Based on H. G. Wells's own life experience in the drapery trade, this comic novel presents our anti-hero, Alfred Polly, miserable, timid, and without direction, but with a gift for creating incomprehensible conversational "epithets" to express himself. No one quite understands what he has just said to them ... Was it a compliment? An insult? Was it profound or absurd?

The novel opens by telling us, "He hated Foxbourne, he hated Foxbourne High Street, he hated his shop and his wife and his neighbours—every blessed neighbour—and with indescribable bitterness he hated himself." The story unfolds from Mr. Polly's early education, his courtship and marriage, to his eventual discovery of purpose in life.