GANGNES: We now know for a certainty that bacteria are absolutely essential to digestion in human beings and many other organisms. See Sai Manasa Jandhyala, et al, "Role of the Normal Gut Microbiota" (2015).

GANGNES: The Germ Theory of Disease ("Germ Theory")--the understanding that diseases are caused by microorganisms (bacteria and viruses)--only came into British public consciousness toward the end of the nineteenth century. Prior to the rise of Germ Theory, "Miasma Theory" dominated scientific conceptions of the nature of disease. Gaining a better understanding of how diseases were caused and spread led to reforms in public health and sanitation.

More information:

• Jemima Hodkinson, "The History of Germ Theory" on Big Picture's website
• Marianna Karamanou, et al. "From Miasmas to Germs: a Historical Approach to Theories of Infectious Disease Transmission"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 228: "a Victorian exhibition center constructed (in 1854 by Sir John Paxton) of glass and iron. It was originally used to showcase materials from the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Palace, which burned in the 1930s, was in Sydenham in southeast London, about eight miles from the city center."

GANGNES: The Crystal Palace was a massive glass structure constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851. It stood in Hyde Park, London until it was moved to Sydenham Hill in 1852-4, where it remained until it was burned down in 1936. During the Exhibition, it housed exhibits on cultures, animals, and technologies from all over the world.

More information:

• "Crystal Palace" on Encyclopædia Britannica's website
• The Crystal Palace Museum website
• "The Crystal Palace: The Story of a Great Building | AmorSciendi" (YouTube)
• Footage of the Crystal Palace burning down in 1936 (YouTube, "Crystal Palace Burns Down - 1936 | Today in History | 30 Nov 16")

"View from the Knightsbridge Road of The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park for Grand International Exhibition of 1851":

GANGNES: Note here that HUGHES AND GEDULD disagree with MCCONNELL's identification of the reference.

From MCCONNELL 289-90: "A last, and very curious, invocation of the sub-theme of colonial warfare and exploitation. In 1877 Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé Indians had surrendered to the United States Army in a noble and widely-reported speech: 'I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. . . . Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more for ever.' Wells, by associating the tragic dignity of Chief Joseph's language with the now-defeated Martian invader, achieves a striking reversal of emotion. For we now understand that it is the Martians, pathetically overspecialized prisoners of their own technology, who are the truly pitiable, foredoomed losers of this war of the worlds, of ecologies, of relationships to Nature."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 224: MCCONNELL's comment is "farfetched. ... [T]he Nez Perce in Wells's day were unsung, and he would not deal in such an obscure allusion."

More information:

• The official website of the Nez Percé people
• The Encyclopædia Britannica article on the Nez Percé people

GANGNES: These are references to how human beings treat "lower animals"; for example, hunting them for fun, skinning them or cutting off their horns for clothing and jewelry, and so forth. The comparison would be especially appropriate during a time when "big game"/trophy/sport hunting in colonial locales (especially Africa) was popular among British men. A particularly tragic example is the ivory trade, which forms the backdrop of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899).

More information:

• Angela Thompsell, "Real Men/Savage Nature: The Rise of African Big Game Hunting, 1870–1914"
• R. W. Beachey, "The East African Ivory Trade in the Nineteenth Century"

GANGNES: Vivisection is "the action of cutting or dissecting some part of a living organism; spec. the action or practice of performing dissection, or other painful experiment, upon living animals as a method of physiological or pathological study" (Oxford English Dictionary).

Since Wells cut this section from the volume, no explicit reference to vivisection remains in a collected edition of the novel. However, the practice is central to Wells's 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau.

More information:

• "A History of Antivivisection from the 1800s to the Present: Part I (mid-1800s to 1914)" on The Black Ewe
• Nuno Henrique Franco, "Animal Experiments in Biomedical Research: A Historical Perspective"
• Lewis Carroll, "Some Popular Fallacies About Vivisection"

From MCCONNELL 228: at the time, ~$180

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 215: at least ten times the usual amount

GANGNES: "a fleet of the Royal Navy detailed for service in the English Channel. ... In 1909 the Channel Fleet became the 2nd Division of the Home Fleet." (Oxford English Dictionary).

GANGNES: Blackfriars Bridge and Tower Bridge are two large bridges spanning the Thames from north to south in the eastern part of London. Today, the Millennium Bridge (a pedestrian bridge) and Southwark Bridge lie between them, but Southwark Bridge was not opened until 1921, and the Millennium Bridge 2000 (hence the name). These are four of the five Thames bridges overseen today by the London City Corporation. See the City of London site's page on bridges.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 227: Blackfriars Bridge is "a bridge in central London between Waterloo Bridge and Southwark Bridge. It spans the Thames from Queen Victoria Street (on the north) to Southwark Street (on the south).

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 234: Tower Bridge is "London's most famous bridge. It opens periodically to admit the passage of shipping. It spans the Thames between the Tower of London (on the north) and the district of Bermondsey (on the south)."

