Tono-Bungay: the Divided Self

Abstract

In any discussion of Wells in relation to the modern novel Tono-Bungay must occupy a central place. Not only was it in his own words ‘his finest and most finished novel upon the accepted lines’,¹¹ but it is clearly a work in which he invested great pains and high ambitions. In his autobiography he remarks that

presently I was finishing Kipps and making notes for what I meant to be a real full-length novel at last, Tono-Bungay, a novel, as I imagined it, on Dickens-Thackeray lines.… It was planned as a social panorama in the vein of Balzac.¹²

One of the most important assumptions in modern thinking about the novel is the notion, prevalent among novelists and critics alike, that sometime in the concluding years of the last century or the early years of this one, at a point which is not exactly sensitive but is nonetheless there to be felt, there occurred a change, a redirection, a re-emphasis or a ‘turn’ of the novel.

(Malcolm Bradbury, Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel)

It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste.

(H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay)