up with amazingly catchy jingles, places hoardings with his striking logo all round towns and cities, branches out into a huge range of other household products and objects (Tono-Bungay Lozenges and Tono-Bungay Chocolate, Tono-Bungay Mouthwash). He is, you realise at some stage, a kind of epitome of American can-do commercialism plonked down into stuffy late-Victorian society (as far as I can make out, the key events all happen during the 1890s).

And as young George watches at first hand his uncle create a commercial and financial giant from what is, in essence, a set of advertising jingles and slogans, it’s then that he realises that, if the city and lawyers and the wealthy, if entire provincial cities and towns can be taken by storm by this patently fraudulent product, then maybe nobody knows what’s going on and nobody’s in charge. Maybe all of society with its pomp and circumstance and Jubilee celebrations is a hollow sham.

He goes from thinking the world is planned and organised with someone somewhere supervising its moral nature, to realising it’s chaos. Thus when his uncle manages to raise a huge sum in the City on the strength of his fraudulent products:

£150,000 – think of it! – for the goodwill in a string of lies and a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realise the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing? (p.129)

And:

At the climax of his Boom, my uncle at the most sparing estimate must have possessed in substance and credit about two million pounds’-worth of property to set off against his vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions. This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that, paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised nothing. I cannot claim that a single one of the great businesses we organised added any real value to human life at all. Several like Tono-Bungay were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the giving of nothing coated in advertisements for money. (p.184)

And:

Civilisation is possible only through confidence, so that we can bank our money and go unarmed about the streets. The bank reserve or a policeman keeping order in a jostling multitude of people, are only slightly less impudent bluffs than my uncle’s prospectuses. They couldn’t for a moment ‘make good’ if the quarter of what they guarantee was demanded of them. The whole of this modern mercantile investing civilisation is indeed such stuff as dreams are made of. A mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systems grow, cities arise to the skies and spread wide and far, mines are opened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas, countries are settled; about this busy striving world the rich owners go, controlling all, enjoying all, confident and creating the confidence that draws us all together into a reluctant, nearly unconscious brotherhood…

The flags flutter, the crowds cheer, the legislatures meet. Yet it seems to me indeed at times that all this present commercial civilisation is no more than my poor uncle’s career writ large, a swelling, thinning bubble of assurances; that its arithmetic is just as unsound, its dividends as ill-advised, its ultimate aim as vague and forgotten; that it all drifts on perhaps to some tremendous parallel to Uncle Edward’s individual disaster… (p.186)

So George goes from thinking the world is a hugely amplified model of the structured, ordered, supervised society of one grand country house, to realising it is an enormous sham, populated by chancers and frauds, with no bedrock or anchor at all, except everyone blindly trusting in the old forms and traditions.

The power of advertising

Thus the book isn’t so much ‘about’ the fake product as the tremendous power of ‘modern’ advertising and the passages Wells writes describing the coming of age of mass advertising in the 1890s are fascinating social history.

I was particularly struck when he writes that modern advertising isn’t so much about just promoting and selling stuff – it’s about creating new ideas and possibilities which people can buy into. When the book’s resident cynic, Bob Ewart, visits Uncle Edward’s bottling operation, he makes the profound point that advertising doesn’t flog this or that product, it offers its consumers the dream of a better life.

‘It’s the poetry of the customer too. Poet answering to poet – soul to soul. Health, Strength and Beauty – in a bottle – the magic philtre! Like a fairy tale….Think of the people to whom your bottles of footle go…Think of the little clerks and jaded women and overworked people. People overstrained with wanting to do, people overstrained with wanting to be…. People, in fact, overstrained…. The real trouble of life, Ponderevo, isn’t that we exist – that’s a vulgar error; the real trouble is that we don’t really exist and we want to. That’s what this – in the highest sense – just stands for! The hunger to be – for once – really alive – to the finger tips!

‘Nobody wants to do and be the things people are – nobody. YOU don’t want to preside over this – this bottling; I don’t want to wear these beastly clothes and be led about by you; nobody wants to keep on sticking labels on silly bottles at so many farthings a gross. That isn’t existing! That’s – substratum. None of us want to be what we are, or to do what we do. Except as a sort of basis. What do we want? You know. I know. Nobody confesses. What we all want to be is something perpetually young and beautiful – young Joves – young Joves, Ponderevo, pursuing coy half-willing nymphs through everlasting forests… (p.130)

And again:

‘Advertisement has revolutionised trade and industry; it is going to revolutionise the world. The old merchant used to tote about commodities; the new one creates values. Doesn’t need to tote. He takes something that isn’t worth anything – or something that isn’t particularly worth anything – and he makes it worth something. He takes mustard that is just like anybody else’s mustard, and he goes about saying, shouting, singing, chalking on walls, writing inside people’s books, putting it everywhere, ‘Smith’s Mustard is the Best.’ And behold it is the best!’

