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Tono-Bungay
	First UK Edition Cover (1909)
Author	H. G. Wells
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Macmillan
Publication date	1909
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Text	Tono-Bungay at Wikisource

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Tono-Bungay /ˌtɒnoʊˈbʌŋɡi/ is a realist semiautobiographical novel written by H. G. Wells and first published in book form in 1909. It has been called "arguably his most artistic book".^[1] It had been serialised before book publication, both in the United States, in The Popular Magazine, beginning in the issue of September 1908, and in Britain, in The English Review, beginning in the magazine's first issue in December 1908.^[2]

Plot

Tono-Bungay is narrated by George Ponderevo, who is persuaded to help develop the business of selling Tono-Bungay, a patent medicine created by his uncle Edward. George devotes seven years to organising the production and manufacture of the product, even though he believes it is "a damned swindle".^[3] He then quits day-to-day involvement with the enterprise in favour of aeronautics, but he remains associated with his uncle, who becomes a financier of the first water and is on the verge of achieving social as well as economic dominance when his business empire collapses. George tries to rescue his uncle's failing finances by stealing quantities of a radioactive compound called "quap" from an island off the coast of West Africa, but the expedition is unsuccessful. George then engineers his uncle's escape from England in an experimental aircraft he has built, but the ruined entrepreneur turned financier catches pneumonia on the flight and dies in a village near Bordeaux, despite George's efforts to save him. The novel ends with George finding a new occupation: designing destroyers for the highest bidder.

Themes

Scepticism about religion

George's resolve to struggle against "the whole scheme of revealed religion" is strengthened by his experience with his evangelical cousin at Chatham, Nicodemus Frapp, a baker to whom he is briefly "a fully indentured apprentice".^[4]

Socialism

George is influenced by Bob Ewart, a childhood friend and the son of an artist who becomes an artist himself, struggling against a system in which "[n]obody wants to do and be the things people are".^[5] It is Ewart who first interests George in socialism, but Ewart's socialism is detached, cynical and merely "discursive". (Here Wells was probably satirising the Fabian Society, which Wells had tried and failed to reorient between 1903 and 1906.)^[6] Ewart is important to George in that he "kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time [of working for the success of Tono-Bungay]."^[7]

Ennui

George struggles with ennui after breaking with Marion: "I suffered, I suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively. . . . it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only the world and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all but my impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a system of appetites and satisfactions, with much work to do – and no desire, it seemed, left in me. There were moments when I thought of suicide". George only partially resolves this moral crisis by, as he says, "idealis[ing] Science".^[8]

English society

The protagonist of the novel is George Ponderevo, whose most intimate life the reader shares. His uncle Edward, on the other hand, remains a somewhat flat character whose chief function is to symbolise the "wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking"^[9] that became, in Wells's view, the most important social force in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. England is interpreted in the novel as a "social organism". The country estate of Bladesover, "up on the Kentish Downs," epitomises a "seventeenth-century system" which offers "the clue to all England. . . . 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".^[10] Bladesover was based on Uppark, on the South Downs, where Wells mother worked.^[11]

This society has fallen prey to shabby forces of greed and acquisition that are embodied by Edward Ponderevo, who idealises Napoleon and who muses superficially about "[t]his Overman idee, Nietzsche—all that stuff."^[12] The trashy emptiness of Edward's ideal of life is expressed in his absurd attempt to build a vast mansion at Crest Hill. The character may have been based on the fraudster Whitaker Wright.^{[citation needed]}

As a Bildungsroman Tono-Bungay also explores the development of the narrator's emotional life. Three sexual relationships are analysed: his unsuccessful marriage to Marion; his affair with the liberated Effie; and his doomed relationship with Beatrice Normandy, a belle dame sans merci whom he has known since childhood and who loves but refuses to marry him. George also tells of his frustrated love for his stern, austere mother, who was a domestic servant, and his powerful attachment to his aunt Susan, a character whose depiction may be, in part, a portrait of Wells's second wife, Amy Catherine Robbins (better known as Jane).^[13]

