Shortly after Tono-Bungay came out in 1909, Wells’s friend Arnold Bennett gave it a generally enthusiastic, and enjoyably biased, review. In it, Bennett told a story about a “smart, positive, little woman” he met in Bayswater who said: “I draw the line at Wells. He stirs up the dregs. I don’t mind the froth, but dregs I – will – not – have!”
Bennett goes on:
Silence reigned as we stared at the reputation of Wells lying dead on the carpet. When, with the thrill of emotion that a great work communicates, I finished reading Tono-Bungay, I thought of the smart little woman in the Bayswater drawing-room. I was filled with a holy joy because Wells had stirred up the dregs again, and more violently than ever. I rapturously reflected, ‘How angry this will make them’. ‘Them’ being the innumerable tribe of persons, inane or chumpish (this adjective I give to the world), who don’t mind froth, but won’t have dregs.
Fine as that quote is, and grateful as I am for the gift of the word chumpish, I was also frustrated by Bennett’s review. He doesn’t actually go on to define his use of dregs, except to talk about “the spectacle of man whole”. Initially, it left me confused. Not least because, at first flush, those dregs are less luridly obvious in Tono-Bungay than in plenty of Wells’ earlier fiction.
Anyone who has read about the painful cross-species animal experiments in The Island of Dr Moreau, or the troglodyte, cannibalistic Morlocks in The Time Machine and the blood-drinking Martians in The War of the Worlds, may quickly be able to form an idea of the kind of dregs that might have worried Bennett’s acquaintance.
Tono-Bungay is largely free of such shockers, even if there’s an enjoyable interlude in which the protagonist becomes involved with a radioactive substance called “quap” (say it aloud). But there are other kinds of dregs – and there are other ways of stirring things up.
The War of the Worlds is also, for instance, one of the most effective contemporary demolitions of late Victorian imperialism that I’ve read. Wells got there even before Conrad exposed the “horror” of the Belgian Congo in Heart of Darkness, and explained that the conquest of the Earth was “not a pretty thing when you look into it much”. He explicitly compared his merciless Martians to the British colonialists who wiped out the population of Tasmania, while making plenty of other similarly barbed references to the cruelty and arrogance of empire. Which may have caused a few uncomfortable reflections in Bayswater. Perhaps that smart woman also harrumphed at The Time Machine’s suggestion that the inevitable result of the class system would be that feckless aristocrats would become lunch for the workers.
Viewed in that light, it becomes easier to see what kind of dregs Bennett is referring to and how they may relate to “man whole”. Wells does some pretty serious stirring, even before he launches the narrative into the not-so-miraculous miracle cure, Tono-Bungay, and lays into advertising and greed-is-good capitalism.
True to his generally fearless style, he goes straight in at the top. Within the first few pages, the author is laying into God, the absurdities of organised religion and the logical inconsistencies of Christianity. The furious, fearful reaction of the narrator’s cousins must surely have been felt by plenty of contemporary readers when he makes such declarations as: “There’s no hell … and no eternal punishment. No God would be such a fool as that.”
Having rounded on that taboo, Wells moves on to make jokes about sex that seem surprisingly rude even today, let alone 20 years before Lady Chatterley. After the young narrator has his first kiss with a girl, he tells us that he vanished into the woods where he experienced “love dreams and single-handed play”. Just in case readers miss this cheeky reference to onanism, a few lines later he tells us how for many days that “kiss upon my lips was a seal, and by night the seed of dreams”.
This sauce, it turns out, is a prelude to a more sustained attack on the institution of marriage and the shackles of conventional home life. But before he gets stuck into those, Wells also has a good pop at the aristocracy and the English class system. There are brief, but no less devastating descriptions of country house life and the servile imbecility to which it has reduced characters such as the narrator’s own mother and his cousin Nicodemus. The latter represents the “servile tradition perfected”, which is to say, disagreeable of aspect and dedicated to pointless hard work.
The narrator observes the problems associated with kowtowing to meritless authority while still a child. The other boys he meets at this time have been equally beaten by this class system into something “loutish and slow, servile and furtive, spiteful and mean”. Meanwhile, the places they live either present a “clean and picturesque emptiness” if they’re in the country, or, in the case of towns like Chatham, they boast the “colours and even the smells of a well-packed dustbin”.
Given this early clash with the status quo, it’s hardly surprising that the narrator starts looking for answers. He finds them in young manhood when he takes up the torch of socialism. But this being Wells, there’s no mindless acceptance. He stirs up socialists too – most particularly the Fabian Society (of which Wells himself had been a member). He has his narrator attend a meeting where “three-quarters of the speakers seemed under some jocular obsession which took the form of pretending to be conceited”. His demolition job upset Beartrice Webb, one of the Fabians’ most influential members, who described it as a “bitter caricature” in her diary.
Webb had been an intellectual sparring partner for Wells for some time. She was resigned to him challenging the Fabians. But she also noted that Wells was “a useful missionary for whole crowds of persons whom we could never get at”. For many readers, the ideas in Tono-Bungay were new and shocking. Socialism must still have seemed fresh and unsettling for smart women in Bayswater, not to mention the narrator’s mother, who so sternly admonishes him:
‘You mustn’t set yourself up against those who are above you and better than you... Or envy them.’
It’s delightful to imagine how much Wells’s ideas may have stirred them all up - how little they would have wanted to see the dregs he shows. But before we start looking down on Wells’s victims at the turn of the 20th century, we should also be aware of how directly he still talks to us. There are ideas in the book that remain shocking. Wells later publicly and privately apologised for his antisemitic writings, but that doesn’t make them any more palatable. More positively, many of the lessons in the book still read sharp and true. So sharp that they sting. I flinched when I read the reflections of one Mr Ramboat, for instance: “There’s a lot of this Science about nowadays,” he says, “but I sometimes wonder a bit what good it is.” It seems people had “had enough of experts” in 1909, too. But at least Wells was there to stir things up and point out their folly. Perhaps a dose of Tono-Bungay from a modern writer would help us, too.
