The History of Mr. Polly
Description:... The History of Mr. Polly is a 1910 comic novel by H. G. Wells.Mr Polly is an ordinary middle-aged man who is tired of his wife's nagging and his dreary job as the owner of a regional gentleman's outfitters. Faced with the threat of bankruptcy, he concludes that the only way to escape his frustrating existence is by burning his shop to the ground, and killing himself. Unexpected events, however, conspire at the last moment to lead the bewildered Mr Polly to a bright new future - after he saves a life, fakes his death, and escapes to a life of heroism, hope and ultimate happiness.The novel's principal conflict is Mr. Polly's struggle with life, told "in the full-blooded Dickens tradition".[7][b] 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 was 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".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"
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