And plans to control and manipulate the media:

He had some amazing perceptions of just how modern thought and the supply of fact to the general mind may be controlled by money. Among other things that my uncle offered for, he tried very hard to buy the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, and run them on what he called modern lines [i.e. to promote his fraudulent products] (p.192)

Plenty of literary critics have written about Wells. I wonder if there’s an essay somewhere by someone who works in advertising and assesses just how spot-on Wells’s analysis was, and whether much has changed in the 130 years since the book’s setting in the 1890s.

Socialism, or not…

George doesn’t become a full-on socialist and socialism is represented in the novel by his boyhood friend, Ewart, who grows up to be a middling to poor sculptor, just about scraping a living, so hardly a shining beacon. Ewart represents total cynicism; he thinks all of society and its values are a sham and so he lives outside them. This is represented by his simple decision to live in sin with one of his models, who herself calmly accepts the fact that he periodically goes on big debauches, getting epically drunk and/or sleeping with prostitutes. Ewart can do this with no hesitation because he has seen through ‘society’ and realised all its values are shams simply designed to keep the proles in line.

But you can see how Wells came to his political opinions and why they aren’t, in fact, socialist; you can see why he joined, but then fell out with, the Fabians. A dictionary definition of socialism is: ‘a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole’ i.e. public ownership not private ownership.

But where Wells’s heart really lies is in the notion that the old raddled fraudulent society needs to be torn down and rebuilt on the basis of Reason and Science. It is Science which becomes young George’s god and he imagines it is leagues of rational, educated, detached and objective scientists who Wells will run the rational society of the future. As George’s flying assistant, Cothope, puts it:

‘We scientific people, we’ll have to take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and that.’ (p.293)

Uncle Edward

But Lord! they’ve no capacity for ideas, they don’t catch on; no Jump about the place, no Life. Live!—they trickle, and what one has to do here is to trickle too—Zzzz.”
“Ah!” said my mother.
“It doesn’t suit me,” said my uncle. “I’m the cascading sort.” (p.46)

Interesting to learn that even down the social scale, in the 1890s a provincial chemist is aware that America is more vibrant exciting and go-ahead than sleepy England:

I’d like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it,” said my uncle. “Then we’d see.”

America! I wish to Heaven, George, I’d been born American—where things hum.

Uncle goes bust on speculation, sells the pharmacy, takes a job in London. George continues studying. Aged 19 he makes his first visit to London (p.69). His uncle invites him to join him in the Tono-Bungay venture. It is the early 1890s.

Marion

Like Mr Lewisham, George gets a scholarship to study Science in London and, just like Mr Lewisham, allows himself to fall in love with an unsuitable woman, in George’s case uneducated, banal, lower class Marion, neglects his studies for her and fails his exams.

The long chapter about Marion is quite harrowing because it is a very powerful description of a sensual intelligent but completely inexperienced young man projecting onto a shallow silly woman all his longing for romance, intellectual companionship and pure lust – while she is a familiar type of sluggish, conventional narrow-minded, reluctant, delaying, ‘not where people can see’ type of prude.

She was young and extraordinarily conventional – she seemed never to have an idea of her own but always the idea of her class – and I was young and sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held us together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and her appreciation of her importance in my thoughts. There can be no doubt of my passion for her. In her I had discovered woman desired. The nights I have lain awake on account of her, writhing, biting my wrists in a fever of longing!

Well, after an agonising courtship in which Marion reveals herself as narrow and unimaginative and petty-minded, they get married, George hoping all the time that, once they’re married, Marion will blossom into the adventurous, cosmopolitan, erudite and wildly sexual personality which he has projected onto her but, of course, she doesn’t. She stays the frigid lump she was all through their courtship and on their wedding night, when he tries to have sex, she cries, unable to cope with the dirty, horrid thing he’s doing to her and which her mother and all her friends have warned her against all her life – which, of course, brings all George’s fantasies crashing down.