Metaphysics

So powerful have corrupting social forces become that they overcome and denature George's life, for while in his youth he was capable of virtue, love and creativity, he finds no ideal he can devote himself to. Instead he becomes the fabricator of powerful machines whose destructive potential can only be guessed at. The concluding chapter, "Night and the Open Sea", depicts a test run of the X2, a destroyer that George has designed and built. The vessel becomes a symbol of a metaphysical "something" that "drives", that "is at once human achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things".^[14]

Reception and criticism

Initial reviews were mixed. The novel was criticised by Hubert Bland and Robertson Nicoll, but the Daily Telegraph praised it as "a masterpiece". Gilbert Murray praised the book in three separate letters to the author, comparing Wells to Leo Tolstoy.^[15] Biographer Vincent Brome has written that "Tono-Bungay came fresh and vivid to men and women of Wells's generation. These great questionings, the challenge to one eternal verity after another, shook their world and their way of life, and it was all tremendously exciting".^[16]

Wells himself was "disposed to regard Tono-Bungay as the finest and most finished novel upon the accepted lines" that he had "written or was ever likely to write".^[17]

In the view of one of Wells's biographers, David C. Smith, Kipps, The History of Mr Polly and Tono-Bungay together make it possible for Wells "to claim a permanent place in English fiction, close to Dickens because of the extraordinary humanity of some of his characters, but also because of his ability to invoke a place, a class, a social scene. These novels are very personal as well, treating aspects of Wells's own life, matters which would come under attack later, but only after he added his sexual and extramarital views to the personal side of his work."^[18]

The book was praised by H. L. Mencken in "Prejudices, First Series".^[19]

References

^ David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 174.
^ H. G. Wells, footnote in the instalment of "Tono-Bungay" in The Popular Magazine, December 1908.
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 2, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 154.
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book I, Ch. 2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 45–55.
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 3, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 181.
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 1, §3 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 130–31.
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 3, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 181.
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 4, §10 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 233–34.
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book IV, Ch. 3, §1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 450.
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 1, §1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 114, 112.
^ H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 32-34
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book III, Ch. 2, §9 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 309.
^ David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 202.
^ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book IV, Ch. 3, §3 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 458. The narrator himself calls attention to "the symbol of my destroyer" and comments: "Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we draw by pain and effort out of the heart of life, that we disentangle and make clear. Other men serve it, I know in art, in literature, in social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a hundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and nations, epochs and civilisation pass, each making its contribution. I do not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme". Northrop Frye commented on this symbol in his Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1971 [orig. 1957], p. 155), and David C. Smith called the conclusion of Tono-Bungay "one of the finer endings in all English fiction" (H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal, p. 202).
^ David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 203–04.
^ Vincent Brome, H. G. Wells: A Biography (London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1951), p. 107.
^ David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 203.
^ David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 200.
^ Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis) (16 November 2016). Prejudices, First Series.

External links

Tono-Bungay at Standard Ebooks
Tono Bungay at Project Gutenberg
Tono-Bungay audiobook – listen to online stream.
Tono-Bungay public domain audiobook at LibriVox

[1] David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 174.

[2] H. G. Wells, footnote in the instalment of "Tono-Bungay" in The Popular Magazine, December 1908.

[3] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 2, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 154.

[4] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book I, Ch. 2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 45–55.

[5] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 3, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 181.

[6] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 1, §3 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 130–31.

[7] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 3, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 181.

[8] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 4, §10 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 233–34.

[9] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book IV, Ch. 3, §1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 450.

[10] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book II, Ch. 1, §1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 114, 112.

[11] H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 32-34

[12] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book III, Ch. 2, §9 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 309.

[13] David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 202.

[14] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book IV, Ch. 3, §3 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 458. The narrator himself calls attention to "the symbol of my destroyer" and comments: "Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we draw by pain and effort out of the heart of life, that we disentangle and make clear. Other men serve it, I know in art, in literature, in social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a hundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and nations, epochs and civilisation pass, each making its contribution. I do not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme". Northrop Frye commented on this symbol in his Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1971 [orig. 1957], p. 155), and David C. Smith called the conclusion of Tono-Bungay "one of the finer endings in all English fiction" (H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal, p. 202).

[15] David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 203–04.

[16] Vincent Brome, H. G. Wells: A Biography (London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1951), p. 107.

[17] David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 203.

