I read this not long after reading Orwell's Coming Up For Air. This one is a much better novel, but they're interesting as two books about very similar characters in very similar circumstances; in the wrong class in Britain at the wrong time, badly educated, badly married, dreams lost, no real prospects or hopes or pleasure left in life when the books begin. Wells is much more subtle about the blind ignorant ways in which people can make themselves miserable in life, and get what they put out.

Also, in this one, the author has sympathy for his protagonist, warts and all, and he shows the internal forces shaping his life just as strongly as the external. Nobody in it is a simple caricature. And it is funny. I don't think I ever laughed out loud, but I was smiling a lot, and wincing too. The story is slower at first, and then starts leaping along in all kinds of startling and funny ways. The fire chapter is well worth the price of admission all by itself.