The War of the Worlds

The switch to the experiences of the narrator’s brother is a surprising one. Such a disorienting move necessitates a solid rationale, both for Wells and for his fictional narrator. While the narrator’s brother is different enough from the narrator himself for his experiences to be interesting, his story is valuable primarily because it allows Wells to present the reader with a broader look at the Martian invasion. Each of the two nameless men is, in his own way, an everyman with whom the reader can easily identify and thus from whose perspective the reader can experience the horrors of interplanetary war.

To position the reader close to the action from the get-go, Wells’s narrator must be situated in the countryside. By placing his brother in London, then the largest city in the world, Wells can offer what would have been an even more common and relatable perspective. That the narrator’s brother is never mentioned prior to this point and that his fate after leaving England remains unrevealed serve as further confirmation this character’s story was not a main priority for Wells in this novel, nor is it for the narrator himself within the fictional conceit of the novel. The narrator’s primary goal in writing is to share his uniquely intimate experiences of the Martians and their invasion with his fictional audience—a world rocked by an alien invasion that most of them did not witness themselves. It makes sense, then, that the narrator would downplay his and his brother’s personal development and trajectory, including what details he does only insofar as they are relevant to the experiences both men had of the Martians and their impact on life in England.

The experiences that make his brother’s story so worthwhile, then, are primarily the way the news of the invasion reached and affected Londoners, the exodus from London, and the naval battle involving the Thunder Child. These events parallel the narrator’s own journey up until this point yet constitute in many ways a more extreme version of his experiences. As was the case with the narrator and his community, the narrator’s brother and London are slow to recognize the significance of the threat the Martians pose, which may be surprising since London contains a far greater number of people who may become susceptible to panic. However, the narrator points out that “[t]he habit of personal security […] is so deeply fixed in the Londoner’s mind, and startling intelligence so much a matter of course in the papers, that they could read without any personal tremors” about the Martian invasion (81-82). Thus, this denial occurs on a larger scale in London. By the time the narrator’s brother begins to worry about the welfare of his brother and sister-in-law, the trains have stopped running. By the time he and his fellow Londoners sense a threat to themselves, the Martians are on the outskirts of the city, wielding their Black Smoke with devastating effect, and he only makes it out just in time. Even this is a matter of dumb luck, for, as the narrator points out following the fighting of Weybridge and Shepperton, “Had [the Martians] left their comrade and pushed on forthwith, […] they would certainly have reached the capital in advance of the tidings of their approach; as sudden, dreadful, and destructive their advent would have been as the earthquake that destroyed Lisbon a century ago” (74).

This absurd devotion to the status quo reaches a fever pitch with Mrs. Elphinstone’s reluctance to cross the English Channel: “She had never been out of England before, she would rather die than trust herself friendless in a foreign country, and so forth. […] Her great idea was to return to Stanmore. Things had been always well and safe at Stanmore” (118). Despite everything she has seen and heard, Mrs. Elphinstone remains incapable of imagining anything can be safer than what she is used to. While she may present the novel’s most extreme version of this tendency, she is far from alone in harboring such sentiments. The narrator’s brother’s experiences, then, provide an even more profound look at the power of denial in preserving life’s normal momentum.

Similarly, the exodus from London and the battle involving the Thunder Child constitute expansions of the narrator’s own flight from Maybury and the battle he witnesses at Weybridge and Shepperton. Wells employs repetition, parallelism, and rhythm several times in this section to drive home this snowballing devastation even further. Most notably, when the narrator’s brother is awoken by a city suddenly flung into panic overnight, Wells underscores the ubiquity of this mayhem using these techniques:

And all about him—in the rooms below, in the houses on each side and across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the hundred other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne Park district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kilburn and St. John’s Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in Shoreditch and Highbury and Haggerston and Hoxton, and, indeed, through all the vastness of London from Ealing to East Ham—people were rubbing their eyes, and opening windows to stare out and ask aimless questions, and dressing hastily as the first breath of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It was the dawn of the great panic (90).

Later, Wells conveys the vastness of the chaos of the exodus in a similar, though less expansive, fashion: “There were cabs, carriages, shop-carts, wagons, beyond counting; a mail-cart, a road-cleaner’s cart marked ‘Vestry of St. Pancras,’ a huge timber-wagon crowded with roughs. A brewer’s dray rumbled by with its two near wheels splashed with fresh blood” (109). Thus, does Wells increase the stakes and scope of the Martian invasion and insinuate into the reader’s mind an expectation of repeatedly heightening catastrophe. Logically, the reader expects the remainder of the book to cast these cataclysmic events onto a continental scale, and then again onto a global scale, and so is left with an immense premonition of dread at the close of Book 1, a premonition that is supported by Book 2’s title: “The Earth Under the Martians.”