[18] David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 200.

[19] Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis) (16 November 2016). Prejudices, First Series.

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@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 {{EngvarB|date=September 2013}}
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+{{short description|1909 novel by H. G. Wells}}
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-| image         = TonoBungay.jpg
+| author = [[H. G. Wells]]
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 }}
-'''''Tono-Bungay''''' {{IPAc-en|ˌ|t|ɒ|n|oʊ|ˈ|b|ʌ|ŋ|ɡ|i}} is a realist [[autobiographical novel|semiautobiographical novel]] written by [[H. G. Wells]] and published in 1909. It has been called "arguably his most artistic book".<ref>David C. Smith, ''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: [[Yale University Press]], 1986), p. 174.</ref> It was originally serialized in ''[[The English Review]]'' beginning in the magazine's first issue in December 1908. It was serialized in the United States in ''[[The Popular Magazine]]'' beginning in the September 1908 issue.<ref>H. G. Wells, footnote of an [http://www.archive.org/stream/popular_december_1908#page/n133/mode/2up installment] of “Tono-Bungay,” ''The Popular Magazine'', Dec. 1908, 125–139.</ref>
+'''''Tono-Bungay''''' {{IPAc-en|ˌ|t|ɒ|n|oʊ|ˈ|b|ʌ|ŋ|ɡ|i}} is a realist [[autobiographical novel|semiautobiographical novel]] written by [[H. G. Wells]] and first published in book form in 1909. It has been called "arguably his most artistic book".<ref>David C. Smith, ''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: [[Yale University Press]], 1986), p. 174.</ref> It had been serialised before book publication, both in the United States, in ''[[The Popular Magazine]]'', beginning in the issue of September 1908, and in Britain, in ''[[The English Review]]'', beginning in the magazine's first issue in December 1908.<ref>H. G. Wells, footnote in the [https://archive.org/stream/popular_december_1908#page/n133/mode/2up instalment] of "Tono-Bungay" in ''The Popular Magazine'', December 1908.</ref>
 ==Plot==
-''Tono-Bungay'' is narrated by George Ponderevo, who is persuaded to help develop the business of selling Tono-Bungay, a [[patent medicine]] created by his ambitious uncle Edward. George devotes seven years to organising the production and manufacture of a product which he believes to be "a damned swindle".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 2, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 154.</ref> He then quits day-to-day involvement with the enterprise in favour of aeronautics. But he remains associated with his uncle Edward, who becomes a financier of the first order and is on the verge of achieving social as well as economic dominance when his business empire collapses. George tries to rescue his uncle's failing finances by stealing quantities of a radioactive compound called "quap" from an island off the coast of West Africa, but the expedition is unsuccessful. His nephew engineers his uncle's escape from England in an experimental aircraft he has built, but the ruined entrepreneur turned financier catches pneumonia on the flight and dies in a French village near Bordeaux, despite George's efforts to save him. The novel ends with George finding a new occupation: designing destroyers for the highest bidder.
+''Tono-Bungay'' is narrated by George Ponderevo, who is persuaded to help develop the business of selling Tono-Bungay, a [[patent medicine]] created by his uncle Edward. George devotes seven years to organising the production and manufacture of the product, even though he believes it is "a damned swindle".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 2, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 154.</ref> He then quits day-to-day involvement with the enterprise in favour of aeronautics, but he remains associated with his uncle, who becomes a financier of the first water and is on the verge of achieving social as well as economic dominance when his business empire collapses. George tries to rescue his uncle's failing finances by stealing quantities of a radioactive compound called "quap" from an island off the coast of West Africa, but the expedition is unsuccessful. George then engineers his uncle's escape from England in an experimental aircraft he has built, but the ruined entrepreneur turned financier catches pneumonia on the flight and dies in a village near [[Bordeaux]], despite George's efforts to save him. The novel ends with George finding a new occupation: designing destroyers for the highest bidder.
 ==Themes==
-===Scepticism===
+===Scepticism about religion===
 George's resolve to struggle against "the whole scheme of revealed religion" is strengthened by his experience with his evangelical cousin at Chatham, Nicodemus Frapp, a baker to whom he is briefly "a fully indentured apprentice".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book I, Ch. 2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 45–55.</ref>
 ===Socialism===