GANGNES: The anti-Semitism embodied in this figure is clear even when "Jew" is changed to "man" in the 1898 volume and subsequent editions (see the text comparison page). As STOVER (111) observes, the caricature of a greedy "eagle-faced man" would have been recognizable to Victorian readers even with the explicit word "Jew" removed.

GANGNES: Note that MCCONNELL, HUGHES AND GEDULD, and STOVER do not completely agree on their explanations of this reference.

From MCCONNELL 218: In the Church of England, the Vestry is not just the room in a church where vestments are stored; it is also a committee of parishioners who arrange local matters like street cleaning.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 214: "Vestry here is not used in its usual ecclesiastical sense but refers to a committee of citizens 'vested' with the task of arranging for such basic local services as health and food inspection and garbage disposal. St. Pancras (then a London borough) is located northwest of the City of London."

From STOVER 161: "A public-health committee of that city district responsible for its garbage removal--a task now beyond its capacity as all public services are overwhelmed."

GANGNES: As is evident by this point, the entirety of The War of the Worlds is specifically situated in actual locations in and around London. This rapid-fire naming of specific streets and neighborhoods can be overwhelming to readers who are not familiar with London, but to those who are (as many of Wells's readers would be), they underscore that this crisis is happening in a very real location. It also gives the narrative a breathless sense of momentum while maintaining the specificity of war reporting.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 235: Westbourne Park is "a district in the London borough of Kensington, about two and a half miles from the city center."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 233: St. Pancras is "a London borough north of the Thames, two miles form the city center. It is the site of Euston and St. Pancras [train] stations, main transit points for northern England and Scotland."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 230: Kilburn is "a northwest London district between Hampstead (on the north) and Paddington (on the south), about three and a half miles northwest of central London."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 233: St. John's Wood is "a middle-to-upper-class residential district northwest of Regent's Park, in north London."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 229: Hampstead is "a hilly northeast London suburb, about five miles from the city center. From its highest point, on Hampstead Heath, it offers a magnificent vista of London."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 233: Shoreditch is "a working-class district in east London, about a mile from the city center."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 229: Haggerston is "a tough, working-class district in north London, north of Bethnal Green and east of Shoreditch."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 230: Hoxton is "a tough, working-class district in north London, between Shoreditch and Haggerston, about two miles northeast of Charing Cross in central London."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 229: Ealing is "a London borough in the county of Middlesex, some eight miles west of the city center."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 229: East Ham is a "London district in the county of Essex, about seven miles east of the city center."

GANGNES: A large collection of orchids would, indeed, have been quite valuable. The craze surrounding "orchid hunting"--the search for rare and beautiful orchids to collect (and/or sell to collectors)--was at its height during the late nineteenth century, to the point where the fad had a name: "orchidelirium." Some varieties would fetch extremely high prices, and wealthy Victorians sank excessive amounts of money into their collections.

Sources and more information:

• Claire Cock-Starkey, "The Dangerous and Highly Competitive World of Victorian Orchid Hunting," MentalFloss, November 18, 2016.
• Andrew Amelinckx, "Old Time Farm Crime: The Cutthroat World of Victorian Orchid Hunters," Modern Farmer, August 1, 2014.
• Li Zhou, "Orchidelirium, an Obsession with Orchids, Has Lasted for Centuries," Smithsonian.com, January 29, 2015.

GANGNES: See earlier note in this installment from STOVER on "much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light." As MCCONNELL (182) notes in Installment 4: "The first portable camera, the Kodak, had been patented by George Eastman in 1888. Wells himself was an ardent amateur photographer."

Even before the portable camera and the beginnings of amateur photography, the prevalence of photojournalism would have made most readers familiar with, and likely interested in, photography. References to cameras and photography, especially in relation to the heat ray, are prevalent throughout the novel.

More information:

• "Nineteenth-Century Photography: A Timeline" on The Victorian Web
• "Victorian photographic techniques" on the National Museum of Scotland's site

From STOVER 81: "The Heat-Ray is often taken as a prophecy of beam-focused lasers, but this is to miss the photographic metaphor Wells uses: 'the camera that fired the Heat-Ray,' 'the camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray.' The Martians' rayguns are in fact cameras in reverse, emitting light not receiving it, and they are in fact mounted on tripods as were the heavy old cameras of the day. What they see they zap. More, the photo-journalistic realism of the invasion recounted by the narrator recalls that of Roger Fenton, whose coverage of the Crimean War in 1855 is the first instance of a war photographer on the scene of action. His pictures were accompanied by sensational stories done by the famed William Howard Russell of the London Times, the first war correspondent in the modern sense. The narrator's account is modeled after both precedents, visually and journalistically."

GANGNES: Stover here gestures (though not by name) to MCCONNELL (145), whose note is quoted by HUGHES AND GEDULD in their edition. MCCONNELL'S note reads: "Though the details of the heat-ray are vague, they do anticipate in some remarkable ways the development of the laser beam in the 1950s."

