Pan classics
1 total work
Tono-Bungay (1909), the bridge between H.G. Wells 's comic novels and his novels of ideas, was regarded by Wells himself as perhaps his most ambitious work of fiction. It was, he said, "the novel as I imagined it, on Dickens-Thackeray lines." The hero-narrator, George Ponderevo, begins life in the servants' hall of a great house, Bladesover, earns a pharmaceutical society scholarship, and is apprenticed to his uncle Edward Ponderevo, a druggist in a small country town. Uncle Teddy concocts a patent medicine, Tono-Bungay ("The Secret of Vigour"), and together they build the colossal Tono-Bungay property "out of human hope and a credit for bottles and printing." The meteoric career of Uncle Teddy, Napoleon of commerce and precursor of twentieth-century hucksters, is narrated against the background of his nephew's life.