 first edition cover | |
| Author | H. G. Wells |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Comedy novel |
| Publisher | Thomas Nelson and Sons |
Publication date | 1910 |
| Pages | 318 |
| Text | The History of Mr. Polly at Wikisource |
The History of Mr. Polly is a 1910 comic novel by H. G. Wells.
The protagonist of The History of Mr. Polly is an antihero inspired by H. G. Wells's early experiences in the drapery trade: Alfred Polly, born circa 1870, a timid and directionless young man living in Edwardian England, who despite his own bumbling achieves contented serenity with little help from those around him. Mr. Polly's most striking characteristic is his "innate sense of epithet", [1] which leads him to coin hilarious expressions like "the Shoveacious Cult" for "sunny young men of an abounding and elbowing energy" and "dejected angelosity" for the ornaments of Canterbury Cathedral. [2]
Alfred Polly lives in the imaginary town of Fishbourne in Kent [3] (not to be confused with Fishbourne, West Sussex or Fishbourne, Isle of Wight – the town in the story is thought to be based on Sandgate, Kent where Wells lived for several years). [4] The novel begins in medias res by presenting a miserable Mr. Polly: "He hated Foxbourne, [lower-alpha 1] he hated Foxbourne High Street, he hated his shop and his wife and his neighbours – every blessed neighbour – and with indescribable bitterness he hated himself". [5] Thereafter, The History of Mr. Polly is divided in three parts. Chapters 1–6 depict his life up to age 20, when he marries his cousin Miriam Larkins and sets up an outfitter's shop in Fishbourne. Chapters 7–8 show Mr. Polly's spectacular suicide attempt, which ironically makes him a local hero, wins him insurance money that saves him from bankruptcy, and yields the insight that "Fishbourne wasn't the world", which leads him to abandon his shop and his wife. [6] Chapters 9–10, at the Potwell Inn (apparently located in West Sussex), culminates in Mr. Polly's courageous victory over "Uncle Jim", a malicious relative of the innkeeper's granddaughter. An epilogue then depicts Mr. Polly at ease as assistant-innkeeper, after a brief visit to ascertain Miriam's prosperity.
The novel's principal conflict is Mr. Polly's struggle with life, told "in the full-blooded Dickens tradition". [7] [lower-alpha 2] This moral struggle is slow to develop, for Mr. Polly is a stunted, rather than a gifted or self-confident character. He is not without imagination and a flair for language, but his mind is "at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued". [9] His mother dies when he is seven, and his formal education ends at the age of fourteen, by which "Mr. Polly had lost much of his natural confidence, so far as figures and sciences and languages and the possibilities of learning things were concerned". [10] His unsympathetic father apprentices him to The Port Burdock Drapery Bazaar. Unsatisfied there, he leaves to look for work in London, and is employed for a time in Canterbury, whose cathedral pleases him greatly: "There was a blood affinity between Mr. Polly and the Gothic". [11]
Mr. Polly's struggles are chiefly moral: he has no confidence in his intellectual powers (though he is an avid reader), and his emotions are confused and timid. The reader is invited to see things from Mr. Polly's point of view, even when this leads him to commit arson and, perhaps, manslaughter. "This is a history and not a glorification of Mr. Polly, and I tell of things as they were with him." [12] H. G. Wells's moral point of view in the novel is complex and often ironic, as Mr. Polly's musings at the end of the novel suggest: "One seems to start in life expecting something. And it doesn't happen. And it doesn't matter. One starts with ideas that things are good and things are bad – and it hasn't much relation to what is good and what is bad. . . . There's something that doesn't mind us. It isn't what we try to get that we get, it isn't the good we think we do is good. What makes us happy isn't our trying, what makes others happy isn't our trying. There's a sort of character people like and stand up for and a sort they won't. You got to work at it and take the consequences". [13]
For the most part in The History of Mr. Polly the author's penchant for social reform is in abeyance; but Wells does cite twice the diagnosis of "a certain highbrowed, spectacled gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a gold pince-nez, and writing for the most part in the beautiful library of the Reform Club," who without knowing Mr. Polly diagnoses the situation of "those ill-adjusted units that abound in a society that has failed to develop a collective intelligence and a collective will for order, commensurate with its complexities." [14] A later passage of several hundred words from the same unidentified author critiques "that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people that we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the lower middle class." [15]
The History of Mr. Polly received mostly enthusiastic reviews. H. L. Mencken published a glowing review in the July 1910 number of The Smart Set . The novel has been called "a complete comic miracle." [16] Mr. Polly' has been called a "wonderful incarnation of what might have happened to Wells without education, a Wells driven to use the words bubbling in him and getting them all so delightfully muddled." [17] [lower-alpha 3] But Wells said his protagonist was based not on himself, but on his elder brother Frank. [16]
The History of Mr. Polly was included by Robert McCrum in his list of the 100 best novels in English in The Guardian . [18]
A film version of the same name was made in 1949 by Anthony Pellisier, with John Mills as Polly. It was adapted by the BBC as a six-part television serial shown between 28 August – 10 October 1959, with Emrys Jones as Polly, and again as a five-part adaptation starring Andrew Sachs, shown between 2 and 30 March 1980. The 1959 version no longer exists. [19] A feature-length version starring Lee Evans was shown on ITV in May 2007.