That said, MCCONNELL and others rightly point to one of the numerous instances in which Wells's descriptions of technologies and events appear prescient. Indeed, many of the Martian technologies seem to anticipate military tech developed for use in the First and Second World Wars. For an analysis of The War of the Worlds and its early illustrations as they relate to early twentieth-century warfare, see Gangnes, "Wars of the Worlds: H.G. Wells’s Ekphrastic Style in Word and Image" in Art and Science in Word and Image: Exploration and Discovery (Brill, 2019), pp. 100-114.

GANGNES: Summaries like these are common in serialized fiction, as they are in comics and in television series--a kind of "previously on" bit of information. This not only reminds readers of what happened in the previous installment (which in this case would have been released a month prior), but also allows new readers to jump in at a later issue if they missed out. This was especially important in cases where an issue of a popular magazine or newspaper might have been sold out.

GANGNES: This term was relatively new when Wells wrote the novel; it first emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and was generally used in scientific journals.

Source:

• Oxford English Dictionary entry on prefix "extra-"

GANGNES: The kind of electrical telegraphy with which Wells's readers would have been familiar began development in the early-to-mid nineteenth century and was commonly used by the end of the Victorian period.

More information:

• Mary Bellis, "The History of the Electric Telegraph and Telegraphy" on ThoughtCo
• Clare D. McGillem, "Telegraph" on the Encyclopædia Britannica's site

GANGNES: The narrator's comment here underscores this novel's preoccupation with the Victorian press. The style of the narration evokes something of war journalism from this period, and the unreliability and mercenary practices of newspapers are a theme throughout the novel. Wells is not exaggerating; the Victorian period has been called the "Golden Age" of the British periodical because of the staggering number and quality of newspapers, journals, and magazines published during the time.

More information:

• Debora Wynne, "The Periodical Press" on the Oxford Bibliographies site
• "History of C19th British Newspapers" on the North Carolina State University site's page for Nineteenth Century Newspaper Analytics
• The Victorian Periodicals section of The Victorian Web
• The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals site

GANGNES: Punch (1841-2002) was a weekly satirical magazine that was first marketed toward the Victorian middle class. It included text, cartoons and illustrations, and other visual features. It was characterized by a "whimsical mode of comedy that focused on the trials and aspirations of the still emergent middle classes."

Source:

• Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press and The British Library, 2009, pp. 517-519.

More information:

• The History of "Punch" (1895) by M. H. Spielmann on Project Gutenberg
• Punch issues on Project Gutenberg
• Punch facsimiles on HathiTrust's digital library
• Official Punch cartoon archives

GANGNES: Warwick Goble (1862-1943) was a Victorian and early-twentieth-century periodical and book illustrator. His watercolor book illustrations have strong Japanese and Chinese influences and themes. Simon Houfe refers to Goble as a "brilliant watercolour painter of the 1900s and 1920s" and writes that Goble's "filmy translucent watercolours, with their subtle tints and Japanese compositions ... are unique in British illustration, but are not noticed by the collectors of [Arthur] Rackham and [Edmund] Dulac" (210).

In his dictionary entry, Houfe only acknowledges Goble's early relationship with periodicals in his role as a staff illustrator for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Westminster Gazette; Pearson's Magazine is not mentioned, despite the fact that Goble illustrated not only The War of the Worlds, but also Arthur Conan Doyle's Tales of the High Seas (short series) and other pieces in 1897. He provided illustrations for volumes of two other major pieces of late-Victorian serialized fiction: Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Kidnapped.

Biographical sources:

• Simon Houfe, The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, 1800-1914 (Baron Publishing, 1981), pp. 210, 318.
• "Warwick Goble: A Biography of the Illustrator" on Pook Press's site.

From MCCONNELL 126: Nature is a scientific journal first edited by Sir Norman Lockyer, who was one of Wells's teachers at the Normal School of Science.

From STOVER 57: This is a reference to the article "A strange Light on Mars," which was published in Nature in 1894.

GANGNES: This is one of the many instances where Wells establishes the novel within a framework of real scientific discoveries and historical events. These connections enhance the realism and journalistic quality of the narrative.

More information:

• Facsimile of "A Strange Light on Mars" in Nature, August 2, 1894 on The Internet Archive

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 199: Nice Observatory was "France's most important nineteenth-century observatory." It was constructed in 1880 on Mt. Gros, northeast of Nice. It used a 30" refracting telescope.

From MCCONNELL 126: Henri Joseph Anastase Perrotin (1845-1904) was a French astronomer who worked at the Nice Observatory 1880-1904.

GANGNES: The 1898 edition adds a reference to Lick Observatory (in California), which the narrator says noticed the light before Perrotin did.

More information:

• "Perrotin, Henri Joseph Anastase" on Encyclopedia.com
• Official Côte d’Azur Observatory (Nice Observatory) site
• Official Lick Observatory site

From MCCONNELL 126: Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835-1910) was an Italian astronomer who claimed to have discovered "canals" on Mars. Schiaparelli called them canali ("channels" in Italian) but the (mis)translation of the word in to English caused speculation that the canali might have been made by intelligent life.

From STOVER 57: Schiaparelli mapped Mars during the opposition of 1877 and provided names for some surface features still used today.

