The War of the Worlds: Religion, Refugees and Social Class 125 years on.
The War of the Worlds: Religion, Refugees and Social Class 125 years on
125 years ago, a strange tale from Mars crashed on planet earth. H.G. Wells’s novel, The War of the Worlds, set loose powers of terror and fascination which spawned numerous adaptations or tributes on stage and page, radio, television and silver screen, from Garrett P. Serviss’s novel Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898) and Orson Welles in 1938, through to John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, and Jeff Wayne’s rock opera of 1978. The gigantic striding Martians were robotic icons from without, and slimy tentacular monsters within. Horribly vivid in Wells’s print descriptions, these uncanny organisms have since inspired innumerable sci-fi screen aliens, from Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien down to Covenant and Prometheus. The scientically exact feeding on human blood seems echoed as recently as the 2015 dystopia, Mad Max: Fury Road.
But for all the fame of the book, surprisingly little has been said about its author, and how much his personal history and personal values gleam in unexpected ways through the story. The War of the Worlds was certainly a work of sci-fi genius. Yet from start to finish it was also a damning portrait of the British Empire, its class system, and its tyrannical attitudes to victims of invasion and colonisation. For most of those taut 180 pages, the most powerful Empire on earth is suddenly powerless, and its people are a chaos of helpless refugees. No mainstream work of fiction had done anything so daring before.
To grasp how this breathtaking feat was achieved, we need to realise that the young Wells was in almost every way an underdog and an outsider. Looking back now, his output of over fifty novels, along with short stories, essays and social commentary looks like the work of an unstoppable force of nature, a relentless driving energy constantly in need of new ideas and subjects to devour. The early truth of his life makes these achievements more astonishing still.
Victorian Child Poverty
Wells was born in Bromley in 1866, the last of four children. His family was poor, and got poorer after rashly buying an unsuccessful small goods shop in the damp and depressing house in which he grew up. Everything about his early life seemed destined to condemn him to an existence of Victorian drudgery, servitude and God-fearing, jingoistic mediocrity. His memories of his wretched time as a draper’s assistant in Windsor and Southsea, starting at age thirteen, seem worse than Dickensian to a modern eye. After his mother had actually paid for him to be apprenticed to a Windsor draper’s, Wells was little more than a prisoner. Up at 7.30 to clean the shop each morning, a breakfast of bread and butter at 8.30, and then servile toil until perhaps 8pm before lights out in the dormitory above at 10.30. ‘Early closing’ one day a week meant 5pm, and Sunday was his only day off. Wells proved so bad at the job that he quickly escaped and had a spell as a teacher. But he was soon trapped in another apprenticeship at a draper’s in Southsea. Although his conditions were less squalid and his employer relatively enlightened, his three years here were ones of misery. The most substantial thing he seemed to eat at either shop was cheese.
The rat-trap of a life set up for Wells was chillingly illustrated by the fate of his brother Freddy, who spent his working career in a draper’s shop. Herbert somehow wriggled free. He quickly showed an aptitude for teaching, even when not much older than his pupils. But even here the crushing weight of the Victorian establishment came down on him again. For many teaching jobs he was ineligible unless actually confirmed in the Church of England. He refused to do this, having turned against his mother’s unquestioning Christian piety around age twelve. The whimpering curate with whom the narrator is trapped mid-way through War of the Worlds embodies much of that early rebellion. Recalling a Catholic service which he attended with a friend from the Southsea draper’s, Wells recoiled at this ‘incredible and ugly lie’ and its ‘enthronement of cruelty’.
And this was not the only Victorian ideology which Wells had to escape. With unsparing candour he looked back from the 1930s on a child who for some time was completely indoctrinated by Imperial prejudice, insularity and outright racism. At thirteen, ‘my mind had leapt all too readily to the idea that I was a blonde and blue-eyed Nordic … In those days I had ideas about Aryans extraordinarily like Mr Hitler’s’. Hemmed in on every side by Victorian poverty and Victorian values, Wells not only powered on into the modern world, but in some ways invented it.
