by H. G. Wells
Introduction
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch son of a basket-maker made an alarming discovery. His name was Antony van Leeuwenhoek. He ground his own lenses and constructed a microscope. Whereas Galileo had been surveying the stars and Isaac Newton was measuring the Moon’s orbit, van Leeuwenhoek looked in the opposite direction, into the very small.
Observing a drop of water from a lake, he found it full of living things, of ‘animalcules’: ‘On these last I saw two little legs near the head, and two little fins at the hindmost end of the body . . . And the motion of most of these animalcules in the water was so swift, and so various upwards, downwards, and round about, that ’twas wonderful to see . . .’
At last, someone had discovered alien life!
Long before the seventeenth century, the human mind was amply populated by hobgoblins of all kinds, and indeed still continues to be. Ghosts and vampires abound there. But to discover these minute, hidden, seemingly hostile ‘animalcules’ in a drop of water was a new and disquieting thing. Water! Water, the symbol of purity, infested with unimagined creatures! Peace of mind departs and one more step towards our neurotic modern world is taken.
The young Mr H. G. Wells attended the biological laboratory of what was in 1884 known as the Normal School of Science. An echo of his learning experience sounds in the opening lines of his story ‘The Stolen Bacillus’: ‘“This again,” said the Bacteriologist, slipping a glass slide under the microscope, “is a preparation of the celebrated Bacillus of cholera – the cholera germ.”’
The ubiquity of ‘germs’ as an idea took hold on Wells’s mind.
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866, of lower-middle-class parents. The parents ran a china shop in Bromley, in Kent. At the age of seven, young Bertie broke his leg and was laid up for weeks. Sympathy and books came his way. He said, ‘This fall was one of the luckiest events of my life.’
Although the population of Bromley increased from 20,000 to 50,000 in the decades of the sixties, seventies and eighties, it seems that none of the new inhabitants wanted to buy any china. The shop closed amid an increased urban sprawl which continues today.
Wells’s education included a spell under the great scientist and humanist, Thomas Huxley. Huxley, in his vigorous defence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, became known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’. His grandsons included Julian and Aldous Huxley. Once Wells had won his hard-earned freedom, he moved ever onwards; through over a hundred books, we see him struggling with questions of evolution, over-population, education, and the betterment of mankind.
He became a leading contributor to the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man, which later formed part of the charter of the United Nations. When the UN General Assembly held its first session in London in January of 1946, Wells was in his last months of life. He died peacefully on 13 August of that year.
His creative powers had waned as his strength as a polemicist grew. In his early novels, these aspects are in balance: and never more so than in this present novel, The War of the Worlds. The novel’s thrilling and horrific theme aims to puncture mankind’s pretensions. As the 1930s dawn, novels give way to treatises such as The Way to World Peace (1930), The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932), World Brain (1938), and The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939).
It was a part of Wells’s genius that he could invent things never before imagined. A character in one of Chekhov’s plays says, ‘We should show life neither as it is nor as it ought to be, but as we see it in our dreams.’ It is the Surrealists’ prescription and one at which Wells was good in his early days, until he began desiring to change the world – by force if necessary. We see a foreshadowing of this wish at the conclusion of the present volume, when the narrator tells us that the Martians have done much to ‘promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind’.
But to say this is to begin at the end. To begin at the beginning, and at that magnificent paragraph with which The War of the Worlds opens, here we find mention of ‘a man with a microscope’ who might scrutinize ‘the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water’. We shall find that this first reference, hardly cordial, to mankind as a whole is to be followed by many another unflattering description.
I first came upon this novel at a youthful age, when I was not unfamiliar with the more conventional novels to which the term ‘classic’ was applied. Among such novels were Robinson Crusoe, Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre. But I do not recall any sentence which ever had such awesome effect on me as one sentence in that first paragraph of The War of the Worlds: ‘Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.’ Had there ever been such an opening statement, labyrinthine yet pellucid, before? No latinate long words here, designed to impress; the longest word is that readily comprehensible understatement of an adjective, ‘unsympathetic’.
So the curtain comes up on the drama, and already the seeds of Wells’s clever denouement have been planted.
The novel was published in hardcover in 1898, having been serialized in a popular magazine in 1897, the year of a second Victorian jubilee and much British self-congratulation.
The later decades of the nineteenth century had seen the popularity of the sensation novel, ‘read alike in drawing-room and kitchen’. Such novels might concern adultery or bigamy, famous examples of both being Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne (wherein the famous line occurs, ‘Dead – and never called me mother!’). Something of the ubiquity of these novels was owed to the 1871 Bill to provide public elementary education for all. The Education Act marks the first time that the state assumed direct responsibility for general education. A new readership developed, open to the wonders of Mr H. G. Wells.
There are sensations more overwhelming than adultery, more terrible than bigamy. The sensations of warfare and societal change in which Wells trafficked also emerge in the late decades of the nineteenth century. The year 1871 alone brought Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and Colonel George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking. The latter pamphlet describes a German invasion of England. England, unprepared, is defeated by Germany.