More information:

• Walt Hickey, "A Mistranslated Word Led To Some Of The Best Fake News Of The 20th Century" on FiveThirtyEight
• Ephrat Livni, "When reporters accidentally wrote science fiction: A true story about Mars" on Quartz
• Richard Milner, "Tracing the Canals of Mars: An Astronomer's Obsession" on SPACE.com

From MCCONNELL 125: In the eighteenth century, England drove native Tasmanians from their land in order to turn Tasmania into a prison colony.

From STOVER 55-6: "The racially Australoid natives of Tasmania survived until 1876 in a state of upper paleolithic culture. To the island's Dutch and later British colonists, they were so many subhumans hunted down for dog meat."

More information:

• Richard Flanagan, "The lost tribe" on The Guardian's site
• "British colonisation of Tasmania" entry on Wikipedia

GANGNES: "Inferior" as it is used here reflects Victorian conceptions of racial hierarchies. There are, of course, many, many scholarly works on this subject, but here are a few good places to start:

• "Victorian Racism" on The Victorian Web
• Carolyn Burdett, "Post Darwin: social Darwinism, degeneration, eugenics" on the British Library's site
• "Race" on the Oxford Bibliographies site

From MCCONNELL 125 and 151: The dodo was a large, flightless bird from Mauritius that was hunted into extinction by the seventeenth century. North American bison were also thought to be on the verge of extinction during this time. This is the first of two comparisons between the extinction of the dodo and the potential extinction of humans by the Martians; the second is in Chapter VII.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 205: "Later, the very idea of such a bird [as the dodo] was ridiculed ... until skeletal remains came to light in 1863 and 1889."

More information:

• "Dodo" on the Encyclopædia Britannica's site
• Cristen Conger, "What brought bison back from the brink of extinction?" on howstuffworks.com

From DANAHAY 41: Reference to a Victorian debate regarding the existence of intelligent life on Mars. See Wells's article "Intelligence on Mars" in the Saturday Review 8 (April 4, 1896), p. 345-46.

More information:

• Facsimile on HathiTrust of "Intelligence on Mars" in the Saturday Review (1896)

GANGNES: Passages such as these garnered praise for the novel in late-Victorian vegetarian publications such as The Herald of the Golden Age (1896-1918) and The Vegetarian Magazine (1890-1909).

More information:

• "Man under Martian Rule" in The Herald of the Golden Age, 15 August 1898, p. 94

GANGNES: The "robes of smoke" here refers to the "London fog" (also known as "pea soup fog," "black fog," and "killer fog"). This greasy, yellowish fog that hung around London in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was a byproduct of coal burning. It caused respiratory problems and other illnesses for London residents, especially factory workers. Here, then, Wells offers a vision of a London whose pollution has, perhaps paradoxically, been temporarily swept away by the Martians' own Black Smoke, which has brought London's industry to a standstill.

More information:

• Major cultural references to pea soup fog
• Jesse O Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: the London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016)
• Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth (2015)

GANGNES: Now better known as the London Zoo. The Zoological Society of London established the Zoological Gardens in 1828. For excerpts from primary and secondary accounts, see Lee Jackson, "Victorian London - Entertainment and Recreation - Zoo's and Menageries - London Zoo / Zoological Gardens."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 233: "Sir Christopher Wren's great cathedral. In London, east of Ludgate Hill, one-eighth of a mile north of the Thames at Blackfriars."

GANGNES: St. Paul's Cathedral is a massive cathedral that traces its origins to the year 604. It lies in the Blackfriars region of London, near the London Stock Exchange, and is tall enough that it would have been visible to the narrator in most parts of the city.

More information:

• St. Paul's Cathedral official website

St. Paul's Cathedral in the late nineteenth century:

GANGNES: Knowledge: An Illustrated Magazine of Science, Plainly Worded -- Exactly Described (1881-1918) was founded as a weekly periodical with three-column pages by astronomer Richard Anthony Proctor in an effort to make scientific research more accessible. Advertisements allowed Knowledge to undercut the sales of Nature (see next note and Installment 1). It became a monthly periodical in 1885 and, under the editorship of Arthur Cowper, began to introduce reproductions of astronomical photographs, which allowed for the popular distribution of pictures of the stars. This structure of Knowledge at the time when Wells was writing The War of the Worlds is consistent with the idea that the journal might have published photographs of Mars and Venus.

Source:

• Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press and The British Library, 2009, pp. 335-336.

GANGNES: The narrator believes the curate to be suffering from what we would now call Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Victorians might have referred to this condition as "male hysteria" in the curate's case; soon it would be called "Shell Shock" due to the PTSD experienced by soldiers during the First World War.

From DANAHAY 144: "The Martians are all brain, in keeping with Wells's theory that the bodies of 'advanced' creatures would atrophy through disuse."

GANGNES: Live pigeon shooting was at peak popularity in late-1800s Britain. It involved rounding up live pigeons and releasing them in such a way that participants could shoot them with rifles mid-flight. Clay pigeon shooting was introduced in 1880 as a more controlled, convenient, and humane sport.

