The title--it is typical of Mr. Wells--suggests at once the farcical element in the whole thing. Tono-Bungay--a quack medicine, "slightly injurious rubbish" sold at "one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the Government stamp." We can only approach Tono-Bungay, which is modern and representative of our whole industrial system, by way of something prior to it--the old social order which exists only as a tradition, which is maintained as a vast, stupid, demoralising pretence, undermined by Tono-Bungayism. The old order, in Mr. Wells' language, is called the Bladesover System, Bladesover being the house where "I," George Ponderevo, the housekeeper's son--one of the many incarnations of the author himself--was born, brought up, and acquired his first impressions of life. The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers, and the servants in their stations and degrees seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed mere collections of shops, marketing-places for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the order of the whole world. "All this fine appearance was already sapped." George himself, as a boy, had already begun to "question the final rightness of the gentlefolks," declaring his rebellion by "resolving to marry a viscount's daughter" and blacking the eye of her half-brother. He is transported to the house of Nicodemus Frapp, baker, of Chatham, where he again rebels, this time against the threat of being burned for ever in Hell. Thence he is taken to the house of his uncle Ponderevo, chemist, of Wimblehurst, a small town dominated, like Bladesover, by the landed gentry tradition. And he finds in this uncle, whose name is soon to become a household word throughout the country, a veritable embodiment of the new spirit which is invading the Bladesover system and altering England. Mr. Ponderevo is restless and discontented. He does not like Wimblehurst. "One rubs along. But there's no development--no growth. They just come along here and buy pills when they want 'em--and a horse-ball or such. They've got to be ill before there's a prescription. That sort they are. You can't get 'em to launch out, you can't get 'em to take up anything new."