WELLS, H.G.

London Ernest Benn Limited. 1928. 288p.Sider. Brown hardback. No dust jacket. Nice copy. 1. edition. The protagonist of the novel, Arnold Blettsworthy, is the scion of a genteel family prominent ""in the south and west of England.""[1] Blettsworthy's father, however, was an adventurer who married a woman from Madeira. Both his mother and his father die early, and the young Blettsworthy is raised in Cheltenham by an aunt and an uncle who is a liberal Anglican priest. A complacent Edwardian worldview that an Oxford education did nothing to shake is undermined when Blettsworthy is betrayed in business and in love by his best friend, Graves, and his mistress, Olive Slaughter. A family solicitor and counselor named Ferndyke advises him to travel in order to recover from disillusionment so severe that it has threatened his sanity.