The Columbia History of the British Novel

means of representation. Paradoxically, a certain laxity of construction-e.g., the Dickensian coincidence-bespeaks this intention: rough writing means the writing is not itself the point. Indeed, Dickens and Thackeray (though emphatically not Balzac) were precisely the novelists whom the contemporaries of Wells-Bennett prominent among them-abused as the artless inferiors of such continentals as Flaubert and Turgenev.

Wells did not merely follow his progenitors, however; he attempted to purge the novel's form of its lingering unrealisms. Tono-Bungay enacts that purgation, employing Dickensian characterization in order to critique it. Its population might have been recruited from the strongly marked «types» so numerous in Dickens (and in Balzac's Comédie humaine); every character but the narrator seems bounded by some identifying trait, some humor that endures all the onslaughts of experience. The names of such minor personages as Nicodemus Frapp and Lord Boom suggest the fixity of the human landscape one seems to encounter in Tono-Bungay. The method extends to major characters. Teddy Ponderevo expels breath with the same four-lettered «Zzzz» throughout the novel-he Zzzz's on his deathbed-and endlessly spouts the same barmy advice to his nephew. One can never forget the roundness of his belly, because the narrator continually reminds one of -665- it. His wife, Susan, hitches the adjective «old» to every conceivable noun, and several inconceivable ones, thus establishing her indestructible wise insouciance. But Wells transforms the technique of the earlier realists in Tono-Bungay, in that the moral value of character does not depend on character itself. Character for Wells does not itself exist on a moral scale, as in Dickens or Balzac; rather, the interactions of each individuality with the extant social order produces a final mixed effect of good and ill. The social order, of course, impinges on Dickens's characters, but it does not permeate them. That is, character itself, forged though it may have been in particular social circumstances, has a moral dimension: Mr. Micawber is inherently good, Uriah Heep inherently bad. But in a startling revision of Dickens, Wells reveals Mr. Micawber and Uriah Heep to be the same man-Teddy Ponderevo, the bustling, energetic, good-hearted little Englishman, is also an embezzler, a fraud, and a forger. He is a megalomaniac because British capitalism channels his energies into self-aggrandizement. This energy is itself neutral: Teddy does not grow bad-intentioned with wealth. There are no conversions of character in Tono-Bungay, only changes of context.

In Tono-Bungay, Wells continually reconfigures Dickensian prototypes in order to suggest the inseparability of individual character from its social context. Like David Copperfield, George Ponderevo titles the chapters of his life story after what sound like mock-heroic steps toward self-possession: 'How I became a London Student, and Went Astray,' 'Our Progress from Camden Town to Crest Hill.' George's story, though, leads him not to a recognition of his essential self but to a recognition that his personal life is hopelessly enmeshed in the life of his times. The novel, indeed, modulates from the voice of Dickens to the voice of Conrad-a strategy thought by Mark Schorer, writing at a time when critics were hypnotized by the notion of organic unity, to be a disabling flaw. On the African expedition to recover his uncle's lost fortunes by the theft of the valuable radioactive substance known as 'quap,' George encounters the Conradian jungle, the moral idiocy of the physical universe-recognition of which can engender a concomitant decay in human morals, the illusion of a naturally authorized ethical code being lost. George, in fact, murders a man to keep him from reporting the illicit expedition's whereabouts. The action occurs thoughtlessly, in a moment, and alters George's subsequent behavior hardly at all. Inconsequential murder would violate the fundamental laws of the Dickensian universe-to Wells, an unreal universe he is -666- determined to complicate. Tono-Bungay ends with a description of the Thames reminiscent of Conrad's in Heart of Darkness, in which Marlow reminds his listeners that London, too, 'has been one of the dark places of the earth'-except that London's present, not its past, is now the emblem of meaninglessness and chaos: 'The third [most modern] part of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order, and precedence, it is the seaport and the sea… And amidst it all no plan appears, no intention, no comprehensive desire. That is the very key of it all.' The novel has set the bright Dickensian vision of English «characters» in the frame of a world that forecloses the role of essential character in determining the moral status of a life.