-Bob Ewart, a childhood friend who, the son of an artist, becomes a sceptical artist, struggles against a system in which "[n]obody wants to do and be the things people are".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 3, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 181.</ref> It is Ewart who interests George in socialism, but Ewarts's socialism is in practice detached, cynical, and merely "discursive"; through him the [[Fabian Society]], which Wells tried and failed to reorient in 1903–1906, is briefly satirised.<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 1, §3 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 130–31.</ref> Ewart is important to George in that he "kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time [of working for the success of Tono-Bungay]."<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 3, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 181.</ref>
+George is influenced by Bob Ewart, a childhood friend and the son of an artist who becomes an artist himself, struggling against a system in which "[n]obody wants to do and be the things people are".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 3, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 181.</ref> It is Ewart who first interests George in socialism, but Ewart's socialism is detached, cynical and merely "discursive". (Here Wells was probably satirising the [[Fabian Society]], which Wells had tried and failed to reorient between 1903 and 1906.)<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 1, §3 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 130–31.</ref> Ewart is important to George in that he "kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time [of working for the success of Tono-Bungay]."<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 3, §2 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 181.</ref>
 ===Ennui===
-George struggles with [[ennui]] after breaking with Marion. "I suffered, I suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only the world and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all but my impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a system of appetites and satisfactions, with much work to do—and no desire, it seemed, left in me. There were moments when I thought of suicide". George only partially resolves this moral crisis by, as he says, "idealis[ing] Science".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 4, §10 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 233–34.</ref>
+George struggles with [[ennui]] after breaking with Marion: "I suffered, I suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only the world and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all but my impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a system of appetites and satisfactions, with much work to do – and no desire, it seemed, left in me. There were moments when I thought of suicide". George only partially resolves this moral crisis by, as he says, "idealis[ing] Science".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 4, §10 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 233–34.</ref>
 ===English society===
+The protagonist of the novel is George Ponderevo, whose most intimate life the reader shares. His uncle Edward, on the other hand, remains a somewhat flat character whose chief function is to symbolise the "wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking"<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book IV, Ch. 3, §1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 450.</ref> that became, in Wells's view, the most important social force in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. England is interpreted in the novel as a "social organism". The country estate of Bladesover, "up on the [[Kent Downs AONB|Kentish Downs]]," epitomises a "seventeenth-century system" which offers "the clue to all England. . . . 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".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 1, §1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 114, 112.</ref> Bladesover was based on [[Uppark]], on the South Downs, where Wells mother worked.<ref>H. G. Wells, [[Experiment in Autobiography]], (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 32-34</ref>
-Edward Ponderevo's business career offers the occasion for a satirical portrait of late-Victorian and Edwardian England, arguably the main theme of the novel. As a ''[[Bildungsroman]]'', however, ''Tono-Bungay'' explores the development of the narrator's emotional life. Three sexual relationships (his unsuccessful marriage to Marion, his affair with the liberated Effie, and his doomed relationship with Beatrice Normandy, a ''[[Belle Dame sans Merci|belle dame sans merci]]'' whom he has known since childhood and who loves but refuses to marry him) are analysed, and also his frustrated love for his stern, austere mother (a domestic servant) and his powerful attachment to his aunt Susan, a character whose depiction is in part a portrait of Wells's second wife, Amy Catherine Robbins (better known as Jane).<ref>David C. Smith, ''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 202.</ref>
+[[File:Happy-phagocyte.png|thumb|right|300px|A drawing by H. G. Wells from the novel]]
-The protagonist of the novel is George Ponderevo, whose most intimate life the reader shares; his uncle Edward, on the other hand, remains a somewhat flat character whose chief function is to symbolise the "wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking"<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book IV, Ch. 3, §1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 450.</ref> that became, in Wells's view, the most important social force in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. England is interpreted in the novel as a "social organism". The country estate of Bladesover, "up on the [[Kent Downs AONB|Kentish Downs]]," epitomises a "seventeenth-century system" which offers "the clue to all England. . . . 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".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book II, Ch. 1, §1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), pp. 114, 112.</ref>
