"The History of Mr. Polly" is a novel by H.G. Wells.
This is quite an
extraordinary life of H.G. Well's hero in
focus. Alfred Polly's ambitions are weak, and yet, in his own way achieves them in the end, although by accident. Thirty-seven year old Alfred Polly has always lived in an impending world with a balance of real misfortunes and joyous imaginative world, often associated with the past. He has suffered from an appalling
education followed by several years of apprenticeship unsuitably to a low-class draper, he has suffered from an appalling education. Even the legacy from his father hasn't been of much help, in fact, the slant is on the negative: the shop is not profitable, and to top it, his marriage to his cousin, Miriam, is not of a happy one either, giving him severe bouts of indigestion for fifteen years.
Presented in a comically abortive attempt at death, Polly tries to commit suicide when he starts a fire but fails to cut his throat, anyway, surviving his ordeal. As a result of his actions during this 'great Fishbourne fire,' his bundling a neighbour's mother-in-law across the rooftops, proclaims Polly a hero.
As H.G. Wells endorses Polly's utopian dreams of escape, he hits the road and abandons his home. He experiences the wide open space, the landscape of rural England until he arrives in a place called Potwell Inn with a plump landlady. To him, his new surrounding is a haven from the pressures of his failed commercial prospects and marital life way back home.
Polly is finally able to settle at the Potwell Inn after proving his manhood in a fight that transpired with the criminal Uncle Jim, and Miriam being awarded a life insurance for her husband she thinks dead.