Driven by forces I did not understand, diverted altogether from the science, the curiosities and work to which I had once given myself, I fought my way through a tangle of traditions, customs, obstacles and absurdities, enraged myself, limited myself, gave myself to occupations I saw with the clearest vision were dishonourable and vain, and at last achieved the end of purblind Nature, the relentless immediacy of her desire, and held, far short of happiness, Marion weeping and reluctant in my arms. (p.151)

Having taken time to describe their agonising courtship, Wells briskly deals with their sad, humiliating married life:

Each time I returned to Ealing, life there seemed more alien, narrow, and unattractive—and Marion less beautiful and more limited and difficult—until at last she was robbed of every particle of her magic. She gave me always a cooler welcome, I think, until she seemed entirely apathetic. (p.155)

And quickly summarises what happened next, which is he has a fling with a woman who works in the typing pool and he becomes aware of following him with her eyes, Effie Rink.

She looked up at me without a word, with her face flushed and her eyes alight, and I bent down and kissed her lips. She leant back to put an arm about me, drew my face to her and kissed me again and again. I lifted her and held her in my arms. She gave a little smothered cry to feel herself so held. Never before had I known the quality of passionate kisses. (p.157)

Startlingly for an Edwardian novel, he says that after they’ve exchanged glances on numerous occasions, he finally summons up the courage to speak to her and then, abruptly, kisses her and…it’s what she wanted and she returns the kiss! And so they quickly have a passionate affair, running off for a week of sensual delight at Cromer. And with a certain inevitability, as soon as he gets home, Marion confronts him with his infidelity (one of her relatives spotted him in Cromer) and he confesses and so, with surprising calm, they discuss and arrange a divorce, and after a few more pages tying up loose ends, she passes out of his life and the story.

The point is, this is what happened – as a very young man Wells rushed, in 1891, into a marriage with his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells who turned out to be utterly unsuitable for an effervescently intellectual super-ambitious writer. After only a few years he fell in love with a much more suitable candidate, one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, so that he divorced Isabel in 1894 and married Amy in 1895.

So it’s hard not to feel that the Marion chapter (Part Two, Chapter 4) is a deeply-felt and only thinly-veiled record of his miserable courtship and failed marriage and it has a lot of force and power. I read it in one go and felt quite unnerved and depressed by it.

Boyhood vividness

It’s a while since I mentioned how autobiographical the book is but I intended, back in the Bladesover section, to make an important point which is, the boyhood scenes are best. The other scenes have interest – Ewart’s analysis of advertising is shrewd and the long chapter about his marriage to Marion pierces the heart, the account of Uncle Edward’s rise to nouveau riche status – but the first fifty or so pages about being a boy at Bladesover are, arguably, the most fresh and vivid and memorable.

The boy’s-view of the old spinsters who own the place and the petty snobberies of the staff, and his description of his boyhood crush on a little girl he was allowed to play with, Beatrice, and once got to kiss amid the ferns in the house grounds – all have the freshness and power of a good children’s story. Some of it is very funny in a way none of the subsequent scenes, humorous though they may intend to be, are actually funny. (I learn from the introduction that critics routinely describe these scenes to the boyhood scenes in Dickens’s David Copperfield and, I’d add, Great Expectations.)

And the same was true of Kipps. The best part of Kipps is the descriptions of him being a small boy running wild over Romney Marshes with a best friend his own age, pretending at playing cowboys and Indians on the beach, around old shipwrecks or ruined towers, it sounds paradisiacal.

Simple point: the most vivid bits of these two autobiographical novels are the scenes of boyhood.

Victim of life

This is all the more poignant because the adult George paints himself throughout the book as a victim, as a pawn of life, in thrall to forces he completely fails to understand.

I wondered if my case was the case of many men, whether in former ages, too, men had been so guideless, so uncharted, so haphazard in their journey into life.

At times my life appeared before me in bleak, relentless light, a series of ignorances, crude blunderings, degradation and cruelty. I had what the old theologians call a ‘conviction of sin’.

With the dismaying result that:

There were moments when I thought of suicide.

Many passages in the ‘adult’ section of the book are like this and serve to highlight the comedy and freshness of the boyhood scenes. And it’s against his hopeless failures in his private life that he turns to a belief in Science as something hard and objective which can save him.

In the end of this particular crisis of which I tell so badly, I idealised Science. I decided that in power and knowledge lay the salvation of my life, the secret that would fill my need; that to these things I would give myself. (p.168)

Science, with her order, her inhuman distance, yet steely certainties, saved me from despair. (p.169)

And so it is to the science of Aeronautics that George comes to devote his time and researches (pages 181, 218, 230 and Part 3 Chapter 3).

Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses; she hides in strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laborious roads, but she is always there! Win to her and she will not fail you; she is yours and mankind’s for ever. She is reality, the one reality I have found in this strange disorder of existence. She will not sulk with you nor misunderstand you nor cheat you of your reward upon some petty doubt. You cannot change her by advertisement or clamour, nor stifle her in vulgarities. Things grow under your hands when you serve her, things that are permanent as nothing else is permanent in the whole life of man. That, I think, is the peculiar satisfaction of science and its enduring reward… (p.233)

One wonders how much Wells’s own promotion of the Creed of Science and Technology was based, like George Ponderevo’s, on personal failure and despair and a search for personal certitude, the same kind of disillusionment with traditional society and search for a grand transnational Order to properly run the world which, of course, fuelled the rise of totalitarianism between the wars…

Topics

The book is stuffed with long passages about society and other topics which make for sort-of interesting reading, but, at the same time, you can feel the prolixity which was to make his later novels feel more and more garrulous. Wells knew it and has his narrator try to excuse it right at the start:

I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration. I want to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle’s) as the main line of my story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last, I want to get in, too, all sorts of things that struck me, things that amused me and impressions I got – even although they don’t minister directly to my narrative at all… I want to get in all sorts of things. My ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere….

Just the fact that these passages have to be quoted at such length indicates the sense of Wells unbelting himself, letting himself go, the pithy brevity of the early sci fi stories giving way to middle-aged spread.

England as one vast landed estate run for the benefit of the landed aristocracy

It is this idea of escaping parts from the seventeenth century system of Bladesover, of proliferating and overgrowing elements from the Estates, that to this day seems to me the best explanation, not simply of London, but of all England. England is a country of great Renascence landed gentlefolk who have been unconsciously outgrown and overgrown. The proper shops for Bladesover custom were still to be found in Regent Street and Bond Street in my early London days in those days they had been but lightly touched by the American’s profaning hand—and in Piccadilly. I found the doctor’s house of the country village or country town up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not otherwise different, and the family solicitor (by the hundred) further eastward in the abandoned houses of a previous generation of gentlepeople, and down in Westminster, behind Palladian fronts, the public offices sheltered in large Bladesoverish rooms and looked out on St. James’s Park. The Parliament Houses of lords and gentlemen, the parliament house that was horrified when merchants and brewers came thrusting into it a hundred years ago, stood out upon its terrace gathering the whole system together into a head.

London as the Bladesover template gone cancerous

I said at the outset of my first book that I find in Bladesover the clue to all England. Well, I certainly imagine it is the clue to the structure of London…I am most reminded of Bladesover and Eastry by all those regions round about the West End parks; for example, estate parks, each more or less in relation to a palace or group of great houses. The roads and back ways of Mayfair and all about St. James’s again, albeit perhaps of a later growth in point of time, were of the very spirit and architectural texture of the Bladesover passages and yards; they had the same smells, the space, the large cleanest and always going to and fro where one met unmistakable Olympians and even more unmistakable valets, butlers, footmen in mufti. There were moments when I seemed to glimpse down areas the white panelling, the very chintz of my mother’s room again.

I could trace out now on a map what I would call the Great-House region; passing south-westward into Belgravia, becoming diffused and sporadic westward, finding its last systematic outbreak round and about Regent’s Park. The Duke of Devonshire’s place in Piccadilly, in all its insolent ugliness, pleases me particularly; it is the quintessence of the thing; Apsley House is all in the manner of my theory, Park Lane has its quite typical mansions, and they run along the border of the Green Park and St. James’s. And I struck out a truth one day in Cromwell Road quite suddenly, as I looked over the Natural History Museum. ‘By Jove,’ said I, ‘But this is the little assemblage of cases of stuffed birds and animals upon the Bladesover staircase grown enormous, and yonder as the corresponding thing to the Bladesover curios and porcelain is the Art Museum and there in the little observatories in Exhibition Road is old Sir Cuthbert’s Gregorian telescope that I hunted out in the storeroom and put together.’

And:

And the more I have paralleled these things with my Bladesover-Eastry model, the more evident it has become to me that the balance is not the same, and the more evident is the presence of great new forces, blind forces of invasion, of growth. The railway termini on the north side of London have been kept as remote as Eastry had kept the railway-station from Wimblehurst, they stop on the very outskirts of the estates, but from the south, the South Eastern railway had butted its great stupid rusty iron head of Charing Cross station, that great head that came smashing down in 1905—clean across the river, between Somerset House and Whitehall. The south side had no protecting estate. Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London port is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets of undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families, second-rate shops, inexplicable people who in a once fashionable phrase do not ‘exist.’ All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times, do suggest to this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some tumorous growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlines of the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble comfortable Croydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham. To this day I ask myself will those masses ever become structural, will they indeed shape into anything new whatever, or is that cancerous image their true and ultimate diagnosis? (p.82)