Still, just as the narrator maintains some shred of hope even after all he has witnessed, so does the narrator’s brother find reason to stave off despair as his boat departs England. Certainly, the Thunder Child’s destruction of not one but two Martian fighting-machines, which elicited “frantic cheering […] by all in the crowding multitude of ships and boats” (122), is enough to stave off total pessimism, even if the mighty ship is itself lost in the process. More significantly, while the narrator’s brother may not recognize it as such, Wells ends Book 1 with another subtle symbolic omen that the Martians are doomed: “Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness— […] something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey mystery of the night” (123). This object is never identified, but it must be one of the flying-machines that the narrator later learns the Martians are working on. While their potential is terrifying, these machines constitute the greatest technological failure of the Martian invasion, as the narrator later reveals (186). Just as the Martians failed to consider whether Earth might contain deadly microbes, they failed to account for the challenges an unfamiliar atmosphere might pose. As the narrator’s brother watches the rapid rise and fall of this device over England, he witnesses a metaphor for the overall fate of the Martians in his homeland.

Conspicuously, the narrator’s brother watches many of the major events of his story through a shroud, either literal or figurative. Up until the sea battle, his experience of the Martians is entirely secondhand, arriving either via newspaper reports or word-of-mouth. His view of the trampling of the man who clutches foolishly at his coins amidst the exodus from London is hidden from him by dust and passing carts (112). Most significantly, steam and smoke obscure much of the sea battle between the Thunder Child and the Martian fighting-machines. Even the sinking of the Thunder Child he never sees: “[W]hen at last the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened, and nothing of the Thunder Child could be made out, nor could the third Martian be seen” (122). As the narrator is born away across the English Channel, even the coast of his homeland is cloaked “by a marbled bank of vapour, part steam, part black gas, eddying and combining in the strangest way” (122). Most simply, this lack of clarity underscores the distanced narrative frame of the narrator relating another’s story. Wells obscures these events to emphasize the confusion experienced by those who witness such catastrophes and especially the struggle to make meaning of such horrific sights. The melding of Martian and human influences, embodied by the mixing of steam and Black Smoke as well as by the simultaneous vanishing of the Thunder Child and the third fighting-machine, especially evokes this unintelligibility, and it helps the reader appreciate that Book 1’s final image, that of an unknown object shooting up to the sky and plummeting back to Earth, might not be as ominous as it seems.

Beyond these symbolically weighty plot points, the narrator’s brother’s experiences provide the novel’s clearest window into issues of gender and class. Prior to this point, The War of the Worlds has been dominated by men, the narrator’s wife the only female character in the previous chapters and a fairly minor one at that. What is revealed of her sets the stage for the subtle criticism of Victorian gender roles that Wells develops more extensively in this section. Nameless like her husband, she mostly reacts to him, generally in stereotypically feminine ways. When he returns from the massacre at Horsell Common, she simply worries, “knitting her brows and putting her hand on mine” (35). The next day when they must flee, she helplessly and quietly follows her husband’s lead. However, the narrator implies that her silence is not due to a lack of thought, noting that she “was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed oppressed with forebodings of evil” (49). When the narrator must return to Maybury, he believes that his wife wishes she could have “urged me to stay in Leatherhead that night” (49), a wish that if fulfilled might have spared them both immense hardships. Her silence, then, is an ill. Since such silence is born of Victorian England’s expectation that women be subservient to their husbands, it demonstrates that Wells is using these events to criticize that society’s repressive gender roles.

This criticism becomes more overt in the narrator’s brother’s story. Although he is a decent fellow himself, he encounters only morally questionable men on his flight from London—men like the three who attempt to rob the Elphinstones or like the boat captain that maximizes his profit by “picking up passengers until the seated decks were even dangerously crowded” (119), men whose desperation and greed lead them to acts of violence and abuse. Even the poor fellow who is crushed by the horde as he clutches his gold pieces is at best a fool. Contrasting with these reprehensible male characters are the Elphinstones themselves. While Mrs. Elphinstone is equally unimpressive, her courageous and clever sister-in-law, who willingly returns to defend the narrator’s brother from the robbers and is his equal in securing their escape from the dangerous throng and out of England altogether, is one of the most morally upstanding figures in the novel. She is also its only unattached female character, suggesting that the narrator’s wife and Mrs. Elphinstone suffer from their assimilation into Victorian society and that a woman must stand outside it as Miss Elphinstone does to maintain her moral integrity.

Along with gender roles, Wells critiques Victorian notions of propriety and class in this section. In the Martian apocalypse, these divisions and distinctions become almost meaningless, as money and status fail to provide much protection, and all suffer equally. Immediately prior to the grisly death of the commoner who is crushed as he vainly clutches his gold, the narrator’s brother hears of Lord Garrick, who is “dying fast, and very thirsty” (110). Having seen nothing but dirty, haggard people all around, the narrator’s brother struggles to believe that such an important figure could be among them, failing to recognize that the dirt and desperation of the exodus do not differentiate based on wealth or rank. In the end, Lord Garrick probably dies, his money and position unable to secure for him the most basic ingredient of life. However, even as the old orders fade away, new ones spring up, such as “the Committee of Public Supply,” which “seize[s] the [Elphinstone’s] pony as provisions” (117). This ragtag assembly of citizens uselessly offers to give the travelers a share of the pony the next day, rounding out Wells’s skepticism of class divisions both old and new.