-This society has fallen prey to shabby forces of greed and acquisition that are embodied by Edward Ponderevo, who idealises [[Napoleon]] and who muses superficially about "[t]his Overman idee, [[Nietzsche]]—all that stuff."<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book III, Ch. 2, §9 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 309.</ref> The trashy emptiness of Edward's ideal of life is expressed in his absurd attempt to build a vast mansion at Crest Hill.
+This society has fallen prey to shabby forces of greed and acquisition that are embodied by Edward Ponderevo, who idealises [[Napoleon]] and who muses superficially about "[t]his Overman idee, [[Nietzsche]]—all that stuff."<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book III, Ch. 2, §9 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 309.</ref> The trashy emptiness of Edward's ideal of life is expressed in his absurd attempt to build a vast mansion at Crest Hill. The character may have been based on the fraudster [[Whitaker Wright]].{{citation needed|date=May 2020}}
+As a ''[[Bildungsroman]]'' ''Tono-Bungay'' also explores the development of the narrator's emotional life. Three sexual relationships are analysed: his unsuccessful marriage to Marion; his affair with the liberated Effie; and his doomed relationship with Beatrice Normandy, a ''[[Belle Dame sans Merci|belle dame sans merci]]'' whom he has known since childhood and who loves but refuses to marry him. George also tells of his frustrated love for his stern, austere mother, who was a domestic servant, and his powerful attachment to his aunt Susan, a character whose depiction may be, in part, a portrait of Wells's second wife, Amy Catherine Robbins (better known as Jane).<ref>David C. Smith, ''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 202.</ref>
-[[File:Happy-phagocyte.png|thumb|left|300px|A drawing by H. G. Wells from the novel]]
 ===Metaphysics===
-So powerful have corrupting social forces become that they overcome and denature George's life, for while in his youth he was capable of virtue, love, and creativity, he finds no ideal to which he can devote himself. Instead, he becomes the fabricator of powerful machines whose destructive potential can only be guessed at: such is the portent suggested by the remarkable concluding chapter, entitled "Night and the Open Sea", in which, during a test run of the ''X2'', as the destroyer that George has designed and built is known. The vessel becomes a symbol of a metaphysical "something" that "drives", that "is at once human achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book IV, Ch. 3, §3 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 458. The narrator himself calls attention to "the symbol of my destroyer", ibid., and comments: "Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we draw by pain and effort out of the heart of life, that we disentangle and make clear. Other men serve it, I know in art, in literature, in social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a hundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and nations, epochs and civilisation pass, each making its contribution. I do not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme". [[Northrop Frye]] commented on this symbol in [[Anatomy of Criticism]] (Princeton University Press, 1971 [orig. 1957], p. 155), and David C. Smith called the conclusion of ''Tono-Bungay'' "one of the finer endings in all English fiction" (''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal'', p. 202).</ref>
+So powerful have corrupting social forces become that they overcome and denature George's life, for while in his youth he was capable of virtue, love and creativity, he finds no ideal he can devote himself to. Instead he becomes the fabricator of powerful machines whose destructive potential can only be guessed at. The concluding chapter, "Night and the Open Sea", depicts a test run of the ''X2'', a destroyer that George has designed and built. The vessel becomes a symbol of a metaphysical "something" that "drives", that "is at once human achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things".<ref>H. G. Wells, ''Tono-Bungay'', Book IV, Ch. 3, §3 (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1937]), p. 458. The narrator himself calls attention to "the symbol of my destroyer" and comments: "Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we draw by pain and effort out of the heart of life, that we disentangle and make clear. Other men serve it, I know in art, in literature, in social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a hundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and nations, epochs and civilisation pass, each making its contribution. I do not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme". [[Northrop Frye]] commented on this symbol in his ''[[Anatomy of Criticism]]'' (Princeton University Press, 1971 [orig. 1957], p. 155), and David C. Smith called the conclusion of ''Tono-Bungay'' "one of the finer endings in all English fiction" (''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal'', p. 202).</ref>
 ==Reception and criticism==
