H G Wells Omnibus, page 324
Also like Wells, George meditates darkly on social problems and possible means of reform. Having decided he and his sculptor friend Ewart are socialists, the two attend a meeting of the Fabian Society, a real organization founded in 1884, which hoped to bring about socialism through evolutionary, not revolutionary, means (its name alludes to Fabius Cunctator, the Roman general who overcame his opponents by patiently avoiding major battles). After a single meeting, George and Ewart leave in disgust at the futility and vanity of the Fabians; Wells spent five years in the society, much of it in a position of power, before taking the same step. Later, George’s technical assistant Cothorpe, a self-educated socialist, expresses in a rough summary the prediction in Wells’s book of political and technological prophecies, Anticipations, of the rescue by disinterested scientists and engineers of a society otherwise doomed by the self-interest of its citizens and politicians: ‘We scientific people, we’ll have to take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and that’ (IV.1.§2). Left unspoken is Wells’s fear that this programme is as impractical as Ewart’s utopian fantasy of reforming sexual relations by isolating women in a closed ‘City of Women’ – each living in a private home set in the outer wall, with a balcony and ‘a little silken ladder she can let down if she chooses’ to admit for a brief interlude one of the men waiting outside (II.4.§3).
Morally and intellectually, George is the opposite of his uncle Edward, but Edward too is a self-portrait of Wells, although in a far more secret and ambiguous way. Through Edward’s fraudulent public persona, through his ill-won status as a financial giant among rapacious plutocrats, Wells commented sardonically on his own increasing fame as a social prophet. Edward, like Wells, thinks of himself as a social reformer, a prospective member of the class of leaders who will save the world: ‘We got our hands on things, George – us big people,’ Edward says; ‘we got to run the country, George. It’s ours. Make it a Scientific – Organized – Business – Enterprise. Put idees into it’ (III.2.§8). Edward’s reforms are of course also intended to be profitable, as in his early idea of ‘The Ponderevo Patent Flat, a Machine you can Live in’ (I.2.§4) (exactly the modernist project fulfilled two decades later by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier in his ‘machine à habiter’, ‘a machine for living in’). While Wells was recommending to his huge readership that society be rebuilt on rational and scientific grounds, and while he became famous enough to be welcomed to the private offices of powerful rulers – as in his visits to Lenin in 1920, and to Roosevelt and Stalin in 1934 – he also sensed that he was selling his readers an intellectual version of Tono-Bungay itself, something fraudulent, valueless, perhaps dangerous, but beneficial to himself.
Wells’s ability to hold himself up to judgement adds to the moral authority with which he judges the economic and social world around him. The success of Tono-Bungay and the financial rise and fall of Edward Ponderevo are based on two sets of real events. Almost every detail of the ingredients and history of Tono-Bungay is based on Coca-Cola, which Wells probably learned about during his visit to the United States in 1906. Coca-Cola had been invented by an Atlanta pharmacist in 1886, contained stimulating extracts of kola nuts and coca leaves (including traces of cocaine), was marketed as a brain and nerve tonic, and had unprecedented commercial success.
The sudden, humiliating end of Edward’s empire is based on that of a real financier on the Ponderevo scale, Whitaker Wright, who had built a huge mansion for himself at Lea Park and an adjacent farm called Witley Park. Like Edward at Crest Hill, Wright employed a small army of workers, moved hills, dug lakes, spent millions on the project and caused resentment among his neighbours for the sudden and drastic changes he imposed. One of the many companies controlled by Wright collapsed spectacularly in 1900 as a result of his fraudulent practices – an episode duplicated almost exactly in Edward’s story. Wright fled to America, as Edward attempts to flee to France. The real and fictional stories diverge at this point. After being extradited, Wright was sentenced in 1904 to seven years’ imprisonment, but he killed himself by swallowing potassium cyanide immediately after his sentencing, and had a loaded revolver in his pocket in the event that the cyanide failed; Edward makes a pointed allusion at one point to Wright’s careful preparations for suicide.
George’s research into gliding and heavier-than-air flight derives from the work of such pioneers as Otto Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher and the Wright Brothers. He claims at one point to have been the first to achieve unpowered heavier-than-air flight (the Wrights later achieved powered heavier-than-air flight), but makes the claim tentatively enough to leave other claims for priority undisturbed. The craft in which George takes Edward on his final journey seems to be a powered airship, something like a small blimp, but Wells leaves the technical details deliberately vague. He provides a more detailed account of George’s invention of the assembly line as a means of bottling Tono-Bungay efficiently: ‘a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an inclined glass trough made slippery with running water’ (II.3.§1), with different stages of the operation performed along the way.
The chronology of Tono-Bungay is obscure and perhaps unsolvable. John Hammond’s introduction to his edition3 includes a carefully worked-out dating of events extrapolated from a single date in the text: the publication of George’s scientific account of quap in the Geological Magazine for October 1905 (III.4.§5). Hammond assumes that George’s expedition occurred earlier the same year, and infers from clues scattered through the novel that George is born in 1861, joins his uncle in launching Tono-Bungay in 1883, and has his flying accident (a few moments after achieving unpowered heavier-than-air flight) in October 1904, that Edward is bankrupted in 1905, and that George writes his novel in 1906. This is almost entirely convincing, and is supported by the private joke in which Edward refers in III.2.§8 to a lecture delivered by Wells in March 1903 and published later that year.