Britain under the Martians: an Empire Colonised
In the novel’s very first pages Wells presents the Martians as forced to colonise earth because of the advanced cooling of their home planet, impelling them to conquer a world ‘crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals’. In the devastation which follows, as the Martian tripods storm across southern England with their deadly heat-rays and mounds of poison gas, the people of the world’s most powerful Empire are continually degraded to the level of animals: likened to sheep, cows, or rabbits. Toward the end of the book our English narrator confesses a realisation that ‘I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel’.
And how can humanity complain of this treatment, the narrator asks in his opening pages, when ‘we … 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 own inferior races’? For ‘the Tasmanians … were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years’. Although the reference to ‘inferior races’ jars with us now, this was radical social criticism in 1898, reminding the Victorians how they had brutally annihilated the Tasmanians by 1876.
Here Wells (who had studied under ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, T.H. Huxley) sets up a motif of social Darwinism in which British conquerors become the conquered in a bare few hours. After an eerily slow build-up, whose mixture of realism and the uncanny is aided by Wells’ own scientific training and personal knowledge of the landscape around Weybridge and Woking, devastation is unleashed in just one day. ‘Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal’. On only the second day of the invasion, soldiers wheeling up twelve pound guns across the Surrey heath where Martian capsules first landed remain oblivious of the overwhelming force they are facing — all save one artilleryman, who tells the narrator, ‘It’s bows and arrows against the lightning … They aven’t seen that fire-beam yet’.
To more enlightened readers of the closing Victorian and dawning Edwardian eras, this must already have recalled countless skirmishes between Imperial explorers and tribal peoples, as well as larger scale conflicts, such as the two Afghan Wars (beginning in 1838 and 1878) and the Boer War of 1899–1902, in which concentration camps were first invented by British soldiers. Yet Wells also does something arguably more subversive and disturbing than this, as the secure and superior families of London and the south-east are forced to flee in chaotic floods of hot, tired, bloody and thirsty refugees. In one early scene a crowd facing Martian heat-rays ‘bolted as blindly as a flock of sheep’ before getting jammed in a narrow country lane where at least three people were trampled to death in the panic. A little later the narrator finds Weybridge ‘in such confusion as I had never seen in any town before’ with a growing crowd at the railway station, and ‘the swarming platform … piled with boxes and packages’.
Midway through the book we switch to the viewpoint of the narrator’s brother in London. Presently refugees are streaming away from the capital too. Chapter 16 opens with ‘the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning — the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations … hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward’. Soon people are being trampled and crushed in the fight to get aboard trains, and policemen are ‘breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect’. On the Chalk Farm road the narrator’s brother ‘dodged across through a hurrying swarm of vehicles’ and dragged a bicycle from a looted cycle shop to speed his escape.
Out in the countryside a little while later the brother falls in with two women on a pony-chaise and saves them from the attacks of men aiming to steal their transport, and probably their money. Here the torrents of traumatised refugees are worse than ever. ‘A tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people … grew into distinctness as they rushed towards the corner, hurried past, and merged their individuality again in a receding multitude’. Time and again this impression of swarming, chaotic anonymity sweeps readers along the human rivers of refugees: ‘this was a whole population in movement … It had no character of its own’. The brother and the women ‘swept through Chipping Barnet with the torrent’ and presently find ‘trains swarming with people’ and a multitude fighting to get down to a stream, to drink from it like animals.
Shops are looted. People are robbed. Women and children are trampled underfoot. The proud people of the world’s mightiest Empire are reduced to anonymous swarming helpless masses — precisely the kind of dehumanising imagery for which Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness would later be criticised — his story of the Congo exploding with racially loaded depictions of anonymous swarms of black hands and arms and bodies. The heart of this Empire, London, the seat of governments which had arrogantly claimed to impose order, form, discipline, civilisation and progress on ‘inferior’ colonial peoples is now imploding in a formless chaos of selfish violence. ‘By ten o’clock’ that Monday morning ‘the police organization, and by midday even the railway organizations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body’. Culture is dissolving into raw nature.
