Verne would have been glad to write; he
had gone on to project new worlds constructed after analysis of the
present, or in anticipation of the future, or ideally from the ideal;
he had written comic stories and weird stories, and one or two true
stories; and he had turned to economics and political science with
reforming zeal. But here we have it all again, not in parts, but as a
comprehensive whole, in a novel which asks us to consider every class
in the social ladder in modern England, which questions the whole
organisation of our society, which raises central questions about
birth, marriage, religion, death, and survival, and presents the whole
as a personal and human affair.

Mr. Wells set himself to this task in his own queer, plodding, English
way. To the niceties of style and form he paid little attention. He
tells the story as best he can, in his own slangy, cumbrous,
Latin-English, but idiomatic way--there is little selection or
self-suppression, but he makes his points. He draws from a copious
store. Considered as social satire, it is an exposure of the silliness
and futility of our system of competitive capitalism superimposed on
feudalism. Or you may take it as a book of adventure, and find our
hero and his erratic uncle plunging into orgies of hazardous exploits
and achievements. Or you may take it as a novel of love, and languish
with the hero in a misdirected amour, and burn with him in a glorious,
futile, and tragic affection. Or you may take it as a novel of
England, of the many currents of English life joining in one vast
stream on which the barque of the narrator floats. "'This,' it came to
me, 'is England. This is what I wanted to give in my book. This!'" And
this, the vision which comes to Mr. Wells through a kind of instinct
about the life he has experienced and sought to convey--the vague
dream that haunts and baffles him--the desired, intangible,
dimly-felt, but unknown thing--is offered as a kind of mystical
solution to the insoluble problem of an imperfect world.

The title--it is typical of Mr. Wells--suggests at once the farcical
element in the whole thing. Tono-Bungay--a quack medicine, "slightly
injurious rubbish" sold at "one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a
bottle, including the Government stamp." We can only approach
Tono-Bungay, which is modern and representative of our whole
industrial system, by way of something prior to it--the old social
order which exists only as a traditi