Editorial Reviews:
Book Description
The story of an apprentice chemist whose uncle’s worthless medicine becomes a spectacular marketing success, Tono-Bungay earned H. G. Wells immediate acclaim when it appeared in 1909. It remains a sparkling chronicle of chicanery and human credulity, and is today regarded by many as Wells’s greatest novel. As Andrea Barrett observes in her Introduction, “Through its detailed, often brilliant descriptions and powerful imagery, [Tono-Bungay] slyly satirizes British imperial policy as a whole. . . . The insights into class, money, advertising, public relations, and the power of the press still ring horrifyingly true.”
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the original 1909 edition.
Customer Reviews:
Review #1: A novel for our time
2005-08-13 
This amazing novel could have been written today, except for the wonderful Edwardian style and language. The story of a rags-to-riches advertising fraud sounds quite the contemporary tone. Edward Ponderevo runs a chemist's shop in the Victorian equivalent of Vic and Sade's Dismal Seepage, Ohio. The idea strikes him to add coloring and flavor to a bottle of junk and market it as a miracle drug, Tono-Bungay. Before long, other quacks jump onto his bandwagon and he rises in society and prestige. Part of Wells' genius lay in foreseeing the future: he has the narrator, poor, "ruined" George, go out on a leaky sailing vessel to west Africa in search of radioactive "quap," some stuff that will turn the world on its head, as indeed uranium did, later. He even describes this "quap" as deriving from pitchblende, as uranium does! He also plays with aeronautical inventions such as gliders and balloons, and our anti-hero ends up designing destroyers for the Royal Navy. The love interest, Beatrice (pace, Dante), is unattainable, not because of the usual Victorian claptrap about class or modesty, but because she's addicted to "chloral," the hypnotic element of knockout drops, chloral hydrate. Some of the love interest may have arisen from Wells' romance with Rebecca West, quite a looker in her younger days; (their affair produced a son, Anthony West, who became an embittered old man hating both his parents).
Wells wrote some great stories: "The Shape of Things to Come," which predicted air warfare although it appeared in 1899, "The War of the Worlds," and my favorite, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles," filmed in 1935 with Roland Young ("Topper") as the innocent barfly who stops time. "Tono-Bungay" is among his finest.
Wells had no use for "the quality," that is, the idle rich who populated England's country houses in the 19th century. "The great houses stand in their parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers..." At tea, the great lady "acknowledged your poor tinkle of utterance with a voluminous, scornful 'Haw!' that made you want to burn her alive." She had "a small set of stereotyped remarks that constituted her entire mental range." The narrator sat uneasily on a hard chair "trying to exist, like a feeble seedling amidst great rocks." The house had a "great staircase that has never been properly descended since powder went out of fashion." When later he went to live at the home of young Beatrice and invited to play with her, he was "handed over as if I was some large variety of kitten."
George grew up in the 1880s, the era of "The Good Hard-Working Man." A point of honor "was to rise at or before dawn, and then laboriously muddle about." Religion was dispensed in a dingy chapel, "a little brick-built chapel equipped with a spavined roarer of a harmonium." The larger church, "the great pre-Reformation church, [was] a fine grey shell, like some empty skull from which the life has fled."
Uncle Edward is the finest character in the novel: a little fat, ("he'd look lovely with a stopper," chides his wife, who calls him "Old Sossidge"), breathing with audible "Zzzzzz" sounds, he could be found lying on a small wooden fold-up bed, wearing "an elderly but still cheerful pair of check pajamas." His contribution to the world was to be thinking up slogans and fancy adverts for his fake products. The "proper" shops of his day "had been but lightly touched by the American's profaning hand," and they did not cater to people "who in a once fashionable phrase, do not 'exist.'" He would change all that. He raised capital by going to each source in turn and saying the others had come in. Then he conquered England "province by province. Like sogers." "'You can GO for twenty-four hours,' we declared, 'on Tono-Bungay chocolate.' We didn't say whether you could return on the same commodity." His lovable, eccentric wife, Susan, is plain as salt. "She described the knights of the age of chivalry as 'kavorting about on the off-chance of a dragon.'" She offers her nephew a biscuit: "Have some squashed flies, George."