At one level, Wells thus flips on its head the condescending racism of British imperialism and colonialism, as the calm orderly imperialists or jingoists swarm and jostle in anonymous panic or foaming waves of fugitives. At another, he turns this subversive technique inwards. In the 1880s and 90s thousands of Jews fled persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia, with Blood Libel pogroms breaking out into the early 20th century. A substantial Jewish community formed in the East End, along with a smaller Italian one in Soho and Clerkenwell. In the late 90s, as Wells was planning and writing The War of the Worlds, the right-wing British press was constantly whipping up moral panics against continental refugees and immigrants — people who, ironically enough, were usually labelled ‘aliens’.
‘Considerable difficulty has been experienced at Dover recently on account of the continual landing there of pauper aliens from the continent’. ‘During August there arrived from the continent 3155 aliens en route for America, and 5171 aliens not described’. These numbers were repeated month by month. Not long after those reports in 1896, readers were told that, ‘London is crowded with aliens, there being 33 in every 1000 of the total population. They swarm in the quarters to which one never enters … Dark alleys, evil-smelling streets … covered with the refuse of dust-carts … these are the localities, dark, dismal and out of the way, where the aliens of all nationalities swarm’. Dark, dirty, anonymous masses; Chinese, Poles, Russians, Italians and Lascars all reduced to one amorphous evil-smelling swarm of aliens… The resemblance to Wells’s fictional British refugees seems almost uncanny. Almost — until one hears the author recalling two brothers who, in the late 1890s ‘set about pouring millions of printed sheets of any sort of trash that sold, into the awakening minds of the British masses’.
These two men were Alfred and Harold Harmsworth, two of the biggest press barons of the earlier twentieth century. Wells in fact knew of them back in 1889–90, when he taught at Henley House, the very minor private school the brothers had attended in London. In 1896, the Harmsworths launched the Daily Mail. Offering itself at half a penny instead of the usual penny charged by other British dailies, the Mail’s intended print run of 100,000 immediately rocketed to almost 400,000; and by 1902 its circulation of over a million made it the biggest newspaper in the world. All of those xenophobic pieces on immigrants and London aliens came from the Mail, along with countless others in the years either side of Wells’s novel. Day after day, year after year, and in every decade down to Brexit and the present day, the Daily Mail sold hate, and made millions.
It was in this context that Wells, with bravura genius, flipped that situation on its head, and sent the families of Imperial England fleeing an unimaginably superior power. The colonizers were being colonized. Chapter 17 opens with images eerily prescient in their cinematic force. ‘If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London, every northward and eastward road … would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives … Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together … a stampede gigantic and terrible … six million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong’. Going on to liken this balloonist’s view of swarming refugees to splashes of ink, Wells talks of the human stream ‘pouring swiftly over a crest … exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper’. The metaphor is oblique but unmistakable. Where there was once ordered writing, meaning and communication flowing from a pen, now there are just chaotic blots of ink. And far, far worse was yet to come.
The Curate and the Vampires
Soon after a brief fightback on the Essex coast, when a ship destroys two Martian tripods, Wells cuts back to his primary narrator in Surrey for Book Two, ‘The Earth Under the Martians’. Our protagonist is now holed up with a curate in a deserted house, until the deadly black smoke sprayed by the Martians has dispersed. The figure of the curate embodies Wells’s contempt for a backward and irrational religion, one which the young author had found cruel and tyrannical. From their very first meeting the curate’s dazed gibberish typifies the failure of Christianity under the pulverizing waves of invasion. ‘“Fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! … The end! The great and terrible day of the Lord!”’
Stranded unwillingly with this infantile character all of Sunday and Monday, the narrator ‘grew weary and irritable with the curate’s perpetual ejaculations, I tired of the sight of his selfish despair’. When the black smoke clears, they begin to walk towards London, and near Mortlake enter an empty house in search of food. Here the fifth Martian cannister strikes the building and half buries the pair in the kitchen. With the curate ‘whimpering to himself’ the narrator hears from outside ‘a metallic hammering, then a violent hooting’ and then ‘a hissing like the hissing of an engine’ and ‘a measured thudding and vibration’.
