The War of the Worlds

In brief

Astronomers see flashes on Mars, and some months later a cylinder lands in a sandpit on Horsell Common, near Woking. A crowd gathers, then a deputation with a white flag, and the thing in the pit burns them to death. Within days three-legged machines nearly a hundred feet high are walking across Surrey with a ray that burns whatever it meets and a black smoke that kills what it touches. The army fails. London empties in one of the great set pieces of English fiction. The narrator, a philosophical writer cut off from his wife, spends two weeks trapped with a deranged curate in a house half buried by another cylinder, watching the Martians feed on people through a hole in the wall. When he crawls out and walks into a dead London to give himself up, he finds them already dying, killed by the bacteria of the planet they came to take.

The novel is usually remembered for the tripods. It deserves to be remembered for its first page, which tells the most powerful nation of 1898 that it is about to be treated as it has treated others.

The argument

The War of the Worlds sets out its case in one of the most imitated openings in fiction, in which men go “about their little affairs” while “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes” (Book 1, ch. 1). A few paragraphs later comes the sentence the rest of the book depends on. “And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.” The Tasmanians, he says, “were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants”, and he asks: “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” The phrase “inferior races” is the narrator’s and his age’s. So is the claim of total extinction, which the descendants of Aboriginal Tasmanians have since refuted. But the charge stands, and it was aimed at the people buying the book. Wells told the story in later years as having begun with his brother Frank, in talk about the Tasmanians: what if beings from another planet did that to us?

What follows is a controlled humiliation. Climbing out of the ruined house, the narrator feels “a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel” (Book 2, ch. 6). The artilleryman supplies the comparison in plainer words: “It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants” (Book 2, ch. 7). Then the narrator adds the horrible correction, “We’re eatable ants.”

The ending is often called a cheat, and it is not. Nothing men do defeats the Martians; they are “slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth” (Book 2, ch. 8). The narrator reads this as Darwin would: resistance to germs is what ages of dying have purchased, and “by the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth”. Human beings hold the planet as a species that has already paid, not as its masters. The moral he draws is pity. Creeping out of a house “like a rat leaving its hiding place”, he writes: “this war has taught us pity—pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion” (Book 2, ch. 7).

The shape of the book

The War of the Worlds has two books, and they move in opposite directions. Book One, “The Coming of the Martians”, widens. It begins with one man at a telescope and one hole in a common, and by the end it has six million people on the roads. To manage this Wells brings in a second witness, the narrator’s younger brother, a medical student in London, whose chapters give the panic at street level (Book 1, ch. 14). They end at sea with the torpedo ram Thunder Child charging three tripods off the Essex coast (Book 1, ch. 17), which is the only straightforward heroism in the novel.

Book Two, “The Earth under the Martians”, shrinks to a slit in a wall. The narrator and the curate are buried in a house near Sheen when the fifth cylinder falls on it (Book 2, ch. 1), and for days the action consists of watching and of whispered quarrels over food. It is the best part of the book, because it is where the invasion becomes a matter of fact, and where a decent man fells another with the butt of a meat chopper to keep him quiet (Book 2, ch. 4). Then the slow walk through an empty country to the discovery on Primrose Hill. The Epilogue (Book 2, ch. 10) refuses to close. There may be Martians on Venus, Mars comes round again, and “the great province of houses” looks to him like a city of ghosts.

The voice

Wells wrote the novel in the manner of a reporter after the event. He cites observers by name, some real, like Perrotin of Nice (Book 1, ch. 1) and Denning on meteors (Book 1, ch. 2), and mentions what the morning papers got wrong. He gives times of day and the names of railway stations, and he regrets that he is unqualified: “My particular province is speculative philosophy” (Book 2, ch. 10). Sidney Brooks, reviewing in Harper’s Weekly, admired the way Wells turned his worst fancies into “the language of the simplest, least startling denomination”. That is the method.

It is also a funny book, in a dry way that adaptations lose. On the morning after the first deaths a neighbour, offering strawberries over the fence, remarks, “It’s a pity they make themselves so unapproachable” (Book 1, ch. 9). Back home after everything, the narrator finds the paper he abandoned on the day the cylinder opened, on “the probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilising process”, stopping in mid-sentence: “In about two hundred years,” he had written, “we may expect——” (Book 2, ch. 9). It is the book’s best joke against Victorian progress.

A real map of Surrey

Wells lived in Woking from May 1895, in a rented house on Maybury Road, for just under eighteen months. By his own account in his autobiography he “wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians”, and the geography of Book One is a cyclist’s: Horsell Common, Maybury Hill, the Chobham road, Byfleet, Weybridge, the meeting of the Wey and the Thames at Shepperton (Book 1, ch. 12). The reader can follow the destruction on a map. A 23-foot tripod by Michael Condron has stood in the centre of Woking since 1998.

The choice of place was the point. Wells takes the safest scenery in the Empire, with its villas and season tickets, and sets the Heat-Ray on it, one named road at a time. Near the end the narrator first hears the dying Martian’s cry, “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,” in South Kensington (Book 2, ch. 8), where Wells himself had been a poor science student.

