on, which is maintained as a vast,
stupid, demoralising pretence, undermined by Tono-Bungayism. The old
order, in Mr. Wells' language, is called the Bladesover System,
Bladesover being the house where "I," George Ponderevo, the
housekeeper's son--one of the many incarnations of the author
himself--was born, brought up, and acquired his first impressions of
life.

The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers, and
the servants in their stations and degrees seemed to me, I say,
to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other
villages and great estates, and from house to house,
interlacing, correlated, the gentry, the fine Olympians, came
and went. The country towns seemed mere collections of shops,
marketing-places for the tenantry, centres for such education as
they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village
and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the order of
the whole world.

"All this fine appearance was already sapped." George himself, as a
boy, had already begun to "question the final rightness of the
gentlefolks," declaring his rebellion by "resolving to marry a
viscount's daughter" and blacking the eye of her half-brother. He is
transported to the house of Nicodemus Frapp, baker, of Chatham, where
he again rebels, this time against the threat of being burned for ever
in Hell. Thence he is taken to the house of his uncle Ponderevo,
chemist, of Wimblehurst, a small town dominated, like Bladesover, by
the landed gentry tradition. And he finds in this uncle, whose name is
soon to become a household word throughout the country, a veritable
embodiment of the new spirit which is invading the Bladesover system
and altering England. Mr. Ponderevo is restless and discontented. He
does not like Wimblehurst. "One rubs along. But there's no
development--no growth. They just come along here and buy pills when
they want 'em--and a horse-ball or such. They've got to be ill before
there's a prescription. That sort they are. You can't get 'em to
launch out, you can't get 'em to take up anything new."

Mr. Ponderevo, being bankrupt, moves to London, and in the course of
time George, now a student of science, follows him. New vistas of life
open up in the midst of this vast, overgrown, "purposeless," "dingy"
city. Nobody since Dickens has given us the impression of London in
all its multitudinous, dismal-gay activities as Mr. Wells give