Herbert George Wells was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells' science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the "father of science fiction".
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.
Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since is a historical novel by Walter Scott (1771–1832). Scott was already famous as a poet, and chose to publish Waverley anonymously in 1814 as his first venture into prose fiction. It is often regarded as one of the first historical novels in the Western tradition.
Ann Veronica is a novel by H. G. Wells published in 1909. It describes the rebellion of Ann Veronica Stanley, "a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty", against her middle-class father's stern patriarchal rule. The novel dramatizes the contemporary problem of the New Woman. It is set in Edwardian era London and environs, except for an Alpine excursion. Ann Veronica offers vignettes of the women's suffrage movement in Great Britain and features a chapter inspired by the 1908 attempt of suffragettes to storm Parliament.
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.
Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul is a novel by H. G. Wells, first published in 1905. It was reportedly Wells's own favourite among his works, and it has been adapted for stage, cinema and television productions, including the musical Half a Sixpence.
Uneasy Money is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United States on 17 March 1916 by D. Appleton & Company, New York, and in the United Kingdom on 4 October 1917 by Methuen & Co., London. The story had earlier been serialised in the U.S in the Saturday Evening Post from December 1915, and in the UK in the Strand Magazine starting December 1916.
Thank You, Jeeves is a Jeeves comic novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 16 March 1934 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on 23 April 1934 by Little, Brown and Company, New York.
If I Were You is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United States on 3 September 1931 by Doubleday, Doran, New York, and in the United Kingdom on 25 September 1931 by Herbert Jenkins, London.
The Wheels of Chance is an early comic novel by H. G. Wells about an August 1895 cycling holiday, somewhat in the style of Three Men in a Boat. In 1922 it was adapted into a silent film The Wheels of Chance directed by Harold M. Shaw.
A Modern Utopia is a 1905 novel by H. G. Wells.
The History of Mr. Polly is a 1949 British film based on the 1910 comic novel The History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells. It was directed by Anthony Pelissier and stars John Mills, Betty Ann Davies, Megs Jenkins, Moore Marriott and Finlay Currie. It was the first adaptation of one of Wells's works to be produced after his death in 1946.
Thomas Ridley Sharpe was an English satirical novelist, best known for his Wilt series, as well as Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape, all three of which were adapted for television.
Mr. Britling Sees It Through is H.G. Wells's "masterpiece of the wartime experience in south eastern England." The novel was published in September 1916.
The Soul of a Bishop is a 1917 novel by H. G. Wells.
Meanwhile is a 1927 novel by H. G. Wells set in an Italian villa early in 1926.
The New Machiavelli is a 1911 novel by H. G. Wells that was serialised in the English Review in 1910. Because its plot notoriously derived from Wells's affair with Amber Reeves and satirised Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was "the literary scandal of its day."
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman is a 1914 novel by H. G. Wells.
God the Invisible King is a theological tract published by H. G. Wells in 1917.
War and the Future (1917) is a work of war propaganda by H. G. Wells that was published in North America under the title Italy, France, and Britain at War. Wells would have preferred the title The War of Ideas, but his publisher over-ruled him. Except for the opening piece, its chapters were published as articles in the press. Though proclaiming early in the volume that "I avow myself an extreme Pacifist," Wells staunchly supported Britain's war against Germany "in the hope that so we and the world may be freed from the German will-to-power and all its humiliating and disgusting consequences henceforth for ever."
