H. G. Wells
Tono-Bungay
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664646675
Table of Contents
THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED
OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY
OF MY LAUNCH INTO THE WORLD AND THE LAST I SAW OF BLADESOVER
THE WIMBLEHURST APPRENTICESHIP
HOW I BECAME A LONDON STUDENT AND WENT ASTRAY
THE DAWN COMES, AND MY UNCLE APPEARS IN A NEW SILK HAT
THE HARDINGHAM HOTEL, AND HOW WE BECAME BIG PEOPLE
OUR PROGRESS FROM CAMDEN TOWN TO CREST HILL
HOW I STOLE THE HEAPS OF QUAP FROM MORDET ISLAND
BOOK THE FIRST
THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED
CHAPTER THE FIRST
OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY
I
Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than “character actors.” They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one’s stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacks—the unjustifiable gifts of footmen—in pantries, and been despised for my want of style