The protagonist of the novel is George Ponderevo, whose most intimate life the reader shares. His uncle Edward, on the other hand, remains a somewhat flat character whose chief function is to symbolise the "wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking" that became, in Wells's view, the most important social force in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. England is interpreted in the novel as a "social organism". The country estate of Bladesover, "up on the Kentish Downs," epitomises a "seventeenth-century system" which offers "the clue to all England. . . . There have been no revolutions, no deliberate restatements or abandonments of opinion in England since the days of the fine gentry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the days when Bladesover was built; there have been changes, dissolving forces, replacing forces, if you will; but then it was that the broad lines of the English system set firmly. . . . The fine gentry may have gone; they have indeed largely gone, I think; rich merchants may have replaced them, financial adventurers or what not. That does not matter; the shape is still Bladesover".. Bladesover was based on Uppark, on the South Downs, where Wells mother worked.