I have figured it in my last section by the symbol of my destroyer, stark and swift, irrelevant to most human interests. Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we draw by pain and effort out of the heart of life, that we disentangle and make clear. Other men serve it, I know, in art, in literature, in social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a hundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and nations, epochs and civilizations pass, each making its contribution. I do not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme. It is a something, a quality, an element, one may find now in colours, now in forms, now in sounds, now in thoughts. It emerges from life with each year one lives and feels, and generation by generation and age by age, but the how and why of it are all beyond the compass of my mind….

  Yet the full sense of it was with me all that night as I drove, lonely above the rush and murmur of my engines, out upon the weltering circle of the sea….

  Far out to the north-east there came the flicker of a squadron of warships waving white swords of light about the sky. I kept them hull-down, and presently they were mere summer lightning over the watery edge of the globe…. I fell into thought that was nearly formless, into doubts and dreams that have no words, and it seemed good to me to drive ahead and on and on through the windy starlight, over the long black waves.

  §4

  It was morning and day before I returned with the four sick and starving journalists who had got permission to come with me, up the shining river, and past the old grey Tower.16…

  I recall the back views of those journalists very distinctly, going with a certain damp weariness of movement along a side street away from the river. They were good men and bore me no malice, and they served me up to the public in turgid degenerate Kiplingese, 17 as a modest button on the complacent stomach of the empire. Though as a matter of fact, X2isn’t intended for the empire, or indeed for the hands of any European power.18 We offered it to our own people first, but they would have nothing to do with me, and I have long since ceased to trouble much about such questions. I have come to see myself from the outside, my country from the outside without illusions. We make and pass.

  We are all things that make and pass, striving upon a hidden mission, out to the open sea.

  END OF BOOK IV

  Notes

  Because this edition is intended for readers everywhere in the world, the notes explain many allusions for which British readers need no explanation.

  BOOK I

  THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED

  CHAPTER 1

  Of Bladesover House, and my Mother, and the Constitution of Society

  1. a succession of samples: A series of small portions of different kinds of experience.

  2. Chatham: Then a noisy, mostly working-and lower-middle-class town adjacent to Rochester in Kent.

  3. gasworks: Factory where coal gas (for lighting and heating) was made.

  4. en famille: A French phrase meaning ‘among one’s family‘.

  5. navvies: Labourers who build railways, canals, drains, etc.

  6. 1834 beer-houses: These pubs proliferated when the Beerhouse Act of 1830 (modified by an act of 1834) permitted the sale of beer without the expensive victualler’s licence formerly required.

  7. domestic conveniences: The term has both its general meaning and the specific meaning of lavatories in the home.

  8. Wimblehurst: Based on the towns of Midhurst and Petworth in Sussex, in the South Downs region, and described more fully in Book I, Chapter 3, note 2; the nearby town of Horsham has a Wimblehurst Road.

  9. Lord Roberts β: Explained in III.3.§4; Lord Roberts was Frederick Sleigh Roberts (1832–1914), commander-in-chief of the British Army in 1900–5, when George began his aeronautic experiments.

  10. Bladesover… temple of Vesta at Tibur: Bladesover House is in Kent (as Wells makes clear in I.2.§1), and the fictional Ash-borough seems to be based on the market town of Ashford in Kent. The building itself, however, seems to be based partly on Uppark, a grand seventeenth-century house in Sussex where Wells’s mother had been a servant; the temple of Vesta at Tibur (Tivoli), built around 100 BC, is a grand cylindrical structure.

  11. Ropedean: Probably based on South Harting, just north of Uppark.

  12. his use of the word Eucharist for the Lord’s Supper: Among the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic tendencies in the Anglican Church was the use of the word ‘Eucharist’ for the bread and wine of the communion service; the word was taken by more traditionally Protestant Anglicans to imply the Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine were transformed into Christ’s flesh and blood, and not merely symbols of them.

  13. the fine Olympians: The Olympians were the Greek gods, who lived on Mount Olympus.

  14. Dissolving Views: A magic-lantern show in which one image begins to display itself while the previous one fades away.

  15. ideas of democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous fraternity: An allusion to the French Revolutionary slogan, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’.

  16. pseudomorphous: In mineralogy a pseudomorph is a crystal that has taken the form of a different material instead of its own usual form, in some instances through taking the place of the matter in an existing crystal; the Jewish gentry, that is, has taken on the manner of the British gentry rather than replacing it with something entirely different.

  17. sovereign: A gold coin worth one pound (worth perhaps £100 or $150 in today’s currency, but a much smaller tip than the butler expects from a prince).

  18. an old peerage… Old Moore’s Almanack: A peerage is a directory of English nobility; Crockford’s Clerical Directory is an annual listing of Anglican clergy; Whitaker’s Almanac is an annual volume of useful information, including calendars and astronomical information; Old Moore’s Almanac was a more traditional type of almanac which, together with genuinely useful information, purported to forecast the weather for the entire year.

  19. bagatelle board: The board used to play a kind of miniature billiards.