Now trapped with limited food and water as the Martians work outside just inches away, the narrator is maddened by the curate’s ‘stupid rigidity of mind’ and ‘endless muttering monologue’. At times he has to use violence to keep the curate quiet, and as the grim days of hunger and thirst drag on, the curate eats excessively, and ‘would weep for hours together’ as if ‘this spoilt child of life thought his weak tears in some way efficacious’. He was, concludes the narrator with weary contempt ‘one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man’. And when we are told that ‘he was as lacking in restraint as a silly woman’ it is hard not to recall the young Wells’s deeply ambivalent response to the piety of his meek and long-suffering mother.
Sarah Wells had lost her daughter Fanny to appendicitis two years before Bertie was born, and before he reached his teens the author grew bewildered and angry at his mother’s absurd worship of a God who did nothing to alleviate her grinding toil and hardship. At about eleven or twelve years old the young Wells had a pivotal and ironic dream. A man was stretched upon a wheel, being basted over a fire beneath. The scene must surely be hell. But the figure dealing out torture was not the Devil. It was God. ‘Never had I hated God so intensely … suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie’. Recalling all this decades later, Wells’s anger seems as fresh as that of the twelve year old boy. ‘Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity? At the test of war, disease, social injustice and every real human distress, it fails — and leaves a cheated victim, as it abandoned my mother’.
In the novel the curate mingles cheated victim with spoiled child — and is so reckless and dangerous to them both that the narrator ultimately has to strike him down with the butt of a knife and leave him dead in the house before he himself escapes. It was no accident that the above trio of God’s failures included disease. Admiring the Martians’ ingeniously simple bodies and digestive systems as he watches from the crushed house, the narrator reflects: ‘Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy or unhealthy livers, or sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted above all these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion’. It is deeply telling that this envy mingles both disease and food. Wells was bedridden for long periods as a child and youth. This was sometimes accidental, as in an early broken leg, but later certainly the result of poverty and malnourishment. A rough rugby tackle at the North Wales school where Wells taught in Wrexham left him with a crushed kidney; and at age 21 he had ‘a scandalously skinny body’. ‘I was five foot five and always I weighed less than eight stone’.
Through the hole in the shattered house the narrator watches one of the Martians’ ‘handling machines’: ‘a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs’. The steampunk genius of this creation lies in its queasy union of robot and monstrous, slimy organism: ‘huge round bodies — or rather, heads — about four feet in diameter’. This head has ‘a kind of fleshy beak’, and ‘in a group around the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whip-like tentacles’, in two bunches of eight. Versions of these creatures have since mutated into innumerable glistening and devouring sci-fi monsters, from comics to the silver screen. But what on earth was it like to visualise these nightmare beings back in 1898? Worse was to come. For the Martians had no entrails, and were merely heads. ‘They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins’. Later the narrator sees a tentacle reach back into a cage to lift out a stout well-dressed man’, who disappears into a feeding frenzy of human shrieking and Martian hooting.
It is hard to think of one image which better captures the social injustice of Victorian Britain than this vampiric feeding. A world of ruthlessly mechanised utilitarian industries fed on the living, keeping them barely alive so that capitalists, aristocrats and clergy could live in idle luxury. Although Dracula had appeared only in 1897, John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ was a sensation on page and stage from 1819, and across the nineteenth century journalists and social critics frequently attacked corrupt landlords, employers or governments as vampires. And Wells’s Martian vampires are even more grimly exact embodiments of a social machine which so efficiently sucked the life out of millions. They are, he emphasizes, nothing but heads: pure calculating reason devoid of a human face or human heart.
Before he was eighteen the young Wells had been processed in the machine at the Southsea draper’s, working thirteen hours a day, six days of seven. He would later watch that machine devour the whole working life of his brother Freddy. When studying and teaching in London, walking six miles each day, Wells was still constantly under-fed and under-developed. Meanwhile, as the historian Sarah Wise has emphasized, an average of 45 people simply starved to death in London each year in the 1880s.