Chesney’s story created an immediate effect, popular and political. The device of future war and sudden invasion, which exposes the unprepared nation to inevitable defeat, aroused fears and imitations everywhere. As Professor I. F. Clarke puts it in his invaluable book, Voices Prophesying War 1763–1984, ‘Between 1871 and 1914 it was unusual to find a single year without some tale of future warfare appearing in some European country.’
But it is Wells’s master-stroke to have the invaders arrive from another planet! No communication, no truce, is possible. The appearance on the stage of the hideous Martians, with their bad habits, decidedly raises the stakes and gives the novel an almost mythopoeic strength.
The War of the Worlds opens with portents in the sky above a peaceful England, with people going about their daily business. What some believe to be a meteor lies half-buried in a pit on the sandy common near Woking. Some people have a look. They are mistaken. The supposed meteor is a cylinder, the top of which slowly unscrews.
Onlookers gather. In Chapter 4, something emerges from the cylinder, something which ‘glistened like wet leather’. Wells makes sure we understand how repulsive the Martians are, without going into detail at this juncture.
A delegation waving a white flag approaches the cylinder. The men are determined to communicate with their alien visitors. The Martians turn a heat-ray on the delegation. All are killed. Now we understand how remorseless the Martians are, lacking the qualities of emotion and empathy.
The narrator of the story is at first alarmed; but when he gets home and sits down to a good meal, his mood improves. He believes the Martians are terrified, and says, ‘Perhaps they expected to find no living things – certainly no intelli
gent living things . . . ’
People talk about the unusual event, but it does not make ‘the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done’. By similar touches, Wells brings verisimilitude to his tale.
A second cylinder arrives.
Soon the peaceful English countryside is burning. The Martians use their heat-ray. Perhaps with a nod towards The Battle of Dorking, the military are slow to get into action. Things go steadily and satisfyingly from bad to worse. Church steeples tumble down. People hide in trenches and cellars. While composing this story, Wells was cycling round the area. ‘I completely wreck and sack Woking – killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways,’ says he, with a certain sadistic relish.
It is destructive. However, destruction was modish. The taste of ruination was not in the mouths of the home population. The Edwardians were merely the children of a century in which a hideous adulthood was yet to come. So D. H. Lawrence exclaims, ‘Three cheers for the man who invented poison gas.’ And ‘Let all schools be closed at once,’ while T. S. Eliot regrets the spread of education, which is ‘lowering our standards . . . destroying our ancient edifices . . .’
So why did Wells not call his novel, ‘The War of Woking’? Because his intentions were more grandiose than merely the destruction of Woking, desirable though that might be.
The nameless narrator also witnesses the destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton. Always, the machines are contrasted with that essentially English invention, the countryside. ‘The armoured Martians appeared, far away over the little trees, across the flat meadows that stretch towards Chertsey, and striding hurriedly towards the river.’
And these machines take no more notice of the humans than would the humans of ‘a confusion of ants’.
The narrator meets a curate. The curate, like the artilleryman we meet later, is there merely to express a viewpoint; this is not really a characterization. But to my memory, the world of fiction was once populated with chinless wonders of vicars and curates; they were popular Aunt Sally figures – Aunt Sallys being popular recreational dummies in public-house gardens, designed merely to have wooden balls shied at them.
Wells’s curate is there to express the helplessness of organized religion when faced with the invaders. ‘“All the work – all the Sunday-schools – What have we done?”’ . . . ‘“The end! The great and terrible day of the Lord!” . . . “Be a man!”, said I.’
We learn that the narrator has a brother in London. The scene is thus enabled to shift to the city. Everything is calm there, a calm giving way gradually to excitement and anxiety. Fugitives begin to pour in from West Surrey. The Martians advance, and by Chapter 16 panic and disorder – how Wells hated disorder! – take over. There is ‘a swift liquidation of the social body’.
We may ask ourselves today if something similar would take place, supposing Al-Qa’ida launched bombs containing anthrax upon the capital. I asked myself a similar question when, visiting the bookstall on Paddington station in the Second World War, I came upon a reprint of Wells’s novel; the jacket showed searchlight beams in the sky and flames arising from the destroyed city. Some fears remain ever topical.
The Martians are as remorseless as was the Luftwaffe.
It is not necessary to relate what happens next; we can safely leave that to Mr Wells. The question arises as to what was going on in the capacious mind of the author when he wrote about this wholesale destruction. The subject of colonialism emerges; the cruel treatment of the Tasmanians is mentioned. Wells was not the only one in reflective mood. Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Recessional’ was published in 1897. (‘Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre . . .’)
More constantly on Wells’s mind was the question of overpopulation – long before this became a subject for common discussion. Thomas Malthus’s ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ was published in the last years of the eighteenth century. Malthus points out that whereas population increases in a geometrical ratio, subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. An increasing number of people will go hungry. Such is a rule of nature. ‘And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. Among plants and animals, its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice.’