The "systematic impalement of insects" refers to butterfly collecting and other sorts of insect collecting--a fad that was extremely popular during the Victorian period (it features in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch (1871-2)). Insects were displayed to their best advantage by driving a pin through their bodies to stick them into display boxes.

More information:

• Chris Batha, "A Tale of Three Hats" on Shooting Sportsman (history of live pigeon shooting)
• Franziska Kohlt, "Creepy Victorians: How nineteenth century Britain became obsessed with insects" on the Royal Entomological Society website
• Tara MacDonald, "Victorian Insect Bodies" on The Floating Academy

From DANAHAY 145: "Wells himself suffered from liver problems."

GANGNES: Ants do sleep, though not in the same way humans or many other animals do.

More information:

• Matt Walker, "The Secrets of Ant Sleep Revealed" on BBC Earth News

GANGNES: A new paragraph is added here for the 1898 volume. See text comparison page. This paragraph constitutes one of the most significant revisions to the novel in terms of the text's relationship with Pearson's and illustration. The new paragraph covertly criticizes Warwick Goble's illustrations of the novel:

"I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the Fighting Machines, and there his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have created. They were no more like the Martians I saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the pamphlet would have been much better without them."

Wells's friend English writer Arnold Bennett noticed the new passage and wrote to Wells: “I gathered … that you were not exactly enchanted with Warwick Goble’s efforts.” Wells admitted the intentional critique: Goble “made people think my tale was a wearisome repetition of kettles on camera stands. I really don’t think he put a fair quantity of brain into that enterprise or I wouldn’t have slanged him in the book.”

References:

• Wells, H. G. A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds: H. G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, with Introduction and Notes by David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld. Edited by Harry M. Geduld. Indiana UP, 1993, pp. 216-217.

From MCCONNELL 249: "Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896), German engineer, was the chief developer of glider flight."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 219: "German engineer Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896) was one of the pioneers of man-bearing gliders."

From DANAHAY 148: "gliders invented by Otto Lilienthal (1849-1896), a German engineer"

GANGNES: Gladiolus are flowering plants, not vegetables. The flowers and greens are edible to humans, but eating the bulbs is not advised.

More information:

• Edible Flowers: Part Two on Eat the Weeds

GANGNES: Waltham Abbey is ~15 miles north of the London city center. This is where the Royal Gunpowder Mills are located. Gunpowder production began there in the 1660s, and by the nineteenth century the mill was taking advantage of steam power to supply explosives to the British Navy and Army. The destruction of this site, then, is a huge blow to the British defense against the Martians; in trying to destroy one of the fighting machines, the British destroy a valuable supply of explosives for their military.

More information:

• Official Waltham Abbey Gunpowder Mills website
• Rupert Baker, "Explosive tales from Waltham Abbey" on the Royal Society's website
• Article on Essex local history on the BBC's website

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 215: "The Midland Railway Company provided public transportation to such Midlands cities as Nottingham, Leicester, Manchester, and Leeds. Its London terminus was St. Pancras Station."

From STOVER 169: "A vigilante group whose name echoes that of the Committee of Public Safety formed under Robespierre during the French Revolution."

From DANAHAY 134: "Flight was still a dream when Wells wrote this, and so he is vague about how exactly the Martians' flying machines operate."

From MCCONNELL 240: "Popular newspapers frequently issued these supplements, cheap and crude reproductions, 'suitable for framing,' of famous works of art or stirring historical scenes; they decorated the homes of many lower middle class families."

From MCCONNELL 207: "A tall, dense, puffy cloud. Many readers during the First World War viewed this as a forecast of the use of poison gas."

GANGNES: Smoke suffocates wasps; this practice is still done today, often with smoke-like products that can be purchased for this purpose.

From MCCONNELL 210: "The first British destroyer, the Havoc, was commissioned in 1893. The development of steam power in the second half of the century had revolutionized the concept of naval warfare, and put in jeopardy Britain's traditional bulwark of defense, the Royal Navy. In the growing war-fever at the end of the century, much concern was generated around what seemed to be the increased power of European navies, especially the French, and the Naval Defense Act of 1889 laid down rules for the refurbishing of the Navy similar to those which had earlier attempted to reinvigorate the Army."

From STOVER 154-5: London's first motor exhibition was in 1895; legislation kept motorcars' speed slower than horses (and horse-drawn carts/carriages) and bicycles. In 1903 the maximum speed for motorcars was raised from two miles per hour to twenty.

From MCCONNELL 212: a one-horse, two-wheeled cab for two passengers with the driver seated above and behind the cab

From DANAHAY 116: "these were frequently for hire on the streets of London like taxis"

From STOVER 158: This heroic character is likely named after Montstuart Elphinstone (died 1859), who explored the dangerous wilds of Afghanistan on behalf of the British Raj. Wells's readers would have been familiar with his feats.

From MCCONNELL 216: "The East End of London, until well into the 1930s, was a notorious working-class slum."

From DANAHAY 122: "The Italian scientist Luigi Galvani (1737-98) passed electricity through dead animal tissue to make it move; this kind of involuntary movement became known as galvanism."

GANGNES: Note that MCCONNELL disagrees with HUGHES AND GEDULD and STOVER here about the importance of this title.