Eatable Ants
Finally escaping the ruined house, the narrator comes out on ‘the work of fifteen days’ and walks through ‘a landscape weird and lurid, of another planet’, where an uncanny Martian red weed has spread, so that the trees near Kew are like ‘an avenue of gigantic blood drops’. On Putney Hill he meets the artilleryman he had known briefly back in Surrey — and now the story descends into visions of apocalyptic hell easily exceeding Dracula or any Gothic novel. They sit behind some bushes and the soldier outlines his plans for survival. Humans, he is certain, are beaten, nothing more than ‘eatable ants’ for the Martians. Because of his character and training he is determined to survive by living in the London sewers — though he admits the risk that some in this feral life ‘will go savage — degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat’.
Implicitly far worse than that, however, are the timid human slaves of Victorian capitalism. ‘I’ve seen hundreds of ’em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train for fear they’d get dismissed if they didn’t … sleeping with the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money … And on Sundays — fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits!’ And now the apocalyptic future in store for humanity whips around to bite its own tail in a moment of astonishing and incisive satire. ‘Well, the Martians will be just a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry … They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them’. Caged and farmed for their blood (with the hint that maybe they will be kept alive in good utilitarian fashion) these animals will adopt ‘a sort of do-nothing religion … and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord … These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety’.
Nominally, the soldier is speaking. But the voice, the anger, the grim personal experience — all of these belong to Wells. And it is that dialogue and the succeeding partnership of the narrator and the soldier that clearly jolt us away from a purely sympathetic stance toward the drudging masses of late Victorian workers. Wells of all people, with that superhuman drive and energy and determination to escape, cannot help but feel contempt towards these spiritless toiling pious hordes. Even the point about joyless marriages rings true, as Wells quickly tired of his first wife, finding her intolerably meek and passive. And the sense of disdain only sharpens as the potential union between the two fugitives falters and breaks. They begin trying to dig a tunnel from an abandoned house into the sewers. But very soon the soldier tires. He gets them playing cards, drinking looted champagne and smoking pilfered cigars. And now the Wellsian contempt turns on the man of action and born survivor. ‘I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer to his drink and gluttony…’. The point is clear, as it was through the iconoclastic and visionary inventions of all those early fictions: there could be only one H.G. Wells.
‘Surely, if we have learnt nothing else, this war has taught us pity — pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.’ So says the narrator, after he has crept out of an abandoned inn on Putney Hill, ‘like a rat leaving its hiding place’. The description of ‘witless souls’ again retains something of the prejudice Wells had suffered as a Victorian child. But recalling that hoped for lesson of 1898 here in Brexit Britain, the big question must surely be: ‘what would Wells think of us now?’ Before and after the tragic idiocy of the Leave vote in 2016 a nation of ordinary working people has been distracted, tricked and conned by xenophobia and racism. Almost every teacher in Britain meets a hungry child daily. Child poverty now sits at 31% of the child population. Old people freeze in homes they can no longer afford to heat. 65% of the current Tory cabinet is drawn from private schools, attended by just 6% of the UK population. The country has had five Prime Ministers in less than seven years. Instead of Victorian imperial racism we now have internet post-imperial racism, sometimes directed at Ukrainian refugees. Once again cold, hungry, impoverished people are constantly told to fear the enemy without, rather than the privileged elite within. If Wells was alive today, he would probably be reading and quoting books on money laundering such as Oliver Bullough’s incisive work, Moneyland. In just over 200 pages Bullough makes it brutally clear that the enemy of the working classes, source of economic crashes and recessions since the 1970s, travels by private jet rather than rubber dinghy. The dark, secret, dirty, dangerous and uncontrollable problem swarming, flooding, surging across international borders is not refugees. It is money.
Many thanks for reading. My new novel, Kali the Wonder Dog (2023) is a surprisingly fun satire on Brexit and right-wing British identity. For a more serious historical and political take, see Talking Dirty: the History of Disgust from Jesus Christ to Boris Johnson (2023).
