refers to them as “my cousins,” an apparent confusion on Wells’s part.
14 (p. 49) I knew the landlord had a horse and dog cart: A dog cart is a light, two-wheeled carriage (named because the driver sits at the rear of the coach, on top of the box originally intended to hold a dog). By this point in the story, the narrator begins to feel the “immediate pressure of necessity” (p. 10) that he had imagined prompted the Martian invasion. He realizes that to get his wife and their servant to safety, he will need a vehicle and pays an exorbitant fee to the greedy owner of the public house. This subtle but telling scene reflects the reality that, in emergencies, we are apt to sacrifice morality for survival.
15 (p. 52) war fever that occasionally runs through a civilised community: Here Wells begins to transform his narrator from accidental witness to intentional reporter. After driving his wife and servant to Leatherhead, he returns to be “in at the death,” thinking the army will annihilate the sluggish Martians. His return gives him—and Wells—the opportunity to give a firsthand account of the Martian invasion.
16 (p. 54) like the working of a gigantic electric machine: As early as 1880, James Wimshurst (1832-1903) developed an electrostatic induction generator, and Wells probably saw it work in the London Science Museum. Electricity itself was not widely used in late-nineteenth-century England, and either gas or oil lamps provided domestic light in much of London.
17 (p. 54) And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it?: The Martian fighting machine stands in contrast to the Martians themselves. The narrator describes the Martians in minute detail on pp. 146-152. They do not need sleep and wear no clothes; they can barely hear on Earth and communicate by telepathy; and they live on human blood. But while Wells makes the Martians nonhuman, squid-like creatures, their three-legged machines are caricatures of the human body. At the same time, the idea of Martians riding around Surrey on three-legged machines recalls Wells’s interest in bicycling—where a man rides on top of a machine he propels (in 1896 Wells published a seriocomic novel, The Wheels of Chance, about the bicycling craze). Wells wants to make the Martians radically different from humans but at the same time to show them as a possible evolutionary future for mankind.
18 (p. 57) to rejoin my wife at Leatherhead: Wells adds yet another nuance to the narrator: Here he realizes he should be with his wife but says he is too wet and tired to retrace his steps. Fear replaces the “war fever” he feels on p. 52. Curiosity will soon displace both fear and loyalty to his wife.
19 (p. 57) It was the landlord of the Spotted Dog: Wells establishes a parallel between the dead horse (p. 55) with a broken neck and the dead landlord, whose neck is also broken. The horse represents outmoded technology unable to withstand the Martian attack, while the landlord represents a humanity concerned only with its own interests and unable to see larger issues, especially the need to organize in order to survive. Both the horse and the landlord are random victims as well, so it is as if the narrator were exempted because of their deaths so he can tell his story.
20 (p. 60) Then I perceived this was a wrecked train: In Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902), Wells states: “The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam engine running upon a railway.” The Martians strike terror in the humans in part by demolishing what Wells considers humanity’s crowning technological achievement of the nineteenth century.
21 (p. 64) ever and again: Note Wells’s occasional sloppiness, the unnecessary repetition of this phrase, which he uses three paragraphs above.
22 (p. 72) but I was not too terrified for thought: Earlier the narrator was saved by chance or luck. Now he is adapting to circumstance in order to survive. When a chance shell hits one of the Martians’ fighting machines—the only defensive success in the war—it is simply another case of luck. In fact, it will be sheer luck that saves humanity—the Martians’ inability to cope with earthly bacteria.
23 (p. 73) the camera that fired the Heat-Ray: It is not clear whether Wells is comparing the projector of the