Hammond’s chronology is called slightly into doubt by George’s tentative claim in III.3.§4 that he was first to achieve unpowered heavier-than-air flight. This claim suggests a date for the event considerably earlier than 1903, when the Wright Brothers achieved powered heavier-than-air flight (an event that became widely known around 1906). Wells may have thought of Edward’s financial collapse as occurring at the same time as that of Whitaker Wright in 1900. According to this alternate chronology, George’s flight and accident would have occurred at a more plausible date, 1899, and George would have had a half-dozen years to become a designer of warships, instead of only a few months. Possibly Wells used slightly contradictory timelines for different episodes in the novel, and cared little about inconsistencies.
Tono-Bungay found enthusiastic readers from the moment it was published, although the early reviews, as in the case of most great books, included both condescending dismissals and grateful praise. (A fascinating selection maybe found in Patrick Parrinder’s H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, 1972). The book has never had a prominent place in histories of modern literature, but it has a significant if somewhat hidden afterlife. The liberal politician C. F. G. Masterman, who read Tono-Bungay in proof, used it to illustrate the themes of The Condition of England (1909), a book which set the agenda for much public discussion of modern society in the decades that followed. Masterman’s account of a society deluded into a false sense of security by its military and economic power, and threatened by disintegrating forces that it cannot even perceive, exactly parallels the vision of Tono-Bungay, and his opening sentence quotes George Ponderevo (in II.4.§6): ‘“I’ve got to a time of life,” says the hero of a modern novel, “when the only theories that interest me are generalizations about realities.”’4 The climax of Masterman’s book is a rapid summary of George’s disconnected, fragmentary existence, at one point a plutocrat courted by the great, at another point a suburban husband quarrelling with his wife, elsewhere engaged in middle-class sociability, or on a piratical expedition to Africa, or balancing toast and teacup in a London drawing room, or driven by the uncontrollable forces of sex into perplexity and confusion.
Among those who read the book in its published form, perhaps the first to perceive its stature was the young D. H. Lawrence, who wrote to his friend Blanche Jennings a few days after the serialization in the English Review was complete:
[Y]ou must, must read Tono-Bungay… It is the best novel Wells has written – it is the best novel I have read for – oh, how long? But it makes me so sad. If you knew what a weight of sadness Wells pours into your heart as you read him – Oh, Mon Dieu! He is a terrible pessimist. But, Weh mir, he is on the whole, so true.5
Two months later Lawrence again urged his friend to ‘read, read Tono-Bungay; it is a great book’.6 He rarely mentioned the book again, but he remembered its vocabulary and themes when he began work in 1914 on his own greatest novel, Women in Love, in which he countered Wells’s apocalyptic pessimism with his own apocalyptic hope. Lawrence considered titling his book The Latter Days or Dies Irae, before he settled on Women in Love, and told a friend, ‘The book frightens me: it is so end-of-the-world. But it is, it must be, the beginning of a new world too.’7
Everyone in Women in Love (eventually published in 1920) is vaguely aware of the impending catastrophe that only Lawrence’s fictional spokesman, Rupert Birkin, fully understands: ‘Dissolution rolls on, just as production does… It is a progressive process – and it ends in universal nothing – the end of the world’.8 But Birkin’s visionary mysticism lets him foresee a time after the time of chaos: ‘Supposing this old social state were broken and destroyed, then, out of the chaos, what then?’9 Lawrence awaits the phoenix that Wells never imagined, and its place of rebirth from the ashes is the new kind of sexual relation that Rupert Birkin seeks with Ursula Brangwen.
George Ponderevo sees his sexual relation with Beatrice as absolutely incidental: ‘I tell of this love-affair here because of its irrelevance, because it is so remarkable that it should mean nothing, and be nothing except itself. It glows in my memory like some bright casual flower starting up amidst the débris of a catastrophe’ (IV.2.§2). For Lawrence the imperfect but hopeful relation of Birkin and Ursula, the ‘star-equilibrium’10 that succeeds where mutually possessive love fails, is the means and symbol of renewal, and they withdraw from a doomed society, their bed serving symbolically as an ark that will survive the flood.