From MCCONNELL 220: "In England, the presiding judge of any court with several members."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 215: "The nearest American equivalent [of "Chief Justice" here] (although there are many differences in the two offices) would be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court."

From STOVER: "The Lord Chief Justice of England is equivalent to the Chief Justice of the United States."

From MCCONNELL 223: "[Hot-air] Ballooning began in the late eighteenth century. It was employed for military purposes in the American Civil War, and many prophecies of the late nineteenth century envisaged the wartime use of balloons for both reconnaissance and bombardment."

From MCCONNELL 224: "The Goths were a Teutonic people who invaded and settled in the Roman Empire between the third and fifth centuries A.D. The Huns, an Asiatic people, invaded and pillaged the Empire during the fifth century A.D."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 215: "The Goths, a Germanic tribe, invaded Rome's Eastern and Western Empires during the third through the fifth century. The Huns, a nomadic Asian people, under their leader Atilla, invaded and ravaged much of Europe during the fifth century."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 212: "In the 1890s, Sunday papers far outsold dailies.... Wells did not foresee the change and unwittingly 'dated' his narrative for future readers" when newspaper reading habits changed.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 212: "The various routes and stations of the (now defunct) South-Western Railway Company. Its terminus is Waterloo Station, London. The network had three main branches: the Northern, serving locations in the direction of Staines and Reading; the Central, serving locations in the direction of Bournemouth and Southampton; and the Southern, serving locations in the direction of Guildford, Epsom, and Leatherhead."

From MCCONNELL 194: The first "tube"/underground railway was opened in London in 1890.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 213: "Adjoining the Waterloo Station terminus of the South-Western Railway was another station belonging to the South-Eastern Railway (a separate company providing service to locations in the direction of Margate, Dover, Folkstone, and Hastings), whose terminus was Charing Cross. Normally there were barriers preventing passengers from moving directly from one railroad to another. These barriers had been lifted because of the emergency situation."

From MCCONNELL 195: "The Salvation Army was founded in 1878 by the Methodist minister and social worker William Booth, for the purpose of aiding the inhabitants of the terrible slums in the East End of London."

GANGNES: The Houses of Parliament are on the north bank of the Thames in Westminster, between Westminster Abbey and Westminster Bridge. The "Clock Tower" here is commonly referred to today as "Big Ben."

From MCCONNELL 195: "The reorganization of the British Army included an emphasis upon the reserve forces; but there was considerable doubt throughout the years before World War I whether a 'reserve' soldier would really be able to function in a battlefield situation."

From DANAHAY 102: "somebody in the army reserve force"

GANGNES: Fleet Street is a central London road on the north side of the Thames; it becomes (the) Strand (see below) to the west. During the Victorian period it was the home of most major London periodical publishers. It is associated with the story of Sweeney Todd: the "Demon Barber of Fleet Street," who appeared in the Victorian "penny dreadful" The String of Pearls: A Romance (1846-7).

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 229: Fleet Street is "a famous central London thoroughfare linking Ludgate Circus and The Strand. Until 1988 it was the home of many of London's most important newspapers. During Wells's lifetime 'Fleet Street' was a term synonymous with the British press."

More information:

• Wikipedia article on the character of Sweeney Todd
• "The String of Pearls" text on VictorianLondon.org
• Judith Flanders, "Penny Dreadfuls," on the British Library's website

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 213: "This is a slip. Until about 1870, paper was dampened to ensure a good printing impression and was then dried, but by the 1890s dry paper was used.... The anachronism disappears in the Heinemann edition (p. 127), which reads: 'type, so fresh that the paper was still wet.'"

GANGNES: It is unclear what HUGHES AND GEDULD mean when they write that the "anachronism disappears in the Heinemann edition"; the Heinemann edition also includes this line on page 124.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 213: "Threepence a copy was three to six times the normal price."

From DANAHAY 102: "Wells is implying that newspapers were exploiting the situation by making their newspapers unusually expensive."

From MCCONNELL 196: "Field pieces with finely-wound wire, coiled under tension, inside their barrels. An early form of rifling (introduced in 1855), the wire coil made it possible to construct a much thinner and lighter barrel than previously, and also increased greatly the effective range of the projectile. Wire guns were used extensively during the period, and in the First World War."

From DANAHAY 103: "artillery with wire wound in the barrels that increased their power and range"

From MCCONNELL 197: these gloves were "highly fashionable, even somewhat dandified," in the late 1890s

From MCCONNELL 198: "the 'Coventry' tricycle, two wheels with a much larger supporting wheel to one side, current around 1876"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 213: sometimes nicknamed "Tuppence-farthing bikes" (because of their appearance)

From MCCONNELL 199: "The first practical electric light had been developed by Thomas Edison in 1879, but the cities of Europe and America were still lit by gas at the time of the story."

From STOVER 141: "Army barracks in central London. In the event, soldiers quartered there are useless in facing unconventional Martian forces."

From MCCONNELL 201: "This was nearly fifty times the normal price of a newspaper."