A city of Bladesovers, the capital of a kingdom of Bladesovers, all much shaken and many altogether in decay, parasitically occupied, insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible elements; and with a ruling an adventitious and miscellaneous empire of a quarter of this daedal earth complex laws, intricate social necessities, disturbing insatiable suggestions, followed from this. Such was the world into which I had come, into which I had in some way to thrust myself and fit my problem, my temptations, my efforts, my patriotic instinct, all my moral instincts, my physical appetites, my dreams and my sanity. (p.83)

(At exactly the same time, in Howards End, E.M. Forster describes London as a cancerous growth and I came across the contemporary Tory leader Lord Rosebery doing the same, in Roy Hattersley’s history of The Edwardians, page 350: ‘a tumour, an elephantitis, sucking into its gorged system half the life and blood and the bone of rural districts.’)

The nouveaux riches

I don’t know whether it is due simply to my changed circumstances, but it seems to me there have been immensely disproportionate developments of the hotel-frequenting and restaurant-using population during the last twenty years. It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of people who, like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but whole masses of the prosperous section of the population must be altering its habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to evening dress, using the week-end hotels as a practise-ground for these new social arts. A swift and systematic conversion to gentility has been going on, I am convinced, throughout the whole commercial upper-middle class since I was twenty-one.

So it was we recognised our new needs as fresh invaders of the upper levels of the social system, and set ourselves quite consciously to the acquisition of Style and Savoir Faire. We became part of what is nowadays quite an important element in the confusion of our world, that multitude of economically ascendant people who are learning how to spend money. It is made up of financial people, the owners of the businesses that are eating up their competitors, inventors of new sources of wealth, such as ourselves; it includes nearly all America as one sees it on the European stage. It is a various multitude having only this in common: they are all moving, and particularly their womankind are moving, from conditions in which means were insistently finite, things were few, and customs simple, towards a limitless expenditure and the sphere of attraction of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, and Paris. Their general effect is one of progressive revolution, of limitless rope.

They discover suddenly indulgences their moral code never foresaw and has no provision for, elaborations, ornaments, possessions beyond their wildest dreams. With an immense astonished zest they begin shopping, begin a systematic adaptation to a new life crowded and brilliant with things shopped, with jewels, maids, butlers, coachmen, electric broughams, hired town and country houses. They plunge into it as one plunges into a career; as a class, they talk, think, and dream possessions. Their literature, their Press, turns all on that; immense illustrated weeklies of unsurpassed magnificence guide them in domestic architecture, in the art of owning a garden, in the achievement of the sumptuous in motor-cars, in an elaborate sporting equipment, in the purchase and control of their estates, in travel and stupendous hotels. Once they begin to move they go far and fast. Acquisition becomes the substance of their lives. They find a world organised to gratify that passion. In a brief year or so they are connoisseurs. They join in the plunder of the eighteenth century, buy rare old books, fine old pictures, good old furniture. Their first crude conception of dazzling suites of the newly perfect is replaced almost from the outset by a jackdaw dream of accumulating costly discrepant old things.

This made me think of The Times newspaper which aims, in our day, to be the Bible of this class, overflowing with supplements titled ‘Class’ and ‘Style’ and ‘Travel’, guides for the rich on how to spend their money with ‘class’ and ‘style’. Nothing whatsoever has changed.

The affluent society

The American economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the phrase The Affluent Society in the title of a book he published in 1958, but Wells was describing its existence in the 1890s:

In these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour’s eye, when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always before these times the bulk of the people did not over-eat themselves, because they couldn’t, whether they wanted to do so or not, and all but a very few were kept “fit” by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost any one can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. (p.234)

Here, as in Galbraith, it strikes me as a comfortably middle class concern

The imperial class

I had a near view of the machinery by which an astounding Empire is run, rubbed shoulders and exchanged experiences with bishops and statesmen, political women and women who were not political, physicians and soldiers, artists and authors, the directors of great journals, philanthropists and all sorts of eminent, significant people. I saw the statesmen without their orders and the bishops with but a little purple silk left over from their canonicals, inhaling, not incense but cigar smoke. I could look at them all the better because, for the most part, they were not looking at me but at my uncle, and calculating consciously or unconsciously how they might use him and assimilate him to their system, the most unpremeditated, subtle, successful and aimless plutocracy that ever encumbered the destinies of mankind.

John Buchan wouldn’t have agreed.

The absurdity

Regarding the vast unfinished palace Uncle Edward was having built for him on Crest Hill, George is stricken with the futility, not only of the individual life, but of the entire system whereby people slave their lives away to provide the improvident rich with their heedless luxuries.