Lawrence wrote Women in Love partly in tribute to Tono-Bungay, partly to refute it, and echoes of the earlier book can repeatedly be heard in the later one. In Tono-Bungay, when George and Beatrice sit in a canoe on a lake, she suddenly kneels forward and cries, ‘Who cares if it upsets?… If you say another word I will kiss you. And go to the bottom clutching you. I’m not afraid of that’ (IV.2.§2). In Women in Love, when Lawrence needed a metaphor for the lethal constraints of possessive love, he transformed Beatrice’s words into an episode in his ‘Water-Party’ chapter, where Diana Crich falls from a boat and drowns herself and the young man who tries to save her: ‘The bodies of the dead were not recovered till towards dawn. Diana had her arms tight round the neck of the young man, choking him: “She killed him,” said Gerald.’11
Lawrence also remembered George’s thoughts about the destructive effects of radioactivity when he portrayed Gudrun Brangwen, Ursula’s sister, sensing at the start of her affair with the doomed Gerald Crich ‘the field of his living, radio-active body’12 – apparently Lawrence’s first use of the word ‘radio-active’ and his only use of it in fiction. George Ponderevo’s almost casual invention of the assembly line flowered into Lawrence’s symbolically charged chapter ‘The Industrial Magnate’, in which ‘the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments’.13
Women in Love stands as one of the central monuments of literary modernism, while Tono-Bungay has remained on the sidelines. Wells himself, with some of the blindness of his narrator, seems to have regarded his novel as more conventional than it is. In his preface to a 1925 reissue (see p. 3) he called it a ‘novel upon the accepted lines’, and in his Experiment in Autobiography he said he planned it to be ‘a novel, as I imagined it, on Dickens–Thackeray lines’.14 But a century after its publication, it seems less dated, less limited by its era, than many modernist classics. Its picture of a world shadowed in by anxiety and change in the midst of apparent normality remains vivid and urgent, as does its vision of a society whose wealth is built partly on the imagery of advertising, partly on the exploitation of technology, partly on piratical commerce on an international scale. The ambiguities and uncertainties of its narrative technique retain their unsettling power because Wells never insisted that he was writing in a way that was radically new – and that must therefore grow old when its moment of newness passes. Tono-Bungay is a book that defined its century, while its century scarcely noticed it.
Edward Mendelson
NOTES
1. Tono-Bungay is divided into four numbered books, a series of numbered chapters within each book and numbered sections within each chapter, here given as ‘IV.2.§2’.
2. For the sense in which Wells uses this word, see Book III, Chapter 4, note 8.
3. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, ed. John Hammond (London, 1994), p. xxxiii.
4. C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England, ed. J. T. Boulton (London, 1960), p. 1.
5. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge, 1979), vol. 1, p. 119.
6. Ibid, p. 127.
7. Ibid, ed. James T. Boulton and George Zytaruk (Cambridge, 1982), vol. 3, pp. 25–6. Lawrence was less enthusiastic about Wells’s later work. In letters in 1916 and 1917 he lumped Wells with John Galsworthy and other novelists of Wells’s generation and said they were in decline, and that he was bored by all of them.
8. Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge, 1987), p. 173.
9. Ibid, p. 102.
10. Ibid, p. 319.
11. Ibid, p. 189.
12. Ibid, p. 332.
13. Ibid, p. 230.
14. Experiment in Autobiography (London, 1934), vol. 2, p. 639.
Further Reading
The most vivid and memorable account of Wells’s life and times is his own Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., London: Gollancz and Cresset Press, 1934). It has been reprinted several times. A ‘postscript’ containing the previously suppressed narrative of his sexual liaisons was published as H. G. Wells in Love, edited by his son G. P. Wells (London: Faber & Faber, 1984) His more recent biographers draw on this material, as well as on the large body of letters and personal papers archived at the University of Illinois and elsewhere. The fullest and most scholarly biographies are The Time Traveller by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie (2nd edn, London: Hogarth Press, 1987) and H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal by David C. Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Smith has also edited a generous selection of Wells’s Correspondence (4 vols., London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998). Another highly readable, if controversial and idiosyncratic, biography is H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (London: Hutchinson, 1984) by Wells’s son Anthony West. Michael Foot’s H. G.: The History of Mr Wells (London and New York: Doubleday, 1995) is enlivened by its author’s personal knowledge of Wells and his circle.
Two illuminating general interpretations of Wells and his writings are Michael Draper’s H. G. Wells (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987) and Brian Murray’s H. G. Wells (New York: Continuum, 1990). Both are introductory in scope, but Draper’s approach is critical and philosophical, while Murray packs a remarkable amount of biographical and historical detail into a short space. John Hammond’s An H. G. Wells Companion (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) and H. G. Wells (Harlow and London: Longman, 2001) combine criticism with useful contextual material. H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, edited by Patrick Parrinder (London: Rout-ledge, 1972), is a collection of reviews and essays of Wells published during his lifetime. A number of specialized critical and scholarly studies of Wells concentrate on his scientific romances. These include Bernard Bergonzi’s pioneering study of The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); John Huntington, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). Peter Kemp’s H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) offers a lively and, at times, lurid tracing of Wells’s ‘biological themes and imaginative obsessions’, while Roslynn D. Haynes’s H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980) surveys his use of scientific ideas. W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) and John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) are studies of his political thought and his schemes for world government. John S. Partington has also edited The Wellsian (The Netherlands: Equilibris, 2003), a selection of essays from the H. G. Wells Society’s annual critical journal of the same name. The American branch of the Wells Society maintains a highly informative website at http://hgwellsusa. 50megs.com.
