In the Library
The History of Mr. Polly
H.G. Wells, 1910
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 69k words
£1.99
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
The Diary of a Nobody
George Grossmith, Weedon Grossmith
Pooter is another clerkly Englishman fighting suburban life with small dignities and mangled grandeur, though the Grossmiths never let him burn down the shop and walk away.
£1.99
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Emma also cannot bear the shop and the provincial marriage, and Flaubert grants her none of the mercy Wells hands his shopkeeper.
£1.99
About the book
He is sitting on a stile between two threadbare fields with indigestion, saying the word hole out loud and then improving on it. Mr Polly was educated by being left alone with books he only half understood, and the result is a private language he cannot stop making: sesquippledan verboojuice, zealacious commerciality, the High Froth. This is the funniest thing Wells ever wrote and very nearly the saddest, because a man who talks like that has been put behind a draper's counter in Fishbourne for fifteen years and married to a woman he did not quite mean to propose to. What he eventually decides to do about it involves paraffin, and it goes wrong, and the going wrong is the making of him. Wells believed a person could simply walk out of the life they had assembled, and he never made the case better than here, where the least heroic man in England does it and finds a riverside inn.