  20. Mr Cunninghame Graham: R. B. Cunninghame Graham (1852 – 1936), Scottish patriot, politician, travel and short-story writer; helped found the Scottish Parliamentary Labour Party; from a landed family, so at least plausible as a relation to a prince or duke.

  21. Plutarch… prevented George Washington being a King: Alludes to George Washington’s early education when, having been told to choose a model for himself from the subjects of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, he chose Cincinnatus who, after being called back to military service to save Rome from disaster, was asked to become emperor but instead returned to his farm – an episode that Washington remembered after the American Revolution when a group of army officers asked him to become king of the United States.

  22. ‘They lef’ their country for their country’s good’: Paraphrasing verses written in 1796 by George Barrington (1755–1804) for the opening of the playhouse in Sydney by a theatrical company made up of convicts who had been transported to Australia from Britain: ‘We left our country for our country’s good.’

  23. polypus: Tumour.

  24. Maria Monk: The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836), a sensational work of anti-Catholic propaganda reporting supposed sexual irregularities among Roman Catholic priests and nuns, and the model for many similar works.

  25. stanzas of Raphael: Paintings by Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1423–1520), in a series of rooms (stanze) in the Vatican.

  26. Terrae Incognitae: Unknown countries; maps indicated an unexplored area with the Latin label ‘terra incognita‘.

  27. Poland, Sarmatia: Poland is a ‘land now lost’ because it had been absorbed into Russia; Sarmartia was an ancient district corresponding to southern Russia and south-eastern Europe.

  28. So I read and understood… Gibbon – in twelve volumes: Common Sense and The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine (1737-1809), British-American political thinker and revolutionary, argued against monarchy and for the natural rights of man and political freedom. Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), is the famous book of imaginary voyages in which Gulliver encounters the articulate, rational race of horses, the Houyhnhnms, and visits the lands of Lilliput, Brobdingnag and Laputa. Candide, or Optimism, by Voltaire (1694–1778), is a philosophical novel about a young man who is undeterred from his optimism by large and small disasters. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, by Samuel Johnson (1709–84), is another philosophical satire about a young man seeking happiness. The twelve volumes of Gibbon are The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (1737–94).

  29. Plato’s Republic: The Republic is one of the philosophical dia-logues in which Plato (c.427–347 BC) imagines the form of government for an ideal society.

  30. Vathek: In the gothic novel Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1786), by William Beckford (1759–1844), the Caliph orders everyone to follow his example in kicking an independent-minded Indian.

  31. Frederick, Prince of Wales: Bladesover’s paintings are old ones; Frederick (father of George III) never became king because he died in 1751 while his father George II was still living. Wells made Bladesover slightly more outdated than the real house on which it is based; above a mantel in the great saloon at Uppark, exactly where Wells situates the portrait of Frederick at Bladesover, was (and still is) a portrait of George III.

  32. Langhorne’s ‘Plutarch’: George identifies the translation by John Langhorne, which first appeared in 1770, to emphasize the outdatedness of the Bladesover library.

  33. College of Preceptors: Teachers’ college in London.

  34. Boys of England… Stevenson: One among many series of ‘shil-ling shockers’ or ‘penny dreadfuls‘, magazines containing sensationalistic fiction. H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) wrote exotic adventure novels such as She and King Solomon’s Mines. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) wrote many kinds of essays and fiction, including such adventure stories as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  35. the Kentish weald: The part in Kent of the wooded country that also covers parts of the counties of Sussex and Surrey.

  36. Retreat of the Ten Thousand: A heroic episode in the Spartan expedition against Persia, famously described by Xenophon (c.435 – 354 BC) in his historical memoir, Anabasis.

  37. monumental artist: A sculptor who makes monuments for gravestones.

  38. Bob Ewart: Later (II.1.§3) Ewart calls himself Sydney Ewart (Wells apparently having forgotten that he had named him Bob).

  39. The Honourable Beatrice Normandy: Her title indicates that she is a daughter of either a viscount or a baron.

  40. a shameful difficulty: George’s social class would have barred him from an officer’s rank.

  41. Snifty: The Oxford English Dictionary (citing this passage) gives the definition ‘haughty, disdainful’; but ‘overbearing, domineering’ is perhaps closer.

  42. the eagle in a bracken stem: The fronds of a bracken fern resemble an eagle’s wings (the plant’s Latin name means ‘eagle fern‘).

  43. after the fashion of Coriolanus: In the self-pitying style of the title character in Coriolanus (1607–8), a Roman hero who had been condemned to exile (in the tragedy by William Shakespeare (1564–1616)).

  CHAPTER 2

  Of My Launch into the World and the Last I Saw of Bladesover

  1. imaginary draughts of blood: Apparently both a reference to the sacrament of Communion (see notes 3 and 6 below) and also an allusion to a fantasized revenge in which they imagine drinking the blood of their enemies.

  2. spavined: Lame, halting (in this context, unable to keep time).

