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Updated: June 14, 2025
The house at Beckengham was something of an enterprise for them at that time, a reasonably large place by the standards of the early years of Tono-Bungay. It was a big, rather gaunt villa, with a conservatory and a shrubbery, a tennis-lawn, a quite considerable vegetable garden, and a small disused coach-house.
Yes, I'll come, I'll take my chance with you, I won't hesitate again." And I didn't. I stuck to that resolution for seven long years. So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the Government stamp. We made Tono-Bungay hum!
Province by province. Like sogers." We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with a special adaptation containing eleven per cent. of absolute alcohol; "Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand." We also had the Fog poster adapted to a kilted Briton in a misty Highland scene.
And then came the reconstruction of Tono-Bungay, and then "Household services" and the Boom! That sort of development is not to be told in detail in a novel. I have, indeed, told much of it elsewhere. It is to be found set out at length, painfully at length, in my uncle's examination and mine in the bankruptcy proceedings, and in my own various statements after his death.
But enough of this disaster of my marriage and of my early love affairs; I have told all that is needed for my picture to explain how I came to take up aeroplane experiments and engineering science; let me get back to my essential story, to Tono-Bungay and my uncle's promotions and to the vision of the world these things have given me.
Never for a moment do I remember myself faltering from my persuasion that the sale of Tono-Bungay was a thoroughly dishonest proceeding. The stuff was, I perceived, a mischievous trash, slightly stimulating, aromatic and attractive, likely to become a bad habit and train people in the habitual use of stronger tonics and insidiously dangerous to people with defective kidneys.
And I, sole scorched survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an air that is never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a table littered with working drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes about velocities and air and water pressures and trajectories of an altogether different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.
"'Member me telling you Tono-Bungay?.... Well.... I'd just that afternoon thought of it!" "I've fancied at times;" I admitted. "It's a great world, George, nowadays, with a fair chance for every one who lays hold of things. The career ouvert to the Talons eh? Tono-Bungay. Think of it! It's a great world and a growing world, and I'm glad we're in it and getting a pull.
After all, Tono-Bungay is still a marketable commodity and in the hands of purchasers, who bought it from among other vendors me. No! Cocks their tails. Modern touch! There you are!" He reverted to the direction of our lunch.
My ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere.... Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in every chemist's storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age and brightens the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory, its financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever.
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