From DANAHAY 107: "The price of a newspaper [since earlier in the installment] has now risen from threepence to a shilling, or twelve pence."

From MCCONNELL 202: "equivalent of fifty dollars at the time"

From STOVER 148: "Small hills of South African locution made familiar to English readers in accounts of the Boer War, from behind which Boer guerrillas sniped on English troops. Although the war did not officially break out until 1899, the landscape of the coming conflict was reported by [Rudyard] Kipling."

GANGNES: In the serialized version of the novel, Chapter V was divided in half between installments 5 and 6. This imposed a kind of "false cliffhanger" that was often seen in Victorian serialized fiction because periodicals had a set number of pages per issue (sometimes with a little wiggle room) to devote to an installment of a serialized work.

This "false cliffhanger" would have affected a Victorian reader's sense of pacing and the feeling of suspense caused by the abrupt end of the installment in the middle of an intense battle. This a "to be continued" moment that was created by serialization rather than an author's intended pacing.

GANGNES: short for "aluminium" (British; American aluminum)

From MCCONNELL 176: "First isolated in 1825, aluminum ... began to be produced in massive quantities only after the discovery, in 1866, of a cheap method of production by electrolysis."

From MCCONNELL 177: "Guns capable of firing a twelve-pound ball. Heavy artillery, like every other aspect of warfare, underwent a gigantic growth in the late nineteenth century--especially after the German munitions maker, Alfred Krupp, developed the first all-steel gun in 1851."

From DANAHAY 86: "artillery, heavier than field guns described previously"

STOVER: "It is the inequality of combat, magnified, between French and German forces in the Franco-Prussian War."

GANGNES: In addition to STOVER's note, consider the larger scope of nineteenth-century European imperialism; the 1890s were a time when the British empire was nearing its decline, and The War of the Worlds was one of many well-known novels written at the end of the century that addressed imperialism. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (serialized in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1899 before being collected) tells of a real-life imperial experience, but Bram Stoker's Dracula, which was, like The War of the Worlds, published in 1897, is a very different kind of novel that nonetheless explores the idea of Britain being invaded by a superior entity in the way the British invaded colonial lands.

Numerous Wells scholars have written on the "reverse colonization" and "Empire comes home" nature of The War of the Worlds. As Robert Silverberg writes, "[Humans] simply don’t matter at all [to the Martians], any more than the natives of the Congo or Mexico or the Spice Islands mattered to the European invaders who descended upon them to take their lands and their treasures from them during the great age of colonialism.” Likewise, Robert Crossley observes, "The Martians do to England what the Victorians had done to Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific--and Wells intended that his fellow English imperialists taste a dose of their own medicine.”

Sources:

• Robert Crossley, "The Grandeur of H.G. Wells," A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 357.
• Robert Silverberg, The War of the Worlds: Fresh Perspectives on the H. G. Wells Classic, ed. Glenn Yeffeth (Benbella Books, 2005), p. 8.

More information:

• Facsimile of "The Heart of Darkness" in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
• Article on the first edition of Dracula on the British Library's site

From MCCONNELL 178: "The insignia, then as now, of the Red Cross, founded in 1864 as a result of the Geneva Convention on international warfare."

From MCCONNELL 178: "Originally, grenadiers were especially tall soldiers in a regiment employed to throw grenades. This practice was discontinued by the end of the eighteenth century, though the tallest and finest soldiers of their regiments continued to be called 'grenadiers.' After 1858, the only regiment officially referred to by the name was the Grenadier Guards, the First Regiment of the Household Cavalry."

From DANAHAY 88: "originally 'grenade throwers,' but by this time an elite army regiment"

From DANAHAY 89: "Inns and pubs were allowed to sell alcohol only during particular hours specified by law."

From MCCONNELL 182: "The first portable camera, the Kodak, had been patented by George Eastman in 1888. Wells himself was an ardent amateur photographer."

From DANAHAY 91: "These were very large, box-like cameras."

From MCCONNELL 183: "The word [used in this way] was still new at the time, and referred primarily to factory whistles."

From MCCONNELL 185: "The Lisbon earthquake, on November 1, 1775, produced tremors felt throughout Europe, destroyed almost the entire city, and killed thirty thousand people."

From DANAHAY 94: "Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, was almost completely destroyed by a devastating earthquake in 1755."

From MCCONNELL 160: "The period from 1890 to the First World War has been called the 'golden age' of the machine gun, and was an era of intensive development of new weapons of all sorts. ... [B]y 1898 technology had produced an amazingly wide range of designs."

From STOVER 102: "an allusion to the Wimshurst electrostatic induction generator invented in 1880 by James Wimshurst"

From MCCONNELL 163: "Any three-legged support, although the most common instance of the 'tripod' for Wells's readers would probably have been the tripod on which older cameras were mounted."

From MCCONNELL 164: "This is a remarkable anticipation of the 'strobe effect' of rapid flashes of light, which we have come to associate (through films as much as through real experience of warfare) with modern battle scenes."