The narrator believes himself to be a "morally limited cad with a mind beyond his merits." He suffers through a long, horrible marriage and separation, and shares in the Tono-Bungay business. His uncle, meanwhile, discovers creative accounting 19th century style: "you wouldn't find the early figures so much wrong as strained." He also discovers what auditors call "y/e" items, year-end transactions. "Each of these companies ended its financial year solvent by selling great holdings of shares to one or other of its sisters, and paying a dividend out of the proceeds..." Nothing has changed in a century. Wells has his narrator comment, "I had some amazing perceptions of just how modern thought and the supply of fact to the general mind may be controlled by money." At the same time he notices the London unemployed, "a shambling, shameful stream they made, oozing along the street, the gutter waste of competitive civilisation." Unlike his uncle, they had not said "Snap" in the right place, or were too eager, or never said it at all. Uncle Edward develops a rich man's style of behavior, he would "Zzzzz" and fiddle with his glasses, and "rise slowly to his toes as a sentence unwound, jerkily like a clockwork snake, and drop back on his heels at the end." He was no longer a little man. He ends his career, like a Donald Trump, in real estate. "It is curious how many of these modern financiers of chance and bluff have ended their careers by building...try to make their fluid opulence coagulate out as bricks and mortar...Then the whole fabric of confidence and imagination totters--and down they come...."
And then comes the discovery of the great heap of quap in West Africa, "floating fragments of slum" available for the stealing. A nearby station is abandoned "because every man who stayed two months at the station stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like a leper." "The only word that comes near it is cancerous." The sample produced for the narrator was "wrapped about with lead." What did H. G. Wells know? He studied science before becoming a writer, but the effects of radiation were still a mystery after his death, in the late 1940s, when soldiers were ordered into foxholes only 200 yards away from the site of the Nevada atomic test explosions.
Wells writes splendidly and succinctly. His aristocrats sit about in the summer house and in garden chairs, "very hatty and ruffley and sunshady." Croquet is played "with immense gravity." As the nouveau-riche begin to invade the upper levels of society, "with an immense, astonished zest they begin shopping,...a new life crowded and brilliant with things shopped...they talk, think, and dream possessions." They conceal their daughters (one is found wearing "a large gold cross and other aggressive ecclesiastical symbols.") Their chairs are covered with Union Jacks. The love interest in the novel plays the piano: "'Was that Wagner, Beatrice?' asked Lady Osprey, looking up from her cards. 'It sounded very confused.'" Uncle Edward's doctor is "a young man, plumply rococo, in bicycling dress, with fine waxen features, a little pointed beard, and the long black, frizzy hair and huge tie of a minor poet."
George concludes that the royal robes and ermine of English lords conceal the realities of "greedy trade, base profit-seeking, bold advertisement." Kingship and chivalry are dead and buried.
A spectacular find.
Review #2: Everything you want in Wells
1999-03-27
"Tono-Bungay" is an alleged tonic with dubious medical benefits; and the story is one of the brief fortunes of someone who manages to turn the worthless substance into a formidable fortune - for a while. By the time Wells wrote this novel he had already written books which might or might not be science fiction (witness "The War in the Air") and, all in all, "Ton-Bungay" probably isn't science fiction. But I should mention a substance called "quup" which is introduced towards the end of the book. (I'm not giving anything important away.) "Quup" is the first mention I know of of what we would now call radioactive waste, except that it's naturally occurring, and ... well, perhaps I should be discrete, but I can say that the scenes involving quup have a peculiar flavour which writers would find impossible to capture nowadays.So you get an excellent double deal with this book: the best of Wells's social fiction of the 1910s, plus a dollop the fresh science fiction he wrote the previous century.
Review #3: Social-Fiction, not Science-Fiction
1998-07-30 
Having read H.G. Wells' classics WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE INVISIBLE MAN, THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, THE TIME MACHINE, and THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, I looked forward to reading what is often claimed to be his "best" work. TONO-BUNGAY is completely different than any of his Sci-Fi classics. TONO-BUNGAY is more of a study of class structure and class struggle in England during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The story follows the life of a young man, George, and his Uncle Edward. Edward invents an elixir called TONO-BUNGAY and hires his nephew George to help build the company. As the book goes George and Edward become quite wealthy. Throughout the book George makes numerous comments on his varying places on the social ladder. It seems that no matter how wealthy George becomes, he will never be accepted in certain circles because he is newly rich and not "old money." The story is well written and is generally easy to follow. I would, however, recomm! end the World's Classics edition of this book (published by Oxford U. Press and available from Amazon.Com) because there are some instances in which Wells makes comments about European literature, art, languages, colleges and phrases that may be of little meaning to the average reader, but for the six pages of end notes provided in the World's Classics edition. The World's Classics edition also claims to be the most accurate edition of the story, taking into account all of Wells' revisions of the story, many of which were made after the book was initially published in 1909 (TONO-BUNGAY was revised by Wells and re-released in 1925). |
