The War of the Worlds

Summary

The War of the Worlds is told by an unnamed writer on philosophical subjects who lives on Maybury Hill near Woking in Surrey, looking back some years after the events. Book One, The Coming of the Martians, opens with astronomers seeing jets of gas leap from the surface of Mars. The narrator watches the planet through the telescope of his friend Ogilvy at Ottershaw. Some days later a falling star lands on Horsell Common, and it proves to be a huge metal cylinder. Crowds gather; the top unscrews, and grey tentacled creatures with great eyes and V-shaped mouths heave themselves out. When a deputation approaches under a white flag, the Martians burn it with an invisible Heat-Ray, killing Ogilvy, the astronomer Stent and many onlookers. More cylinders fall. The Martians assemble towering three-legged fighting-machines and advance over Surrey. The narrator drives his wife to her cousins at Leatherhead in a borrowed dog-cart, returns the cart through a thunderstorm, and sees the tripods wade through the night. A fleeing artilleryman joins him for a time. At Shepperton and Weybridge he watches the artillery bring down one machine, then escapes into the Thames as the Heat-Ray boils the river, and falls in with a curate whose faith has collapsed into terror. Meanwhile his younger brother in London sees the city panic under the Martians' poisonous black smoke and joins the exodus to the Essex coast, where the ironclad Thunder Child rams two fighting-machines while the steamers escape. In Book Two, The Earth Under the Martians, a fifth cylinder lands beside the house at Sheen where the narrator and the curate are hiding. Trapped for some fifteen days, he watches through a slit as the Martians feed by injecting the blood of living men into their own veins and build handling-machines in the pit. The curate grows wild and loud, and the narrator strikes him down; a Martian tentacle drags the curate's body away. Emerging into a landscape choked with the Martians' red weed, he meets the artilleryman again on Putney Hill, who dreams of an underground human remnant, but leaves him as a talker rather than a doer. In a silent London he hears a Martian howling 'Ulla, ulla' and finds the invaders dead on Primrose Hill, killed by earthly bacteria against which they had no defence. After a breakdown he returns to Woking and is reunited with his wife. An epilogue reflects on what the invasion has taught. The novel was serialized in Pearson's Magazine in 1897 and published as a book by Heinemann in 1898. It is a founding work of the alien-invasion story and has been widely adapted, including Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast.

Plot or Argument

• Book One, Chapters I-IV: The Eve of the War to The Cylinder Opens

  The narrator describes the dying planet Mars and the minds that envied the earth, recalls the flashes seen through Ogilvy's telescope, and tells how Ogilvy found a cylinder half buried in a pit on Horsell Common. As the crowd watches, the lid unscrews and the first Martian, glistening and gasping in the heavier gravity, struggles out.

• Book One, Chapters V-X: The Heat-Ray to In the Storm

  A deputation with a white flag is burnt to death by the Heat-Ray, and the narrator flees home. Soldiers ring the common, a second cylinder falls, and he takes his wife to Leatherhead. Returning the dog-cart at night in a thunderstorm, he sees a fighting-machine striding over the pines and finds the landlord of the Spotted Dog dead.

• Book One, Chapters XI-XIII: At the Window to How I Fell In with the Curate

  The narrator shelters the artilleryman, whose battery was wiped out, and the two set off together. At the confluence of the Wey and the Thames the guns destroy one machine, but the Heat-Ray boils the river and burns Weybridge and Shepperton. Scalded, the narrator drifts downstream and meets the curate, who asks why such things are permitted.

• Book One, Chapters XIV-XVII: In London to The Thunder Child

  The story shifts to the narrator's brother, a medical student in London. Newspapers at first make light of the news; then the black smoke rolls over the Thames valley and the population of London flees. The brother rescues two ladies, Mrs. Elphinstone and her sister-in-law, on the road north, and at the coast sees the ironclad Thunder Child destroy two fighting-machines before she is sunk.

• Book Two, Chapters I-IV: Under Foot to The Death of the Curate

  A cylinder lands beside the ruined house at Sheen where the narrator and the curate are hiding. Through a crack he studies the Martians' bodies, their blood-feeding, and their handling-machines. Food runs short, the curate's raving threatens to betray them, and the narrator knocks him senseless; a Martian tentacle draws the curate out of the scullery.

