Tono Bungay

John Bean did this. proofed against hardcopy-Dianne
TONO-BUNGAY H.G Wells 1908
BOOK THE FIRST
THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED
CHAPTER THE
FIRST
OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE
CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY
I
Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have a
beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with
another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as
being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say,
no more (and no less) than "character actors." They have a class, they
have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to
them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they
have played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so
much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some
unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and lives
crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of
samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last
writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series
of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at very
different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of
intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social
countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my
cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten
illegal snacks--the unjustifiable gifts of footmen--in pantries, and been

despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced)
by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and--to go to my other extreme--I
was once--oh, glittering days!--an item in the house-party of a countess.
She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but still, you know,
a countess. I've seen these people at various angles. At the dinner-table
I've met not simply the titled but the great. On one occasion--it is my
brightest memory--I upset my champagne over the trousers of the
greatest statesman in the empire--Heaven forbid I should be so
invidious as to name him!--in the warmth of our mutual admiration.
And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered
a man....
Yes, I've seen a curious variety of people and ways of living altogether.
Odd people they all are great and small, very much alike at bottom and
curiously different on their surfaces. I wish I had ranged just a little
further both up and down, seeing I have ranged so far. Royalty must be
worth knowing and very great fun. But my contacts with princes have
been limited to quite public occasions, nor at the other end of the scale
have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but
attractive class of people who go about on the high-roads drunk but
enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the summertime, with a
perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children, a smell, and
ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies, farm-labourers,
sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834 beer-houses, are beyond
me also, and I suppose must remain so now for ever. My intercourse
with the ducal rank too has been negligible; I once went shooting with
a duke, and in an outburst of what was no doubt snobbishness, did my
best to get him in the legs. But that failed.
I'm sorry I haven't done the whole lot though....
You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social range, this
extensive cross-section of the British social organism. It was the
Accident of Birth. It always is in England.
Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that is
by the way. I was my uncle's nephew, and my uncle was no less a

person than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of the
financial heavens happened--it is now ten years ago! Do you remember
the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? Perhaps
you had a trifle in some world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him
only too well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the empty
heavens--like a comet--rather, like a stupendous rocket!--and overawed
investors spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the
most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon of
domestic conveniences!
I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging on
to his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him in the
chemist's shop at Wimblehurst before