  3. There is a fountain… Emmanuel’s Veins: Opening of a hymn with words by William Cowper (1731–1800), found in almost any Anglican hymnal, but first published in A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, compiled by Richard Conyers; generally sung to the tune ‘Martyrdom’ by Robert Archibald Smith, which fits Wells’s description.

  4. the sun-dry Levant… water in a thirsty land: The Levant was the region of the eastern Mediterranean. The rest of the sentence comprises familiar biblical allusions: ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’ (Jeremiah 8:22); manna is the miraculous food provided for the Israelites in the desert on their exodus from Egypt (Exodus 16:15); ‘And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief’ (Jonah 4:6); ‘Oh God… my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is’ (Psalms 63:1).

  5. Russia: That is, the autocratic system of government under the czars.

  6. my relations with the Blood: The state of George’s soul, its worthiness to drink the blood of the Eucharist that (depending on the beliefs of the Frapps’ Nonconformist chapel) either symbolizes or becomes the blood of Christ.

  7. Sloper: Ally Sloper, a dishonest comic character in popular novels and magazines.

  8. county of Kent: Corrected by Wells in the Atlantic edition from ‘country of Kent‘.

  9. Itchinstow Hall: Apparently not a real place.

  10. rubricated: In red letters.

  11. Eleven thousand virgins: The exclamation alludes to the medieval legend of St Ursula and her eleven thousand companions, all martyrs.

  12. O-ri-ental Gums: Oriental gums were among the exotic ingredients claimed to be in some patent medicines.

  13. horseball: A very large medicinal pill; originally, a pill made for horses.

  14. Charity Commissioners: The body set up by Parliament to supervise charitable trusts such as those that provided the endowment for schools.

  15. the Colossus of Rhodes: A gigantic bronze statue of the Greek sun god, Helios (c.280 BC), one of the proverbial seven wonders of the world.

  16. drop-scene: The curtain that falls between the acts of a play.

  17. saloon: A room for receiving guests; salon.

  18. metrostyle pianola: A player-piano (automated piano, invented around 1900); a metrostyle was a device that regulated its tempo.

  19. National Review and the Empire Review and the Nineteenth Century and After: George revisited Bladesover during the seven or eight years before the novel was written; these three magazines were written for an audience interested in politics and the arts. The Empire Review first appeared in 1900.

  20. Keltic renascence: The fashionable artistic-nationalist movement (also called the Celtic Renaissance or Irish Renaissance) that tried to revive ancient Irish art, literature and folklore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  21. the dear old Times: The Times of London, having long retained an almost eighteenth-century longwindedness and dignity, had been transformed into a modern, cheaper newspaper when it was acquired by Lord Northcliffe in 1908.

  22. saprophytically: In the manner of a plant that lives on dead organic matter.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Wimblehurst Apprenticeship

  1. materia medica: George is studying the medicinal substances sold in a chemist’s shop (and learning their Latin names).

  2. Wimblehurst… Eastry House… a long avenue of yews: Local tradition identifies Wimblehurst with Midhurst, where Wells was apprenticed to a chemist. The layout and features of the fictional town are based partly on Midhurst, partly on Petworth, six miles to the east. Petworth was noted for its stone buildings, cobbled streets, the ‘pleasant park that crowds up one side of the town‘, and the ‘odd turnings and abrupt corners’ remarked upon in many nineteenth-century guidebooks. The position of Eastry House ‘so close that it dominates the whole’ exactly matches that of Petworth House; the Petworth railway station, like Wimblehurst’s, was a mile and three-quarters from the town. The church at the edge of the town, adjacent to the marketplace with the old lock-up and stocks, is based on Midhurst, and the yew avenue is perhaps based on one near the ancient, ruined Cowdray House a quarter of a mile from Midhurst. The ‘very white and large and fine’ facade of Eastry House is that of Petworth House, rebuilt in the late seventeenth century; the house was occupied by the politically powerful Percy family from the twelfth to the mid-twentieth century.

  3. so long as its franchise endured: Until the owners of the house lost their right to choose a Member of Parliament under one of the nineteenth-century reform bills.

  4. And shove it: That is, ‘push’ an invention with advertising or publicity.

  5. Corners: That is, cornering the market for something by buying up the majority of shares in it.

  6. Dill-water: Made from dill seeds; relieves gastric distress by inducing flatulence.

  7. some cricket in the summer… blackmail on the big people and the sitting member: The clubs solicited financial support from rich people in the district and from the local Member of Parliament; this was ‘blackmail’ in the sense that they knew they would be denounced for their selfishness if they did not comply.

  8. the Rural Exodus: The mushrooming expansion of British cities was widely bemoaned by conservative writers and politicians.

  9. Goudhurst: The location suggests Bethany College, a boarding school near Goudhurst, founded in 1866, but some details may be based on Midhurst Grammar School, where Wells had been a pupil-teacher.

  10. nap: A card game, typically played for small amounts of money.

  11. National School: One founded by the National Society for the Education of the Poor; Wells discussed in his Experiment in Autobiography the rivalry between such schools and the state Board Schools established later.

  12. at forty: In a later chapter (II.4.§2) George says he is forty-five.