• Book Two, Chapters V-VII: The Stillness to The Man on Putney Hill

  After days alone the narrator finds the pit empty and walks out over a country overgrown with red weed. On Putney Hill he meets the artilleryman, who has a scheme to live in the drains and raise a hardy breed of survivors, but who digs little and drinks and plays cards. The narrator leaves him and goes on toward London.

• Book Two, Chapters VIII-X: Dead London to The Epilogue

  In the empty city a Martian howls 'Ulla, ulla' and falls silent; on Primrose Hill the narrator finds the Martians dead, slain by bacteria. He loses three days in a breakdown, is cared for by strangers, and returns to Woking, where his wife, believed lost, comes back to him. The epilogue weighs the scientific questions the invasion has left and the lasting unease it has left in him.

Characters

• The narrator, protagonist and narrator

  Unnamed writer on philosophical subjects living near Woking, who tells the story of the invasion years afterward.

• The narrator's wife, wife

  Taken to her cousins at Leatherhead; separated from her husband for the rest of the invasion and reunited at the end.

• The narrator's brother, secondary narrator

  Younger brother, a medical student in London, whose experience of the city's panic and flight is retold in Book One.

• Ogilvy, astronomer

  Well-known astronomer at Ottershaw who first finds the cylinder and is killed by the Heat-Ray.

• The artilleryman, soldier

  Survivor of a destroyed battery who meets the narrator twice; on Putney Hill he talks grandly of an underground future.

• The curate, clergyman

  Fugitive from Weybridge whose terror and self-pity in the ruined house endanger them both.

• Mrs. Elphinstone and Miss Elphinstone, refugees

  Two women whom the brother rescues from robbers on the road and travels with to the coast.

• The Martians, invaders

  Great-headed, tentacled beings from a cooling Mars who fight in tripod machines and feed on blood.

Lessons

• Complacency before the unknown

  The first chapter describes men going about their little affairs, sure of their mastery of matter, while they are studied like creatures in a drop of water. Wells uses the invasion to puncture that assurance. The epilogue concludes that the earth can no longer be regarded as a fenced and secure dwelling place.

  • Why do the people on Horsell Common treat the cylinder at first as a curiosity rather than a danger?
  • What does the narrator mean by comparing the Martians' watching to a man looking through a microscope?
  • Is it wise or foolish to feel secure in ordinary life?

• Two ways of breaking down

  The curate and the artilleryman respond to catastrophe in opposite ways. The curate collapses into lament and blame, asking what sins Weybridge has done; the artilleryman makes bold plans for a new human order underground but does almost nothing. The narrator, frightened and sometimes harsh, keeps observing and acting, and the book asks the reader to judge all three.

  • What does the curate expect from God, and why does the invasion shatter that expectation?
  • Why does the narrator leave the artilleryman on Putney Hill?
  • Was the narrator justified in striking the curate in the ruined house?

• Humility before the smallest things

  Every human weapon fails; the Martians are killed by bacteria. The narrator describes them as slain by the humblest things God has put upon the earth, and adds that by the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright. Wells joins the language of providence to the language of natural selection and leaves readers to weigh how the two fit together.

  • Why does Wells let germs rather than soldiers defeat the Martians?
  • How does the narrator explain why human beings can resist bacteria that the Martians cannot?
  • Can the same event be described both as natural selection and as God's wisdom?

• The fragile order of a city

  The brother's chapters show London's institutions failing within a day: the newspapers, the railway, the police. Crowds trample one another on the roads north, and robbers attack travellers, while some people show courage and kindness. The novel looks soberly at how a society behaves when ordinary supports give way.

  • What signs show the brother that London is beginning to panic?
  • How does the brother behave toward Mrs. Elphinstone and her sister-in-law?
  • What virtues matter most when a whole community is in flight?

Context

Wells wrote at the height of the British Empire, when Britain's navy and armies seemed beyond challenge, and in a decade of fascination with Mars. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had mapped 'canali' on the planet in 1877, and the American Percival Lowell was arguing in the 1890s that they were the work of intelligent beings. Popular 'invasion literature', beginning with George Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871), imagined Britain conquered by a European rival. Wells had trained in biology under T. H. Huxley, and the novel's ideas about evolution, the cooling of planets, and the development of brain at the expense of body come from that scientific education.

Composition

Wells was living in Woking when he wrote the book, and he set the landing on Horsell Common and the destruction of nearby towns among places he walked and cycled through. The novel was serialized in Pearson's Magazine (UK) in 1897 and published by William Heinemann in 1898, with some revisions. Wells later recalled that the idea arose from a conversation with his brother Frank about how the Tasmanians had been overwhelmed by Europeans, a parallel the narrator draws in the first chapter.