For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then, and for a time I could think of no other interpretation. This was Life! It came to me like a revelation, a revelation at once incredible and indisputable of the abysmal folly of our being. (p.294)

Turns of phrase

As I’ve often said, I prefer reading older literature because of the unexpected turns of phrase and thought you come across. Wells is usually dismissed as a literary writer because he was slapdash and too often propagandist in intent, but pound for pound his texts include a surprising amount of unexpected and delightful turns of phrase.

I remember these women as immense. No doubt they were of negotiable size, but I was only a very little chap and they have assumed nightmare proportions in my mind. They loomed, they bulged, they impended.

He exfoliated and wagged about novel and incredible ideas. (p.53)

accident in a butter tub p.144

My uncle was my best man, and looked like a banker—a little banker—in flower.

He was an aquarium-faced, long, blond sort of chap (p.177)

He smoked and was fragmentary for a time, fending off my questions… (p.188)

[The polite ladies of Beckenham] all sat about in the summer-house and in garden-chairs, and were very hatty and ruffley and sunshady. (p.198)

Plus ca change…

Another interesting thing about older books is repeatedly being surprised by how little issues and attitudes have changed in the past 130 years. I was struck that George sends Effie a message reading ‘How goes it?’, a phrase I’d have thought was much more modern and slangy (p.170).

I was amused when, after he’s broken up with sensual free spirit Effie, she, in her Bohemian way, falls for a poet:

She married a year or so ago a boy half her age – a wretch of a poet, a wretched poet, and given to drugs, a thing with lank fair hair always getting into his blue eyes, and limp legs.

I was struck how the image of the outsider poet, the poète maudit, coming down to our times in the image of the leather-clad rock’n’roll rebel, drug addict etc – far from being a modern invention has remained so consistent over such a long period.

The radioactive interlude

So most of the novel is extremely homely, set in a country house, a sleepy Sussex town, slovenly Chatham, hotels and apartments around London and then…as the novel reaches its climax, as the wolves start to close in on the fraudster Ponderevo and his business empire starts to crumble, something really weird happens.

Uncle Edward and George agree that the latter must take ship in a dirty old brig, the Maud Mary, and sail, with the shifty captain and surly crew, to an island off the West coast of Africa, here to take aboard as much radioactive ‘quap’ as they can carry. What? The explanation is that Uncle Edward’s London office has been besieged for years by all sorts of people trying to interest him in their get-rich-quick schemes and one that always stood out was a poor explorer, Gordon-Nasmyth, who said he’d come across deposits of radioactive sludge piled up around a lagoon on an island, Mordet Island, off the African coast. Our guys do a scientific analysis of the sample Gordon-Nasmyth brought along and find in it several rare metals. The project hangs fire until Uncle Edward’s fortunes begin to slide and the plan to get the ‘quap’ is a desperate last throw of the dice – if George can return with enough of it, they can extract it, sell it and cover all their debts.

Originally, the plan had been for Gordon-Nasmyth to go but at the last minute he manages to be badly injured in an accident and so our boys decide that George himself should go. The ship is rotten, the captain is a secretive Romanian Jew, George is locked up in a small sweaty cabin with him and the monosyllabic first mate for 50 days, madly seasick.

And when they do find the ‘quap’ is really is radioactive, having scorched the lagoon and surrounding area and burning the hands of the crew who reluctantly set about wheelbarrowing it up plans and dumping it in the ship’s hold.

This whole episode is really bizarre and departs madly from the homely and broadly comic tone of the rest of the book. It feels like a science fiction short story Wells didn’t know what to do with and so inserted here, regardless of its incongruity and strangeness.

As he describes the heat of the tropics, the smell of rotting vegetation, and the occasional black faces they see peeping out of the foliage, I wondered if it was some kind of pastiche of Joseph Conrad, especially his most famous novella, Heart of Darkness. I wondered why on earth Wells made the captain of this knackered old cargo ship a Romanian Jew, which seems a bizarre choice in itself, but when he went into detail about the man’s heavy foreign accent and Continental habit of accompanying his talk with face and hand gestures, I wondered if this was meant to be a satirical portrait of Conrad, who Wells knew, and notorious for his heavy Polish accent.

As if this mad trip to Africa to collect radioactive sludge wasn’t bizarre and random enough already, Wells piles on an even more random and inexplicable event. The boat is anchored for weeks as the loading takes place and so George gets into the habit of wandering beyond the zone blasted by the waste, into the jungle, for an increasing amount of time each day, eventually taking some food and making a day of it.