+Initial reviews were mixed. The novel was criticised by [[Hubert Bland]] and [[Robertson Nicoll]], but the ''Daily Telegraph'' praised it as "a masterpiece". [[Gilbert Murray]] praised the book in three separate letters to the author, comparing Wells to [[Leo Tolstoy]].<ref>David C. Smith, ''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 203–04.</ref> Biographer [[Vincent Brome]] has written that "''Tono-Bungay'' came fresh and vivid to men and women of Wells's generation. These great questionings, the challenge to one eternal verity after another, shook their world and their way of life, and it was all tremendously exciting".<ref>Vincent Brome, ''H. G. Wells: A Biography'' (London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1951), p. 107.</ref>
-With ''[[Kipps]]'', ''[[The History of Mr Polly]]'', and ''Tono-Bungay'', his biographer David C. Smith has written, H. G. Wells "is able to claim a permanent place in English fiction, close to Dickens because of the extraordinary humanity of some of his characters, but also because of his ability to invoke a ''place'', a ''class'', a ''social scene''. These novels are very personal as well, treating aspects of Wells's own life, matters which would come under attack later, but only after he added his sexual and extramarital views to the personal side of his work".<ref>David C. Smith, ''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 200.</ref>
-Initial reviews were mixed. The novel was criticized by [[Hubert Bland]] and [[Robertson Nicoll]], but the ''Daily Telegraph'' praised it as "a masterpiece". [[Gilbert Murray]] praised the book in three separate letters to the author, comparing Wells to [[Leo Tolstoy]].<ref>David C. Smith, ''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 203–04.</ref> Biographer [[Vincent Brome]] has written that "''Tono-Bungay'' came fresh and vivid to men and women of Wells's generation. These great questionings, the challenge to one eternal verity after another, shook their world and their way of life, and it was all tremendously exciting".<ref>Vincent Brome, ''H. G. Wells: A Biography'' (London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1951), p. 107.</ref>
 Wells himself was "disposed to regard ''Tono-Bungay'' as the finest and most finished novel upon the accepted lines" that he had "written or was ever likely to write".<ref>David C. Smith, ''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 203.</ref>
+In the view of one of Wells's biographers, [[David C. Smith (historian)|David C. Smith]], ''[[Kipps]]'', ''[[The History of Mr Polly]]'' and ''Tono-Bungay'' together make it possible for Wells "to claim a permanent place in English fiction, close to Dickens because of the extraordinary humanity of some of his characters, but also because of his ability to invoke a ''place'', a ''class'', a ''social scene''. These novels are very personal as well, treating aspects of Wells's own life, matters which would come under attack later, but only after he added his sexual and extramarital views to the personal side of his work."<ref>David C. Smith, ''H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 200.</ref>
-The character Edward Ponderevo is believed to be based on fraudster [[Whitaker Wright]].<ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2058772/Witley-Park-Surrey-The-story-Whitaker-Wright-Britains-bizarre-folly.html |title=The swindler, the cyanide pill and the underwater ballroom: The story behind Britain's most bizarre folly |last=Mount |first=Harry |authorlink=Harry Mount |newspaper=[[Daily Mail]] |date=8 November 2011 |accessdate=14 October 2015}}</ref>
+The book was praised by [[H. L. Mencken]] in "Prejudices, First Series".<ref>{{Cite book|last=Mencken|first=H. L. (Henry Louis)|url=https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53538|title=Prejudices, First Series|date=2016-11-16|language=English}}</ref>
 ==Further reading==
+*Herbert, Lucille. “Tono-Bungay Tradition and Experiment.” ''Modern Language Quarterly'' (Seattle) 33, no. 2 (1972): 140–55.
-*{{citation |last=Richards |first=Thomas |title=The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire |publisher=Verso |location=London, New York, 1993 |pages=88–104 |isbn=978-0-86091-605-5 }}
+*{{citation |last=Richards |first=Thomas |title=The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire |year=1993 |publisher=Verso |location=London, New York, 1993 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/imperialarchivek0000rich/page/88 88–104] |isbn=978-0-86091-605-5 |url=https://archive.org/details/imperialarchivek0000rich/page/88 }}
 *Robinette, Nicholas Allen. [http://gradworks.umi.com/34/08/3408428.html "Free Realist Style: Epistemology, Form and the Novel, 1909–1954"]. English, 2010. United States—Minnesota: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT). Web. 26 September 2011.
 ==References==
-{{Reflist|30em}}
+{{Reflist}}
 ==External links==
+{{Wikisource}}
-*{{gutenberg|no=718|name=Tono Bungay}}
+* {{StandardEbooks|Standard Ebooks URL=https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-g-wells/tono-bungay}}
-* [http://www.freeaudiobooksonline.org/book/tono-bungay/ ''Tono-Bungay audiobook''] - listen to online stream.
+* {{Gutenberg|no=718|name=Tono Bungay}}
+* [http://www.audiobooksworld.org/tono-bungay/ ''Tono-Bungay audiobook''] – listen to online stream.
+* {{librivox book | title=Tono-Bungay | author=H. G. Wells}}
 {{H. G. Wells}}
-[[Category:1909 novels]]
+[[Category:1909 British novels]]
 [[Category:Novels by H. G. Wells]]
-[[Category:Metafictional works]]
+[[Category:Metafictional novels]]
+[[Category:Novels first published in serial form]]