Reception

The book was popular from the start and was soon imitated and pirated, notably in an American newspaper serial that moved the action to the United States. It established the pattern of the alien-invasion story. Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre radio adaptation of 30 October 1938 relocated it to New Jersey; reports at the time described widespread panic, though later historians have argued that the scale of the panic was exaggerated by the newspapers. It has been filmed several times, notably in 1953 and 2005.

Comparisons

• frankenstein

  Both are founding works of science fiction that test human confidence in science; Shelley's danger is a creature made by man, Wells's a superior intelligence that treats man as the lower creature.

• on-the-origin-of-species

  Darwin's struggle for existence and natural selection lie behind Wells's Martians, evolved into great brains, and behind the ending, where resistance to bacteria won over ages decides the war.

• twenty-thousand-leagues-under-the-sea

  Verne's Nautilus displays human engineering as wonder; Wells turns superior machinery against humanity, and the tripods and handling-machines are seen from underneath by their victims.

• the-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde

  Two late Victorian fables that use scientific ideas to frighten; Stevenson finds the beast inside one respectable man, Wells finds a cold intelligence outside the whole species.

• gullivers-travels

  Swift and Wells both shrink human pride by showing people from another scale; the narrator's comparison of men to ants and to a dodo recalls Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians.

• the-voyage-of-the-beagle

  Darwin's journal records peoples and species displaced by European arrival; Wells imagines the same experience happening to the English.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening comparison of human beings to tiny creatures under a microscope, and how often the book returns to the idea of scale.
• The white flag on Horsell Common and what happens to the deputation.
• How the curate and the artilleryman each explain the disaster, and how the narrator answers them.
• The red weed, which spreads and then dies, as a clue to the ending.
• The narrator's own fear, mistakes and moments of courage, which he reports honestly.

Key terms and names

Cylinder

The huge metal projectile, fired from Mars, in which the Martians cross space and land near Woking.

Heat-Ray

The Martians' invisible beam of intense heat, which sets fire to anything it touches.

Fighting-machine

The tall three-legged metal machine in which a Martian strides across the country.

Black smoke

A heavy poisonous vapour the Martians fire from tubes, which settles into low ground and kills.

Red weed

A Martian plant that chokes English rivers and fields during the invasion and then withers from disease.

Curate

An assistant clergyman in the Church of England; the narrator's companion is a curate from Weybridge.

Thunder Child

The ironclad warship that attacks two fighting-machines off the Essex coast to protect the fleeing steamers.

Bacteria

Microscopic living things, some of which cause disease and decay; the Martians have no defence against them.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What happens when the deputation with the white flag approaches the pit on Horsell Common?
2. Comprehension Why are the narrator and the curate trapped in the house at Sheen, and how long do they stay there?
3. Comprehension What finally kills the Martians, and where does the narrator find them?
4. Interpretation Why does Wells include the chapters about the narrator's brother in London rather than telling only what the narrator himself saw?
5. Interpretation The curate asks what sins Weybridge has done. How does the narrator's reply, What are we?, change the question?
6. Interpretation Why does the artilleryman's plan sound impressive at first, and what makes the narrator lose faith in it?
7. Big Question Does a disaster reveal a person's true character, or can it change that character?
8. Big Question Should human beings think of themselves as masters of nature, or as creatures who depend on things far smaller and greater than themselves?

Faith Connections

• Psalm 8:3-4 (Scripture)

  When I consider thy heavens, what is man? The narrator's answer to the curate, What are we?, echoes the psalmist's question, though the novel looks at the heavens with fear rather than praise.

• Luke 13:1-5 (Scripture)

  Jesus says that those killed when the tower of Siloam fell were not worse sinners than others. The curate assumes the invasion must be a judgment on Weybridge's sins; the passage sets a different way of thinking about sudden catastrophe.

• 1 Corinthians 1:27 (Scripture)

  God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. The narrator himself says the Martians were slain by the humblest things God has put upon the earth.

• Blaise Pascal, Pensées (the thinking reed) (Great Conversation)

  Pascal wrote that man is a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but a thinking reed, and that a vapour or a drop of water can kill him. Wells's novel dramatizes both halves: human weakness before the Martians and the narrator's persistence in observing and reasoning.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Human beings believed themselves secure masters of the earth; a superior intelligence from Mars overcame every human defence; yet the invaders were destroyed by bacteria, the smallest of earthly things; therefore human pride is misplaced, and humanity should see itself as one fragile part of a larger order.

