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Updated: June 14, 2025
I was going to and fro about Tono-Bungay the business I had taken up to secure Marion and which held me now in spite of our intimate separation and snatching odd week-ends and nights for Orpington, and all the while I struggled with these obstinate interrogations. I used to fall into musing in the trains, I became even a little inaccurate and forgetful about business things.
She turned to fetch it and found Fanny still there, wide awake with her feet on the fender, and reading "Tono-Bungay." "Oh, Mrs. Waddington, I thought you'd gone to bed." "So did I, dear. But I changed my mind when I found myself alone with Wells. He's too heavenly for words." Barbara saw it in a flash, then. She knew what she, the companion and secretary, was there for.
You felt it when he wasn't there; even when Fanny had settled down in the drawing-room with "Tono-Bungay" you felt her fear that at any minute the door would open and Horatio would come in. But Barbara wasn't depressed. She enjoyed the perpetual spectacle he made.
Then he came home one day saying Tono-Bungay till I thought he was clean off his onion, and singing what was it?" "'I'm afloat, I'm afloat," I guessed. "The very thing. You've heard him. And saying our fortunes were made.
Several like Tono-Bungay were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the giving of nothing coated in advertisements for money. And the things the Hardingham gave out, I repeat, were nothing to the things that came in. I think of the long procession of people who sat down before us and propounded this and that.
Perhaps you had a trifle in some world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him only too well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the empty heavens like a comet rather, like a stupendous rocket! and overawed investors spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon of domestic conveniences!
And constantly, without attracting attention, I was trying to get newspapers from home. My uncle is central to all these impressions. I have tried to make you picture him, time after time, as the young man of the Wimblehurst chemist's shop, as the shabby assistant in Tottenham Court Road, as the adventurer of the early days of Tono-Bungay, as the confident, preposterous plutocrat.
After all Tono-Bungay it's not like a turf commission agent or anything like that!... There have of course been some very gentlemanly commission agents. It isn't like a fool of a scientific man who can't make money!" My uncle grunted; we'd differed on that issue before. A malignant humour took possession of me. "What would they call you?" I speculated. "The vicar would like Duffield.
And after all, you wouldn't find the early figures so much wrong as STRAINED. In the matter of Moggs and Do Ut, as in the first Tono-Bungay promotion and in its reconstruction, we left the court by city standards without a stain on our characters.
However that may be, there can be no doubt that now the prizes of fortune often go to those who cannot be trusted to make good use of them or even to enjoy them, that Mr Wells's great satire on our financial upstarts "Tono-Bungay" has plenty of truth in it, and that our present system, by its shocking waste of millions of good brains that never get a chance of development, is an economic blunder as well as an injustice that calls for remedy.
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