a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively. . . . it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only the world and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all but my impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a system of appetites and satisfactions, with much work to do – and no desire, it seemed, left in me. There were moments when I thought of suicide". George only partially resolves this moral crisis by, as he says, "idealis[ing] Science". English society The protagonist of the novel is George Ponderevo, whose most intimate life the reader shares. His uncle Edward, on the other hand, remains a somewhat flat character whose chief function is to symbolise the "wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking" that became, in Wells's view, the most important social force in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. England is interpreted in the novel as a "social organism". The country estate of Bladesover, "up on the Kentish Downs," epitomises a "seventeenth-century system" which offers "the clue to all England. . . . There have been no revolutions, no deliberate restatements or abandonments of opinion in England since the days of the fine gentry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the days when Bladesover was built; there have been changes, dissolving forces, replacing forces, if you will; but then it was that the broad lines of the English system set firmly. . . . The fine gentry may have gone; they have indeed largely gone, I think; rich merchants may have replaced them, financial adventurers or what not. That does not matter; the shape is still Bladesover". Bladesover was based on Uppark, on the South Downs, where Wells mother worked. This society has fallen prey to shabby forces of greed and acquisition that are embodied by Edward Ponderevo, who idealises Napoleon and who muses superficially about "[t]his Overman idee, Nietzsche—all that stuff." The trashy emptiness of Edward's ideal of life is expressed in his absurd attempt to build a vast mansion at Crest Hill. The character may have been based on the fraudster Whitaker Wright. As a Bildungsroman Tono-Bungay also explores the development of the narrator's emotional life. Three sexual relationships are analysed: his