In Tono-Bungay, Wells achieved his farthest-seeing analysis of the English social system that, for him, was the ultimate reality shaping English lives. The novel sets its spade into the long, hard roots of Edwardian England, tracing the stages of its growth, revealing it to be but the most recent moment in the nation's long life. Wells exposes the flimsy insecurity of his own age through a profusion of symbols, perhaps the most brilliant of which, as David Ludge has noted, are a series of architectural metaphors. George Ponderevo, much of an age with Wells himself, passes his infancy and boyhood as the son of a servant on the country estate of Bladesover. Bladesover, the House of England, is no Victorian construction, though Wells fills it with seriocomic Victorians; it was raised after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the sole intellectual proprietor in its history was an Enlightenment gentleman. The Glorious Revolution established the enduring English social dispensation; the novel frequently conflates the early eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even as the landed gentry die away, the aristocrats of wealth fill their places. The new sword will eventually outwear this old sheath, but the Bladesover model-a naturally privileged upper class in whose service the infinitely subdivided lower orders produce all the material goods of the world-still largely determines the modes of action available to individuals.

George relives the history of his nation in his own development, beginning as a blind adherent of Bladesover. His first education in other notions of society comes from Enlightenment texts. But the ideas in them have made no progress since the Enlightenment, have even lost ground. No one directs George to Swift and Paine; rather, he finds their works neglected in one of the estate's old dormers. When he is old enough, he attends 'the sort of school the Bladesover system permit-667- ted.'Just as the focus of English society has shifted in the past two hundred years from the country to London, so George is eventually drawn to the metropolis. And such a move is no move at all- George learns to recognize the enduring frame of Bladesover society behind the façades of London:

And I struck out a truth one day in Cromwell Road quite suddenly, as I looked over the Natural History Museum; 'By Jove!' said I, 'but this is the little assemblage of cases of stuffed birds and animals upon the Bladesover staircase grown enormous, and yonder as the corresponding thing to the Bladesover curios and porcelain is the Art Museum, and there in the observatories in Exhibition Road is old Sir Cuthbert's Gregorian telescope that I hunted out in the storeroom and put together.'

When George contemplates a career of public service in scientific research, Uncle Teddy reminds him that modern science serves the new commercial Bladesover, not the public: 'And who pays for that?… Enterprising business men! They fancy they'll have a bit of science going on, they want a handy Expert ever and again, and there you are!' For the rest of the novel, George watches his uncle recapitulate the fossilization of Bladesover, the replacement of its once-living aristocratic tissue with the new substance of money. In describing his rise, George notes that 'in some of the old seventeenth and early eighteenth century prayerbooks at Bladesover there used to be illustrations with long scrolls coming out of the mouths of the wood-cut figures. I wish I could write all this last chapter on a scroll coming out of the head of my uncle.'

The long national metamorphosis of which Teddy's career is a brief microcosm shows how inhabiting the Bladesover House has shaped the new money aristocracy. Sundered from the class in which they originated, they are soon weaned from any affection for the new. They join 'in the plunder of the eighteenth century, buy rare old books, fine old pictures, good old furniture. Their first crude conception of dazzling suites of the newly perfect is replaced almost from the outset by a jackdaw dream of accumulating costly discrepant old things.' Edward Ponderevo, who had longed to 'make things happen,' who had decried Lord Eastry's domination of provincial Wimblehurst-'He doesn't want anything more to happen. Why should he? Any change 'ud be a loss to him'-becomes an untitled equivalent of Lord Eastry, determined to do his 'duty by the Parish,' acclaiming the system that has -668- worked the transformation: 'It's staid and stable, and yet it has a place for new men. We come up and take our places.' Indeed, no new social dispensation has arisen in England since the Anglican orthodoxy consolidated its grip in the eighteenth century. Even Teddy's fall reproduces an old pattern. George Ponderevo, describing his uncle's increasingly dubious financial maneuvers (such as refinancing his subsidiary companies by directing them to sell stock to each other), notes that 'that was our method of equilibrium at the iridescent climax of the bubble.' Perhaps the most famous stock manipulation in English history was the notorious South Sea Bubble scandal of 1711 to 1720, wherein a coterie of well-connected schemers (two of whom bore the uncannily appropriate names Blunt and Craggs) undertook to finance the national debt by speculation in essentially worthless stock. The bubble symbolizes the frailty of the social arrangement England has uncertainly ridden for the last two hundred years. George observesthat all this present commercial civilisation is no more than my poor uncle's career writ large, a swelling, thinning bubble of assurances; that its arithmetic is just as unsound, its dividends as ill-advised, its ultimate aim as vague and forgotten; that it all drifts on perhaps to some tremendous parallel to his individual disaster.