Initial reviews were mixed. The novel was criticised by Hubert Bland and Robertson Nicoll, but the "Daily Telegraph" praised it as "a masterpiece". Gilbert Murray praised the book in three separate letters to the author, comparing Wells to Leo Tolstoy. Biographer Vincent Brome has written that ""Tono-Bungay" came fresh and vivid to men and women of Wells's generation. These great questionings, the challenge to one eternal verity after another, shook their world and their way of life, and it was all tremendously exciting".