Tono-Bungay

Abstract

Wells saw Tono-Bungay, which was published in 1909, as the ‘finest and most finished’ of his novels ‘upon the accepted lines’. Even here, however, in what is assuredly his most serious fictional writing of the period, he was also going his own separate way, veering away from ‘an intensified rendering of feeling and characterisation’, which was James’s prescription for the novel, towards a treatment which was extensive rather than intensive. The difference, according to Wells, was that he (Wells) was attempting to present his characters more as ‘part of a scene’.¹ ‘David Lodge has explored this idea in his seminal essay on the novel in The Language of Fiction.² There he traces precisely the way Wells has invested his imaginative energy in ‘scene’ in the novel, shifting the background, the landscapes and places which encompass the characters’ adventures, to the foreground. The central character of the novel, Lodge argues, is not the narrator, George Ponderevo, but rather his commentary which is both descriptive and diagnostic and which cumulatively establishes the idea of the diseased life of the whole social body. The novel for Lodge sets out to describe, interpret and comment upon the state of society and the effects of social change in the tradition of ‘Condition of England novels’, and it is within this mode that we have to understand and judge it.