H G Wells

Tono-Bungay H G Wells

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". 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 ambitious uncle Edward. George devotes seven years to organising the production and manufacture of a product which he believes to be "a damned swindle". 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. 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 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).