Modernity and Disintegration in 'Tono-Bungay' Laura Byrnes College

H. G. Well’s ‘Tono-Bungay’ is a novel which explores the moral and social disintegration of the individual and society due to societal and economic shifts like the introduction of capitalism. Wells explores the disintegration of social classes, the merging and depressing sameness of cities and the death of emotional connections such as love. It is a bleak and hopeless novel, with its focus on the effects of radioactive and emphasis on sterility suggesting a death to society and humanity, leading to one questioning just like George Ponderevo, ‘but is this Life?’

D. H. Lawrence believed that through this novel Wells put upon his readers a ‘weight of sadness,’ and this can easily be evidenced by the apocalyptic and cancerous imagery that litters the novel regarding the death of individual relations and societal disintegration. Perhaps the only disintegration within the novel that isn’t accredited with such gloomy imagery is the one of the upper classes. When George was a boy, ‘every human being had a “place”,’ within society, ‘they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them.’ The benefits and the world of those who lived within Bladesover were ‘to be a closed and complete social system,’ hostile to the probing of a...