Tono-Bungay is a realist semiautobiographical novel written by H. G. Wells and first published in book form in 1909. It has been called "arguably his most artistic book". It had been serialised before book publication, both in the United States, in The Popular Magazine, beginning in the issue of September 1908, and in Britain, in The English Review, beginning in the magazine's first issue in December 1908. Plot Tono-Bungay is narrated by George Ponderevo, who is persuaded to help develop the business of selling Tono-Bungay, a patent medicine created by his uncle Edward. George devotes seven years to organising the production and manufacture of the product, even though he believes it is "a damned swindle". He then quits day-to-day involvement with the enterprise in favour of aeronautics, but he remains associated with his uncle, who becomes a financier of the first order and is on the verge of achieving social as well as economic dominance when his business empire collapses. George tries to rescue his uncle's failing finances by stealing quantities of a radioactive compound called "quap" from an island off the coast of West Africa, but the expedition is unsuccessful. George then engineers his uncle's escape from England in an experimental aircraft he has built, but the ruined entrepreneur turned financier catches pneumonia on the flight and dies in a village near Bordeaux, despite George's efforts to save him. The novel ends with George finding a new occupation: designing destroyers for the highest bidder. Themes Scepticism about religion George's resolve to struggle against "the whole scheme of revealed religion" is strengthened by his experience with his evangelical cousin at Chatham, Nicodemus Frapp, a baker to whom he is briefly "a fully indentured apprentice". Socialism George is influenced by Bob Ewart, a childhood friend and the son of an artist who becomes an artist himself, struggling against a system in which "[n]obody wants to do and be the things people are". It is Ewart who first interests George in socialism, but Ewart's socialism is detached, cynical and merely "discursive". (Here Wells was probably satirising the Fabian Society, which Wells had tried and failed to reorient between 1903 and 1906. Ewart is important to George in that he "kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time [of working for the success of Tono-Bungay]." Ennui George struggles with ennui after breaking with Marion: "I suffered, I suppose, from