Mars and the Martians

The science was the news of the day. Schiaparelli had described canali on Mars in 1877; Percival Lowell’s Mars (1895) argued that a dying civilisation had dug them to irrigate an arid planet. The light on Mars at the opposition of 1894 that opens the book had been reported by real astronomers. Wells worked out the rest in an article, “Intelligence on Mars”, in the Saturday Review in 1896: an older and smaller world, cooling sooner, on which evolution would have run further.

His Martians are therefore a forecast of us. “They were heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none” (Book 2, ch. 2). They drink blood through pipettes and live inside machines. The narrator notes, with a straight face, that “a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute” had predicted such an end for man in 1893, “writing in a foolish, facetious tone”. The writer was Wells, and the piece was his essay “The Man of the Year Million”. The horror in the pit is the human future as a Victorian science teacher had already sketched it.

The people

The narrator

The narrator is never named. A comfortable writer who is at first more interested in the Martians than afraid of them, he drives his wife to safety at Leatherhead, returns the horse as promised and so gets cut off (Book 1, ch. 10). Wells gives him a steady account of his own failures: he strikes down a helpless man, he drinks with a fool, and for three days he goes out of his mind, singing “The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!” (Book 2, ch. 9).

The curate

The curate is the book’s hardest character on religion, a man whose faith turns into hysteria at the first test. “What sins have we done?” he asks (Book 1, ch. 13), and the narrator answers him without patience: “What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?” And he adds, “He is not an insurance agent.” Yet it is the narrator who is praising God on Primrose Hill by the end.

The artilleryman

The artilleryman is the most interesting person in the book (Book 2, ch. 7). On Putney Hill he lays out a scheme for living in the drains and retaking the world, with a contempt for the clerks who will go into the cages cheerfully: “Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry.” The narrator is half won over, until he sees how little digging has been done and how readily the man turns to cards, cigars and champagne. Wells’s own later politics are in him and so, uncomfortably, is something of the century to come. “Those who stop obey orders”, he says, and his scheme has no place for the “weak or silly”.

The Elphinstones

Mrs Elphinstone and her sister-in-law are the women the brother rescues on the road north of London (Book 1, ch. 16). The sister-in-law, called only the slender lady for most of the chapter, has a revolver under the seat and uses it to save him. She is much the most capable person in the exodus.

How it was made

The novel came out of talk with his brother, whose idea it was by Wells’s account, and it was begun at Woking and continued after the Wellses moved to Worcester Park in 1896. It sits in a whole genre. George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) started a fashion for invasion stories that produced more than sixty works by 1914, many of them about foreign armies and British unreadiness. Wells kept the form and replaced the enemy. He was not the first to imagine hostile aliens; Robert Potter’s The Germ Growers (1892) has them, and Kurd Lasswitz’s Two Planets (1897) has Martians in force. But Wells’s version is the one that took.

The novel ran in Pearson’s Magazine from April to December 1897, for which Wells was paid £200, and in Cosmopolitan in America. Heinemann published the book in 1898. American newspapers meanwhile ran unauthorised versions, moved to New York and to Boston, and the Boston paper followed with a sequel in which Thomas Edison goes to Mars and wins, Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars, which gets the imperial point of the original exactly backwards.

Readers and critics

Reviewers took to it from the start, though some disliked the violence. Wells himself, in a preface of 1933, called it, like The Time Machine, “another assault on human self-satisfaction”, “consciously grim” and written under the influence of Swift. Modern readings follow that lead, treating it as a novel about colonialism from the receiving end, about social Darwinism, and about the fragility of a modern city. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Early H. G. Wells (1961) is a good first stop. The discomfort critics note is real: the book condemns empire in the language of empire, and the Tasmanians appear only to make a point to the English.

Afterlives

The most famous version is Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre broadcast on CBS on 30 October 1938, which moved the landing to Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and played it as breaking news. The legend of a nation in panic has turned out to be largely newspaper work, as historians such as W. Joseph Campbell have shown; many fewer people heard it, and fewer still were fooled, than the next day’s headlines claimed. George Pal produced the 1953 film, set in California, and Steven Spielberg made his with Tom Cruise in 2005. Jeff Wayne’s double album of 1978, with Richard Burton as the voice of the narrator, is the version that keeps Wells’s setting.

The strangest descendant is scientific. Robert Goddard read the book at sixteen, and in October 1899, up a cherry tree in Massachusetts, imagined a device that could rise to Mars. He went on to fly the first liquid-fuelled rocket. Novelists have kept answering too: the Strugatsky brothers’ The Second Invasion from Mars (1968), Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine (1976), and Stephen Baxter’s authorised sequel The Massacre of Mankind (2017), told by Julie Elphinstone.

How to read it

Keep a map of Surrey open. The first book is more frightening when you can see how near Weybridge is to Waterloo.
Read the first chapter twice. Once at the start, and again at the end when you know what the Tasmanian sentence has been doing.
Do not hurry the scullery. Readers who came for tripods find Book Two slow. It is the point of the book.
Take the artilleryman seriously. Ask how much of what he says the narrator ever really answers.
Forget the films. Set aside the American suburbs and the flying saucers, and read it as a story about Woking in the 1890s.

George Chesney, The Battle of Dorking (1871). The invasion story Wells is rewriting, short and worth an hour.
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). The same documentary manner and the same walk through an emptied London.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899). Written at almost the same moment, on the same subject from the other side.
John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951). The English catastrophe novel after Wells, with its debts in plain sight.