s it us.
But it is no longer the London of Dickens. It is a "great, stupid
giantess," a "city of Bladesover ... parasitically occupied,
insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic, and irresponsible
elements." It was a chaotic mass of houses built for the middle-class
Victorian families. And even while these houses were being run up:

Means of transit were developing to carry the moderately
prosperous middle-class families out of London; education and
factory employment were whittling away at the supply of rough
hard-working, obedient girls who would stand the subterranean
drudgery of these places; new classes of hard-up middle-class
people such as my uncle, employees of various types, were coming
into existence, for whom no homes were provided. None of these
classes have ideas of what they ought to be, or fit in any
legitimate way into the Bladesover theory that dominates our
minds. It was nobody's concern to see them housed under
civilised conditions, and the beautiful laws of supply and
demand had free play.

It was such a London, such an England, which offered itself invitingly
to the predatory ambitions of Mr. Ponderevo, so that out of a simple
concoction of drugs and water he was able to capture the money of
hundreds of thousands who fondly believed that Tono-Bungay would give
them new vigour and zest in life. Mr. Wells describes to us the sudden
rise and development of Mr. Ponderevo, to whose fortunes those of
George are linked; he tells us how he grows in importance, how he
moves into houses larger and larger to suit his new place in the
social scale, how vast a position he comes to hold in the financial
world of London, in the philanthropic world, and, of course, in the
social world.

It is whilst he is interesting us in George and his associates that
Mr. Wells makes us aware also of the higher unit of society and the
whole strange fraud of modern life, the pretence that there has been
no change when conditions have radically changed and are still
changing. The theory of the old order broods over the new, chaotic,
haphazard world which flings people up and down, sets their whole
life--birth, marriage, possessions, happiness--at the mercy of mere
chance. In the love interest which is an important part of the story
he presents the modern treatment of marriage and sex as another
disastrous example of muddling and disorder.

But he does not dwell long or didact