H G Wells Omnibus, page 325
P.P.
Note on the Text
H. G. Wells first discussed his plans for Tono-Bungay with his London publisher, Frederick Macmillan, in January 1906. A draft was sent to Macmillan in March, but extensive revisions were later proposed and the novel became much longer than Wells had originally expected. Publication, originally planned for 1907, was put off for a year, and other projects (notably the writing of The War in the Air) intervened. Wells sent the final section of Tono-Bungay to Macmillan in May 1907, but later rewrote the ending. A cancelled preface, now in the Wells Collection at the University of Illinois, shows that George Ponderevo was originally to have been killed in a flying accident.
Final revisions were completed in the spring of 1908, and the first book edition, subtitled ‘A Novel’, was published by Duffield in New York and deposited with the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress at the end of October 1908. The year printed on the title page was 1909, and the book may not have been distributed until January when the first American reviews appeared. In Britain, the novel, subtitled ‘A Romance of Commerce’, was published in four serial instalments between December 1908 and March 1909 in the English Review, edited by Wells’s friend Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford). The first British book edition, with no subtitle, was published by Macmillan in February 1909. The texts of all three editions are substantially identical, except that the serialization omits Wells’s pen-and-ink ‘picshuas’ representing Edward Ponderevo’s sketches for advertisements in Book II.
Tono-Bungay was several times reprinted during Wells’s lifetime, and the first Penguin edition of the novel was published within a few weeks of his death in 1946. Usually the first-edition text was reprinted, but in 1925 Wells published a lightly revised text, with a new preface (included in this edition), as Volume XII of the Atlantic Edition of the Works of H. G. Wells (London: T. Fisher Unwin, and New York: Scribner’s). The principal revisions, usually consisting of the deletion or substitution of a single word to avoid repetition or achieve greater accuracy, have been tabulated by Bryan Cheyette in his World’s Classics edition of Tono-Bungay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). The revisions are, without exception, improvements, and the present edition therefore follows the Atlantic text, modified as set out below.
The Atlantic edition, intended as the definitive text of Wells’s works, was printed in the United States and, usually, set up from earlier American editions. The copy-editors normally reverted to British spelling and punctuation, but they missed numerous examples of American usage, so that the resulting text is almost always a hybrid. In addition, there are inconsistencies of spelling and punctuation in both the Atlantic and the first-edition texts of Tono-Bungay. For the present edition the treatment of compound words has been modernized while the anomalies of the Atlantic text have been removed. For the first time, therefore, the current edition presents a revised text of the novel which could plausibly have come from Wells’s own hand.
Two evident typographical errors in the Atlantic edition have been corrected: ‘first working’ for ‘the first working’ (p. 149); ‘process of pruning’ for ‘process o pruning’ (p. 219). The names of the chemical elements, ‘ythorium’ and ‘carium’, have been corrected to ‘ytterbium’ and ‘cerium’ (p. 224). Other substantive changes are as follows, using the 1909 Macmillan text as standard: ‘aluminium’ for ‘aluminum’, ‘amok’ for ‘amuck’, ‘ascendancy’ for ‘ascendency’, ‘burnt’ for ‘burned’, ‘chalet’ for ‘châlet’, ‘chintz’ for ‘chints’, ‘cosy’ for ‘cosey’, ‘dispatch’ for ‘despatch’, ‘dreamt’ for ‘dreamed’, ‘endorsed’ for ‘indorsed’, ‘entrusted’ for ‘intrusted’, ‘leant’ for ‘leaned’, ‘learnt’ for ‘learned’, ‘Shakespeare‘ for ‘Shakespear’, ‘specialities’ for ‘specialties’, ‘spoilt’ for ‘spoiled’, ‘technique’ for ‘technic’, ‘tyre’ for ‘tire’, ‘verandah’ for ‘veranda’, ‘vendor’ for ‘vender’, ‘wobble’ for ‘wabble’. The spelling of ‘whisky’ has been regularized, and hyphens have been removed from some fifty words in accordance with modern British practice. Other modernizations include ‘anyone’ for ‘any one’, ‘hearthrug’ for ‘hearth rug’, ‘peewit’ for ‘pewit’, ‘weekday’ for ‘week day’, etc.
Housestyling of punctuation and spelling has also been implemented to make the text more accessible to the reader: single quotation marks (for doubles) with doubles inside singles as needed; end punctuation placed outside end quotation marks when appropriate; spaced N-dashes (for the longer, heavier M-dash) and M-dashes (for the double-length 2-M dash); ‘iz’ spellings (e.g. recognize, not recognise), and acknowledgements and judgement, not acknowledgments and judgment; no full stop after personal titles (Dr, Mr, Mrs).
