The History of Mr. Polly

Alfred Polly has drifted into nearly every important decision of his life. A poor education, an unpromising career, an ill-matched marriage, and a failing shop have left him trapped in a life that feels both ridiculous and unbearable. His greatest talent may be for inventing strange phrases to describe how miserable he is.Wells turns that frustration into social comedy. Mr. Polly is neither a heroic rebel nor a simple victim. He is lazy, imaginative, self-pitying, comic, and capable of flashes of courage. His dissatisfaction grows from ordinary pressures: money, work, marriage, respectability, physical discomfort, and the expectation that a man should somehow make a success of circumstances he never consciously chose.When his life reaches a crisis, Polly attempts a desperate escape. The consequences carry him away from the small-town world of shopkeeping and into a very different kind of existence, where physical danger and practical action demand qualities he had never needed behind a counter.The novel’s humor comes from Wells’s affection for Polly’s peculiar language and his sharp eye for lower-middle-class English life. Shops, funerals, courtship, domestic arguments, financial anxiety, and social aspiration all become material for comedy without losing their seriousness.Published in 1910, The History of Mr. Polly belongs with Wells’s social novels such as Kipps and Tono-Bungay. Warm, funny, and unexpectedly adventurous, it examines failure, class, marriage, work, and reinvention while asking whether a life that has gone badly wrong must simply continue-and whether courage can emerge in someone who has spent years believing himself a failure.