Although this stern judgement has been somewhat ameliorated by crop development and improved agricultural methods, Malthus still rules. And, as John Ruskin says in Unto This Last, ‘In all the ranges of human thought, I know none so melancholy as the speculations of political economists on the population question.’
Later, when his amazing creativity was on the wane, Wells in his didactic mode devoted whole books to the question of over-population. In his A Modern Utopia ‘degenerates’ are prevented from breeding. The idiots, drug addicts, drunkards and violent men are exiled on various islands, and carefully policed.
Wells is, of course, one of the most prodigal producers of utopias. In book after book, society is overturned, eventually to develop a better and more orderly world. Perhaps we find such themes less convincing nowadays, after the ghastly regimes established in the early to middle decades of the last century. In 1910, some years after the publication of The War of the Worlds, Wells published the charming History of Mr Polly. While embodying many aspects of Wells’s own earlier life, most notably Mr Polly’s escape from drapery shops, the novel also contains a dream shared by many men of that time: escape from the captivity of shops to becoming a casual worker in a rural inn, owned by a pleasant woman and situated on the banks of an unsullied river. It is a form of one-man utopia, where Mr Polly finds happiness at last.
A pleasant variant on this scenario is played out in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Orwell’s humble notion of utopia is a private room and a girl to love. Mr Polly’s utopia is of longer duration than that of Winston Smith. The mood had darkened by the 1940s.
This is a convenient place in which to say a word concerning some of the films and radio programmes made from Wells’s book. In October 1938 a radio play based on The War of the Worlds, starring Orson Welles, was broadcast in the United States (and re-broadcast much later on BBC radio). It was produced in documentary form, the setting transposed to the eastern seaboard of the United States. Many people fell into a panic, believing they were actually being invaded by Martians, and headed for the traditional hills. It is difficult to see today how listeners could have been so gullible, but learned universities have written about, and a film studio made a movie about, what happened that night.
The War of the Worlds was filmed by George Pal/Paramount Productions and released in 1953. The opening is impressive. Sir Cedric Hardwicke, eminent member of the British contingent in Hollywood at the time, narrates much of the first paragraph of the novel against a starry background.
England gives way to Southern California. Woking gives way to Los Angeles. A square-jawed actor and a blank-faced actress provide a love affair. While the dialogue is plodding, the boomerang-shaped Martian war machines are attractive. It is a noisy film, full of destruction.
As we have seen, Wells’s cleric is contemptible. Director Byron Haskin transforms him into an heroic figure. Advancing towards the Martian front-line, the heroic vicar chants, ‘Yeah, though I walk through the Valley of Death, I will fear no evil’ – when Pow! – he is wiped out.
An American TV series based on the Wells novel arrived on the small screen in 1988 and ran for forty-two episodes.
These films and others, such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, bear witness to a difference in British and American temperaments. The British like – or certainly did like – a pinch of melancholy to their dish, for flavour’s sake. The Americans prefer triumphant individualism, such as was propagated in science fiction by the Robert Heinlein/Isaac Asimov/John Campbell group of writers. This preference was shown even more clearly by the fate of The War of the Worlds in the USA.
The novel was run as a pirated serial in an American newspaper. Americans were not going to take the Mart
ian invasion lying down. A journalist by the name of Garrett P. Serviss wrote a kind of sequel to Wells’s novel, entitled Edison’s Conquest of Mars. Thomas Edison invents anti-gravity and a disintegrating ray, and sets off with a whole fleet of spaceships to pulverize Mars. The evil Martians are wiped out. As is Wells’s lesson in humility.
There were reasons other than Malthus’s essay on population to make a thinking man of Wells’s time somewhat down in the mouth. There was, for example, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin’s remark on entropy: ‘Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period to come, the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted.’
Wells had already reported on those bleak last days of the human race in The Time Machine. Now he was commenting on other theories, such as the theory of Laplace and his nebular hypothesis, that Mars was an older world than ours.
In an article in a review published in 1896, Wells discusses the possibility of intelligent life on Mars, and states, ‘There is no doubt that Mars is very like the Earth.’ The statement was plausible before various NASA fly-bys had shown Mars to be a barren and inhospitable rock, bereft of life, bereft certainly of anything approaching intelligent bipeds or the umbrella-bearing public of Wells’s day.
Wells was labouring under an illusion shared by many who took an interest in matters astronomical at that period. We now know Mars to be not senile, merely inclement. But Wells’s view of Martian life is cleverly linked with that other great nineteenth-century discovery which preoccupied Wells and others (as it still preoccupies us in our century) – Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Wells reserves a close description of Martian anatomy until Book II, Chapter 2. There we are treated to three pages of exposition, following the opening sentence, ‘They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive.’ After we have become thoroughly and scientifically disgusted, comes the cool remark, ‘To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves.’ After all, who knows what we may become? As Wells says, ‘We men . . . are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out.’