v t e H. G. Wells
Bibliography
Novels	The Time Machine (1895) The Wonderful Visit (1895) The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) The Wheels of Chance (1896) The Invisible Man (1897) The War of the Worlds (1898) When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) The First Men in the Moon (1901) The Sea Lady (1902) The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904) Kipps (1905) A Modern Utopia (1905) In the Days of the Comet (1906) The War in the Air (1908) Tono-Bungay (1909) Ann Veronica (1909) The History of Mr Polly (1910) The Sleeper Awakes (1910) The New Machiavelli (1911) Marriage (1912) The Passionate Friends (1913) The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914) The World Set Free (1914) Bealby (1915) Boon (1915) The Research Magnificent (1915) Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) The Soul of a Bishop (1917) Joan and Peter (1918) The Undying Fire (1919) The Secret Places of the Heart (1922) Men Like Gods (1923) The Dream (1924) Christina Alberta's Father (1925) The World of William Clissold (1926) Meanwhile (1927) Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928) The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930) The Bulpington of Blup (1932) The Shape of Things to Come (1933) The Croquet Player (1936) Brynhild (1937) Star Begotten (1937) The Camford Visitation (1937) Apropos of Dolores (1938) The Brothers (1938) The Holy Terror (1939) Babes in the Darkling Wood (1940) All Aboard for Ararat (1940) You Can't Be Too Careful (1941)
Nonfiction	Anticipations Certain Personal Matters Crux Ansata The Discovery of the Future An Englishman Looks at the World Experiment in Autobiography The Fate of Man First and Last Things Floor Games The Future in America God the Invisible King In the Fourth Year Little Wars Mankind in the Making Mind at the End of Its Tether Mr. Belloc Objects to "The Outline of History" The New America The New World Order New Worlds for Old The Open Conspiracy The Outline of History Russia in the Shadows The Science of Life A Short History of the World The Story of a Great Schoolmaster This Misery of Boots Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water War and the Future The Way the World Is Going The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind World Brain A Year of Prophesying
Collections	The Country of the Blind and Other Stories The Plattner Story and Others Select Conversations with an Uncle The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents Tales of Space and Time Twelve Stories and a Dream
Short stories	"Æpyornis Island" "The Argonauts of the Air" "The Beautiful Suit" "The Chronic Argonauts" "The Cone" "The Country of the Blind" "The Crystal Egg" "A Deal in Ostriches" "The Diamond Maker" "The Door in the Wall" "A Dream of Armageddon" "The Empire of the Ants" "In the Abyss" "The Land Ironclads" "Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation" "The Lord of the Dynamos" "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" "The New Accelerator" "The Pearl of Love" "The Plattner Story" "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper" "The Red Room" "The Sea Raiders" "The Star" "The Stolen Body" "A Story of the Days to Come" "A Story of the Stone Age" "Triumphs of a Taxidermist" "The Truth About Pyecraft" "A Vision of Judgment"
Screenplays	Things to Come (1936) The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937)
Related	Political views G. P. Wells Anthony West (son) Joseph Wells (father) Simon Wells (great-grandson) H. G. Wells Society Lunar crater Time After Time (1979 film)