Rhetorical device: Retrospective narration with foreshadowing. The opening sentence of Book One, Chapter I, speaks from after the events, telling the reader at once that the watching minds were as mortal as man's own, which quietly prepares the ending in Book Two, Chapter VIII.

Debate: Resolved: that the narrator was right to leave the artilleryman's underground scheme on Putney Hill.

Memory Work

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own

slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Compare the curate and the artilleryman as two responses to catastrophe, and explain what the narrator learns from each.

Comparison with Frankenstein: Victor Frankenstein and the Martians both use superior knowledge without sympathy for those it harms. Compare how Shelley and Wells judge knowledge without love.

Medical Lens

The novel's ending depends on the germ theory of disease and on Darwinian ideas of acquired resistance: the Martians, from a planet without bacteria, have no defence against the putrefactive and disease germs to which terrestrial life has adapted over ages. Wells was writing about twenty years after the work of Pasteur and Koch made bacteria the accepted cause of infectious disease, and the narrator's phrasing joins natural selection to the older language of providence. Book Two, Chapter II gives a mock-anatomical account of the Martians, which the narrator says dissection later confirmed: bodies reduced to great brains, no digestive organs, nourishment by direct injection of blood taken from living creatures, no sleep, and reproduction by budding; the narrator links this to speculation that human beings too might evolve toward brain and hand. He also notes that Mars knows none of the fevers and contagions of human life. The psychological material is substantial. The curate, fleeing Weybridge, is described as driven to the verge of his reason and later raves in apocalyptic language. The narrator himself, after days of hiding and hunger, loses three days of memory after Primrose Hill and is found wandering and singing, then cared for by strangers; in the epilogue he describes waking at night haunted by images of the dead. Modern readers sometimes describe these passages in terms of acute stress reaction or dissociative amnesia; that is an interpretive reading, not Wells's vocabulary.

• Book Two, Chapter II (What We Saw from the Ruined House)

  The narrator's account of Martian anatomy: a body that is mostly brain, no digestion, feeding by injecting living blood, absence of sleep and fatigue, and the absence of bacteria and disease on Mars.

  Anatomy Dissection Vampirism Blood Fever Infection
• Book One, Chapter XIII (How I Fell In with the Curate)

  The curate, sitting by the Thames, asks why such things are permitted and breaks into apocalyptic cries; the narrator judges that the disaster has driven him to the edge of his reason.

  Trauma Shell Shock Madness Psychosis
• Book Two, Chapters III-IV (The Days of Imprisonment; The Death of the Curate)

  Hunger and thirst in the ruined house at Sheen, the curate's drinking and loud raving, and the narrator's struggle to keep his own self-command.

  Starvation Nutrition Madness Psychosis
• Book Two, Chapter VIII (Dead London)

  The Martians found dead of putrefactive and disease bacteria, with the narrator's explanation of human resistance acquired through natural selection.

  Fever Infection Plague Epidemic
• Book Two, Chapter IX (Wreckage) and Chapter X (The Epilogue)

  Three days the narrator cannot remember, his wandering through St. John's Wood, care by kindly strangers, and his later night visions of the dead.

  Dementia Memory Trauma Shell Shock

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Using a modern map of Surrey and London, trace the narrator's route from Maybury Hill to Leatherhead, Shepperton, Sheen, Putney Hill and Primrose Hill, and the brother's route to the Essex coast.

• Fiction

  Write the diary of the narrator's wife at Leatherhead during the fortnight when she did not know whether her husband was alive.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation on Putney Hill in which the curate, had he lived, answers the artilleryman's plan for the future.

• Essay

  Is the narrator a reliable witness? Use his admissions of fear, his striking of the curate, and his lost three days to argue your answer.

Further Reading

• The Time Machine, H. G. Wells

  Wells's first scientific romance (1895), with its own vision of evolution and decline.

• The Invisible Man, H. G. Wells

  Published the year the Martian serial ran; another tale of science escaping control.

• Experiment in Autobiography, H. G. Wells

  Wells's own account of his education under Huxley and his early writing years.

• The Battle of Dorking, George Tomkyns Chesney

  The 1871 invasion story that started the genre Wells transformed.