Tono-Bungay
First UK Edition Cover (1909)
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| Author | H. G. Wells |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Macmillan |
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Publication date
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1909 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Tono-Bungay /ˌtɒnoʊˈbʌŋɡi/ is a realist semiautobiographical novel written by H. G. Wells and published in 1909. It has been called "arguably his most artistic book". 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.
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.
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".
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". 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. 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]."
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