ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on H.G. Wells's novel Tono-Bungay as it chronicles the changes taking place in the English class system in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the new one. Tono-Bungay, in both content and form, contradicts the idea that Edwardian "democracy" has brought with it a collapse of the class system. Wells was one of those lower-middle-class writers who benefited from the more democratic education system, and also from the expansion of opportunities for lower-middle-class writers in the publishing world. Wells's relationship with Henry James formed part of the background context for Wells's writing of Tono-Bungay because the book has been seen as Wells's attempt to formulate his own version of the novel, a version that differed from that of James. Tono-Bungay is a novel about the changes that are taking place in England at the turn of the nineteenth century, especially those that affect issues of class.
