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H. G. Wells's 1908 novel Tono-Bungay1is a remarkable concoction, binding together characters and setting out of Dickens, sparkling imitations of fin-de-siécle commodity culture and new media, bitter social satire inflected by Wells's socialism, fascination with invention and flight, and murderous imperial adventure. Readers, though often seduced by the wit and precision of Wells's depiction of patent medicines and their advertisements, have not known whether to read the narrative as anti-Bildungsroman, Condition of England novel, science fiction, or imperial romance. It is no wonder that many critics have labeled this novel a failure.
The novel, which Wells had labored over for two years, presents itself as the memoir of George Ponderevo, beginning with his childhood and taking on energy as he chronicles the rise and fall of his uncle's patent medicine firm and his fortune. The novel provides a dizzying tour of the interconnected markets in domestic consumables and the mental "consumables" of mass media, from advertisements to periodicals. It moves from London to a remote tropical island, in a reminder that not all the significant exchanges in late-nineteenth-century consumer culture are confined to the gendered space of the urban department store. That the novel's capitalism is imperial is revealed in the unexpected departure of the protagonist from the metropolis to a little-known African island to collect a mysterious radioactive material known as "quap." This episode, long condemned by critics as inartistic, has recently been embraced for its reminder of the interconnected economics and dynamics of global capitalism, although the shift from London to Africa and from medicine to raw resource is still jarring.
However, the worlds of popular medicine and imperial adventure travel are not as disparate as they seem, as we can see in a closer examination of the antecedents and reach of late-Victorian patent and proprietary medicine brands. Wells writes, in his "Preface to Volume XII of the Atlantic Edition" of the novel, that his plan "was to give a view of the contemporary social and political system in Great Britain, an old and degenerating system, tried and strained by new inventions and new ideas and invaded by a growing multitude of mere adventurers."2Although in this context Wells likely uses the term "adventurers" to refer to bounders like his...