It was during one of these little explores that he comes across a black man standing stick still in a clearing staring at him. There’s a moment as they both stare at each other then the native turns and starts to run. On impulse, to prevent him alerting his tribe and bringing others and maybe attacking his little European crew, George puts his rifle to his shoulder, fires and hits the black man square in the back. Running over, he sees he’s killed him with one shot.

What? Why? Why on earth has George the sceptical engineer, the man whose confused feelings we are encouraged to sympathise with throughout the book, suddenly transmogrified into a racist murderer? It’s true that throughout the book we’ve had continual satirical analysis of the rotten state of England which has two or three times expanded into jokey comments about the ramshackle adventitious British Empire…is this…is this entire African adventure meant as some kind of extended satire on the folly of Empire, very much like ‘Heart of Darkness’?

George buries the body in quicksand but that night is haunted by guilt at what he’s done and returns to the spot the next day only to find it’s been dug up and half eaten by some jungle animal, so he buries it again. Another night of guilt and when he goes back to the spot next day he finds the body has been dug up again but this time by human hands and entirely removed. This puts the Fear into him and when the ship’s crew rebel at the work they’re doing, effectively going on strike and demanding they leave, George is quick to agree.

In the event this is a wise decision because only a few hours after weighing anchor and starting to steam north they encounter a gunship from another European power (it is never explained which European nation claims ownership of this territory, only that removing the ‘quap’ as they do, is illegal and risky).

Anyway, they manage to throw off the other ship in a storm and fog but then the episode reaches a kind of quintessence of futility. For the ship starts to leak, in George’s opinion because its powerful radioactive cargo slowly disintegrates the wooden staves of the hull. They have to man the bilge pumps continually for seasick storm-ridden days until everyone is sick to death and exhausted and only too happy to agree when the captain says they must abandon ship.

After a day in open rowing boats they are picked up by another European ship, the Union Castle liner, Portland Castle, where they are fed and watered and given new clothes and George reads in the newspapers that his Uncle Edward has finally been declared bankrupt.

At which point the narrative returns to England and the rather sleepy provincial English tone of the novel but leaving this reader completely bewildered at this thick slice of exotica, at this bizarre sci fi-and-murder episode I’ve just experienced. It’s weird.

The flight to France

But it’s followed by something almost equally bizarre, namely George and Edward’s aerial flight to France. In the later part of the novel George tells us less and less about Uncle Edward’s complicated business empire and more and more about his use of the money he acquires to set up extensive workshops, hangars and engineering facilities where he, along with trusty assistant Cothope, work on projects for manned flight.

These passages include an extended description of the sensation of lying in an early design of glider and it swoops over the Surrey countryside. And George was working on a new, expanded version of a dirigible of his own design, including his own lightweight motor. So this is a zeppelin-type balloon with a small space for a couple of passengers to lie in and a motor-driven propeller at the back to move it and steer with.

So, long story short, when he gets back to England, and travels down to Surrey to meet with Uncle Edward the latter is, for the first time in his life, broken and speechless. A sustained campaign by his rivals, in particular a certain press baron named ‘Lord Boom’ (modelled on Lord Northcliffe?) have exposed the rickety basis of Edward’s empire and it’s all collapsing. Not only that but he sheepishly admits to George that he’s lied under oath and in signed affadavits – in other words, he could be arrested and gaoled for fraud.

So this is all the rational or logical pretext for what happens next, which is bonkers. And this is that George bundles Edward and some supplies into his prototype dirigible and flies him to France. In the event this fraught trip is described in rather too much detail for the prevailing winds blow them down rather than across the Channel and it’s only by extreme effort that George manages not to get blown out into the Atlantic and instead manages to crash land them on the coast near Bordeaux. But that isn’t the end of this section, far from it.

They are looked after by kindly French peasants and then make their way across country to a small village which I got the impression was close to the Spanish border (‘There is a background of the Pyrenees, of blue hills and sunlit houses, of the old castle of Luzon and a noisy cascading river..’).

Here they find accommodation in a peasant inn and Uncle Edward, worn down by his worries and the exertions of the journey, sickens and dies. But even this simple plot development is really stretched out, taking many days and involving a bizarre coterie of characters, including the local doctor, a Catholic nun, and an English Anglican vicar who spends some of his time catering to English tourists abroad.

Why? Why this ridiculous science fiction, Heath Robinson contrivance of an escape? And why flee as far as the Pyrenees? And why subject us to an extended description of the argy-bargy this all causes among the people tending dying Edward?

