I preached acceptable folly—my God, what folly!—when I should have stood up, though I died for it, and called upon them to repent—repent! ... Oppressors of the poor and needy ... !” (p. 156).

Even in this madness we detect a thread of criticism that leads straight to Wells: The Church should be at the service of the poor, but it merely serves the status quo. Like all other institutions of the pre-Martian world, it will have to be replaced. When the curate’s shrieking threatens to reveal their position to the Martians, the narrator has no choice but to silence him. He knocks him out, but before he can do anything to save him, a Martian sends in a metallic tentacle that drags the curate to his doom. His blood will be food for the Martian.

Miss Elphinstone and the “bearded, eagle-faced man” are very different but absolutely important elements in Wells’s vision. Both appear in the chapters in which the principal actor is the narrator’s medical student brother. As he makes his escape from London, the brother becomes an accidental hero. Three men are attacking two women riding in a small carriage pulled by a pony. Wells’s initial description of the scene is critical:

One of the ladies, a short woman dressed in white, was simply screaming; the other, a dark, slender figure, slashed at the man who gripped her arm with a whip she held in her disengaged hand (p. 106).

The woman screaming (Mrs. Elphinstone) is a female version of the curate, unable to react rationally to the situation, incapable of saving herself. The other woman (Miss Elphinstone, sister to Mrs. Elphinstone’s husband) not only tries to save herself but actually comes to the aid of the brother when he finds himself facing two assailants:

He would have had little chance against them had not the slender lady very pluckily pulled up and returned to his help. It seems she had had a revolver.... She fired at six yards’ distance, narrowly missing my brother (p. 107).

Miss Elphinstone embodies the artilleryman’s idea of the “able-bodied, clean-minded” woman who will be a partner to the man of the new society. By working together, the brother and Miss Elphinstone save not only themselves—they board a ship bound for Ostend that takes them not only out of England but out of the novel as well—but also the incompetent Mrs. Elphinstone. Wells’s vision of the new woman is that of a self-reliant, independent individual, able to think and act on her own, no longer the “inferior vessel” of past ages.

The “bearded, eagle-faced man” is a problematic image for modern readers. As the brother and the two Elphinstone women make their way toward the sea, they run into a throng of refugees:

Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and sent him reeling (p. 114).

This man is Wells’s caricature Jew, running for his life but unable to see that money is not going to be his salvation. When his bag bursts and his gold coins spill onto the highway, he risks his life trying to save his money. The brother tries to save the man, whose back is broken when he is run over by a carriage. But even as the brother tries to pull the fatally injured man out of traffic: “My brother looked up, and the man with the gold twisted his head round and bit the wrist that held his collar” (p. 115). His love of gold far outweighs his instinct to survive. This is Wells’s version of the anti-Semitism common in England at the time, that Jews were money-grubbing monsters who cared for nothing but gold. It is an unfortunate side of an author so liberal and clear-thinking in so many other areas, but one we must see if we are to have a clear image of the man and his writing.

The War of the Worlds is remarkable for its economy. All of the action takes place in a two-week period, with a three-day coda when the narrator has a nervous breakdown (book two, chapter 9) after the Martians fall victim to bacterial infection. The narrator recovers,