The manuscripts of Tono-Bungay are in the Wells Collection at the Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Wells’s extensive correspondence with his British publisher about Tono-Bungay is in the Macmillan Archive, British Library.
P. P.
Preface to Volume XII of the Atlantic Edition (1925)
After the completion of Kipps and In the Days of the Comet, the writer set himself to write as good and spacious a novel as he could. It was to give a view of the contemporary social and political system in Great Britain, an old and degenerating system, tried and strained by new inventions and new ideas and invaded by a growing multitude of mere adventurers. He planned the book with elaborate care; it was begun in 1906 and published in book form in 1909. It attained to a moderate success on both sides of the Atlantic. The writer is disposed to regard it as the finest and most finished novel upon the accepted lines that he has written or is ever likely to write. Its reception disappointed him. He realized that the fully developed novel, like the fully developed Gothic cathedral, is a fabric too elaborate for contemporary needs and uses. His subsequent books are either shorter or smaller in design, or, in cases where there is much to be said, as for example in Joan and Peter and Mr Britling Sees It Through, they are planned and written with far less restraint and care.
CONTENTS
BOOK I
THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED
1 Of Bladesover House, and My Mother; and the Constitution of Society
2 Of My Launch into the World and the Last I Saw of Bladesover
3 The Wimblehurst Apprenticeship
BOOK II
THE RISE OF TONO-BUNGAY
1 How I Became a London Student, and Went Astray
2 The Dawn Comes, and My Uncle Appears in a New Silk Hat
3 How We Made Tono-Bungay Hum
4 Marion
BOOK III
THE GREAT DAYS OF TONO-BUNGAY
1 The Hardingham Hotel, and How We Became Big People
2 Our Progress from Camden Town to Crest Hill
3 Soaring
4 How I Stole the Heaps of Quap from Mordet Island
BOOK IV
THE AFTERMATH OF TONO-BUNGAY
1 The Stick of the Rocket
2 Love Among the Wreckage
3 Night and the Open Sea
BOOK I
THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED
CHAPTER 1
Of Bladesover House, and My Mother; and the Constitution of Society
§1
Most people in this world seem to live ‘in character’; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than ‘character actors’. They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one’s stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples.1 That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham2 infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacks – the unjustifiable gifts of footmen – in pantries, and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks3 clerk; and – to go to my other extreme – I was once – oh, glittering days! – an item in the house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. I’ve seen these people at various angles. At the dinner-table I’ve met not simply the titled but the great. On one occasion – it is my brightest memory – I upset my champagne over the trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire – Heaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name him! – in the warmth of our mutual admiration.
And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered a man….
Yes, I’ve seen a curious variety of people and ways of living altogether. Odd people they all are, great and small, very much alike at bottom and curiously different on their surfaces. I wish I had ranged just a little further both up and down, seeing I have ranged so far. Royalty must be worth knowing and very great fun. But my contacts with princes have been limited to quite public occasions, nor at the other end of the scale have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but attractive class of people who go about on the high roads drunk but en famille4 (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the summer-time, with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children, a smell and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies, 5 farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834 beer-houses, 6 are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now for ever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been negligible; I once went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst of what was no doubt snobbishness, did my best to get him in the legs. But that failed.
I’m sorry I haven’t done the whole lot, though….
You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social range, this extensive cross-section of the British social organism. It was the Accident of Birth. It always is in England. Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that is by the way. I was my uncle’s nephew, and my uncle was no less a person than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of the financial heavens happened – it is now ten years ago! Do you remember the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? Perhaps you had a trifle in some world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him only too well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the empty heavens – like a comet – rather, like a stupendous rocket! – and overawed investors spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon of domestic conveniences!…7
I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging on to his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him in the chemist’s shop at Wimblehurst8 before he began. I was, you might say, the stick of his rocket; and after our tremendous soar, after he had played with millions, a golden rain in the sky, after my bird’s-eye view of the modern world, I fell again, a little scarred and blistered perhaps, two and twenty years older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but greatly edified, into this Thames-side yard, into these white heats and hammerings, amidst the fine realities of steel – to think it all over in my leisure and jot down the notes and inconsecutive observations that make this book. It was more, you know, than a figurative soar. The zenith of that career was surely our flight across the channel in the Lord Roberts β….9
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 set out my own queer love experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and distressed and swayed me hugely; and they still seem to me to contain all sorts of irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headed for getting on paper. And possibly I may even flow into descriptions of people who are really no more than people seen in transit, just because it amuses me to recall what they said and did to us, and more particularly how they behaved in the brief but splendid glare of Tono-Bungay and its still more glaring offspring. It lit some of them up, I can assure you! Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. My ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere….
Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in every chemist’s storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age and brightens the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory, its financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I, sole scorched survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an air that is never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a table littered with working drawings and amid fragments of models and notes about velocities and air and water pressures and trajectories – of an altogether different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.
§2
I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all, this is any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book. I’ve given, I see, an impression that I want to make simply a hotch-potch of anecdotes and experiences with my uncle swimming in the middle as the largest lump of victual. I’ll own that here, with the pen already started, I realize what a fermenting mass of things learnt and emotions experienced and theories formed I’ve got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my book must be from the very outset. I suppose what I’m really trying to render is nothing more nor less than Life – as one man has found it. I want to tell – myself, and my impressions of the thing as a whole, to say things I have come to feel intensely of the laws, traditions, usages and ideas we call society, and how we poor individuals get driven and lured and stranded among these windy, perplexing shoals and channels. I’ve got, I suppose, to a time of life when things begin to take on shapes that have an air of reality, and become no longer material for dreaming but interesting in themselves. I’ve reached the criticizing, novel-writing age, and here I am writing mine – my one novel – without having any of the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose the regular novel-writer acquires.
I’ve read an average share of novels and made some starts before this beginning, and I’ve found the restraints and rules of the art (as I made them out) impossible for me. I like to write, I am keenly interested in writing, but it is not my technique. I’m an engineer with a patent or two and a set of ideas; most of whatever artist there is in me has been given to turbine machines and boat-building and the problem of flying, and do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined storyteller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorize, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn’t a constructed tale I have to tell but unmanageable realities. My love-story – and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling all through as strongly as I have now, you shall have it all – falls into no sort of neat scheme of telling. It involves three separate feminine persons. It’s all mixed up with the other things….
But I’ve said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or want of method in what follows, and I think I had better tell without further delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of Bladesover House.
§3
There came a time when I realized that Bladesover House was not all it seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirest faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that the Bladesover system was a little working model – and not so very little either – of the whole world.
Let me try and give you the effect of it.
Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs, eight miles perhaps from Ashborough; and its old pavilion, a minute wooden parody of the temple of Vesta at Tibur, 10 upon the hill crest behind the house, commands in theory at least a view of either sea, of the Channel southward and the Thames to the north-east. The park is the second largest in Kent, finely wooded with well-placed beeches, many elms and some sweet chestnuts, abounding in little valleys and hollows of bracken, with springs and a stream and three fine ponds and multitudes of fallow deer. The house was built in the eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the style of a French chateau, and save for one pass among the crests which opens to blue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farmhouses and copses and wheatfields and the occasional gleam of water, its hundred and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and handsome territories. A semicircular screen of great beeches masks the church and village, which cluster picturesquely about the high road along the skirts of the great park. Northward, at the remotest corner of that enclosure, is a second dependent village, Ropedean, 11 less fortunate in its greater distance and also on account of a rector. This divine was indeed rich, but he was vindictively economical because of some shrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word Eucharist for the Lord’s Supper12 he had become altogether estranged from the great ladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean was in the shadows through all that youthful time.
Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large house, dominating church, village and the countryside, was that they represented the thing that mattered supremely in the world, and that all other things had significance only in relation to them. They represented the Gentry, the Quality, by and through and for whom the rest of the world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the tradespeople of Ashborough and the upper servants and the lower servants and the servants of the estate, breathed and lived and were permitted. And the Quality did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great house mingled so solidly and effectually with earth and sky, the contrast of its spacious hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper’s room and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar, and the pinched and stuffy rooms of even the post-office people and the grocer, so enforced these suggestions, that it was only when I was a boy of thirteen or fourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had set me doubting whether Mr Bartlett, the vicar, did really know with certainty all about God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began to question the final rightness of the gentlefolk, their primary necessity in the scheme of things. But once that scepticism had awakened it took me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved terrible blasphemies and sacrilege; I had resolved to marry a viscount’s daughter, and I had blacked the left eye – I think it was the left – of her half-brother, in open and declared rebellion.