A set of whys to add to all the questions about the entire African ‘quap’ episode, which also feels as if it’s been parachuted in from a different genre altogether. It is a weird exotic conclusion to the life story of someone who had, up until that moment, been a kind of quintessence of little Englander provincialism and, as such, feels wildly inappropriate.

And it would never have been a proper ‘escape’ as the authorities get wind of a dying foreigner and about the time Uncle Edward expires they turn up to arrest George.

Losing Beatrice

But that’s not all. Third in this trilogy of weirdness is the very final section which describes the frustratingly unsatisfactory end of George’s love affair with Beatrice. You might recall that right back at the start of the novel (which feels like years ago) George, as a little boy growing up in Bladesover House, had a crush on a little girl from the ruling class who he was allowed to play with, Beatrice, and this led up to a stolen kiss in the bracken. In fact it triggers the next stage in the plot because Beatrice is often accompanied by a slightly bigger boy, her cousin Archie, and one day jealous banter escalates into fighting. George is getting the best of it when the house’s owner, old Lady Drew, and her companion come round the corner, are appalled, all sides agree that George started the fight because he is an ill-mannered oik, and this is what triggers him being banished from Bladesover and sent to stay with his awful cousin Frapp in miserable Chatham (from where he eventually runs away).

Anyway, towards the end of the entire book, this Beatrice re-enters, on horseback, accompanied by the son (Lord Carnaby) of the posh local landowner (Lady Osprey). Long story short, George and Beatrice reconnect, and she swears, repeatedly, that she loves him, she has always loved him etc etc, but she cannot be his. This all happens over the few months leading up to George’s ill-fated expedition to Africa so that when he leaves there’s much kissy-kissy and declarations of love.

The thing is she refuses to marry him, constantly putting him off, telling him she’ll explain why and so on when the time is right, one day, not now, but darling we have this evening etc.

What, I think, eventually emerges is that she has been corrupted by society: she was brought up in a grand house, enjoying all the freedoms and privilege, and she now, I think, if I have deduced form her frustratingly oblique explanations, become the mistress of Lord Carnaby (I don’t understand why she hasn’t just married him). The point being that her role of Carnaby’s mistress keeps her in fine clothes and big rooms and horses to ride. If she ran away from Carnaby to be with George, well, George has just lost his fortune and is facing possibly legal proceedings… So she’d be throwing away all the advantages of a wealthy lifestyle to live with poor engineer George and… well… she thinks she’d change, she wouldn’t be the same, she would come to hate him for ruining her life.

So I think the entire point of the Beatrice storyline is to ram home Wells’s point about the corrupting and strangling effect of wealth and social convention on Pure Love.

Last point: destroyers

At the very very end of the novel we clearly discover what has been hinted at a few times earlier that, having lost the fortune which allowed him to experiment with powered flight, George has moved into a job designing destroyers i.e. warships. And not for the British, who scorned his homemade solutions, but for whoever pays the highest fee. The novel ends with an extended description of George taking the first of this new breed of destroyer, the X2, on its maiden voyage down the Thames to the North Sea.

This, also, can be given a satirical, political interpretation: namely that a man who has vaunted his fine feelings and delicate sensibilities and shared the inner truth of his love affairs and been such a shrewd critic of English society and its snobberies and pretensions and ramshackle empire, who came to London with such earnest hopes to contribute something positive to society, who had earnest conversations about socialism and a new world – that this idealist ends up working not for the betterment of mankind but building weapons of destruction (itself to be seen in the context of the arms race between Britain and Germany).

So society is based on a confidence trick; the worlds of finance and business are a sham; the whole show is only kept on the road by only empty snobbery and showy ceremonies; true love is always strangled and frustrated; and even the most idealistic of men ends up designing weapons of war and death in order to survive. These are just some of the more obvious themes which emerge from this ramshackle pot-pourri of a novel.

Conclusion

It’s a powerful book, full of all sorts of treats such as the many topics which I’ve quoted at length – but you can’t help being bewildered by its wild swings of tone and subject matter, especially in the final sections, which I’ve just summarised.

It’s a big absorbing novel full of interesting ideas, the vivid scenes of childhood, the upsettingly powerful description of a failed marriage but – what is the Joseph Conrad-style Africa section doing in it? Or the science fiction dirigible escape? And the final section about his frustrated love for Beatrice felt like it dragged on forever leaving me, by the end, exhausted and relieved that this long rambling, all-over-the-place narrative had, at last, finally, ended.

Credit

Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells was published in 1909. References are to the 1982 Pan Classics paperback edition.

Related links

• Tono-Bungay online

H.G. Wells reviews

• H.G. Wells reviews
• Edwardian reviews