From MCCONNELL 154: "The Inkerman Barracks were named for the Battle of Inkerman, where in 1854, English and French troops defeated an attacking Prussian Army. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the armies of Europe were in the process of massive and ominous expansion and reorganization. But the British had a long-standing aversion to the idea of a standing army. Their reorganization, beginning in 1870, emphasized the localization of garrisons and short enlistment terms for civilian volunteers. In 1881 the infantry of the line was remodeled into two-battalion regiments with territorial names."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 206: located ~2.5 miles southwest of the Horsell sand pits; ~2 miles west of Woking Station

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 205: Britain's most prestigious daily newspaper, est. 1788. By the time Wells was writing this novel its politics were mostly Liberal Unionist.

GANGNES: The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism lists the Times' date of establishment as 1785 rather than 1788; this discrepancy is due to the fact that it was originally titled the Daily Universal Register before its name change in 1788. In its early days it contained parliamentary reports, foreign news, and advertisements, but soon expanded its contents. Under the editorship of Thomas Barnes in the early 1800s it became a "radical force in the context of the liberalizing reforms of the early part of the [nineteenth] century. It continued to exert a radical influence under subsequent editors (including John Thaddeus Delane). The paper included reports from influential foreign correspondents who covered major European conflicts that were of interest to Britain. When Thomas Cherney became its editor in 1878 and was succeeded in 1884, the paper began to become more conservative and pro-Empire. It has changed ownership but is still published today.

Source:

• Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press and The British Library, 2009, pp. 627-628.

GANGNES: See annotation on Installment 1 regarding the Telegraph.

From MCCONNELL 125 and 151: The dodo was a large, flightless bird from Mauritius that was hunted into extinction by the seventeenth century. This is the second of two comparisons between the extinction of the dodo and the potential extinction of humans by the Martians; the first is in Chapter I.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 205: "Later, the very idea of such a bird [as the dodo] was ridiculed ... until skeletal remains came to light in 1863 and 1889."

From MCCONNELL 130 and 152: Cycling was extremely popular in the 1890s; the safety bicycle was first patented in 1884, but the patenting of the first pneumatic tire in 1888 made cycling comfortable and affordable. Wells was learning to ride the bicycle around the time that he wrote this novel.

From MCCONNELL 154: "Hussars are light cavalry. The Maxim is the Maxim-Vickers, the first truly automatic machine gun, manufactured in the 1880s." The Cardigan regiment is from Cardiganshire: a county in West Wales.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 206: "The Maxim gun, patented in 1884 by Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, was an early form of machine gun. After some modification it was adopted by the British Army in 1889. In the field, Maxims were usually mounted on wheeled carriages. ... The Cardigan regiment was named for Cardiganshire, a western county of Wales located between Fishguard and Aberystwyth."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 217: In 1896 H. G. Wells and his agent attempted to get illustrations for The War of the Worlds from Cosmo Rowe, but only succeeded in securing two, both of which appeared in Pearson's and one in Cosmopolitan.

GANGNES: Cosmo Rowe (William John Monkhouse Rowe, 1877-1952) was a British illustrator active during the late Victorian period and thereafter. He was a friend of Wells's and of designer William Morris (1834-1896).

Rowe's illustrations for The War of the Worlds appear in the April 1897 (installment 1, first page) and May 1897 (frontispiece) issues of Pearson's Magazine; they are the only illustrations for the Pearson's War of the Worlds that were not done by Warwick Goble.

Biographical source:

• "Cosmo Rowe," askART.com

More information:

• Portrait of William Morris by Cosmo Rowe

From MCCONNELL 124: the "nebular hypothesis" is Pierre Laplace's (1749-1827) theory that "the solar system originated as a single, densely compacted 'cloud' or 'nebula' of matter."

More information:

• Wikipedia entry on the Nebular Hypothesis

From MCCONNELL 124: The idea that there were, or might have been, oceans on Mars was due to limited telescopic technology during this time.

From DANAHAY p. 42: reference to the theory of "melting icecaps" proposed by Lowell in Mars

From MCCONNELL 125: "struggle for existence" was a phrase popularized by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859).

More information:

• Facsimile of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) provided by The Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project

From MCCONNELL 126: "opposition" means that Mars is at the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun; the nearest Mars gets to Earth. The opposition of 1877 was when Schiaparelli discovered the Mars canali and an American discovered Mars's moons. The opposition of 1894 allowed for further examinations of Mars.

From MCCONNELL 127: Lavelle of Java is a fictional character whose name Wells derived from "M. Javelle," an associate of Perrotin's who observed a "strange light" on Mars in 1894. The evocation of Java also bears associations to the 1883 eruption of Mt. Krakatoa, which killed 50,000 people in Java.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 200: "During the nineteenth century the Royal Astronomical Society (established 1820) acted as an astronomical exchange for observatories within great Britain."

From MCCONNELL 127: "With a spectroscope it is possible to describe the chemical composition of a substance by analyzing the wavelengths of the light generated by combustion of the substance. It was first demonstrated in 1860."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 200: "Ogilvy is no doubt a fictive name. An astronomer of the same name first observes the approaching cataclysm in Wells's short story 'The Star.'"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 200: The Daily Telegraph was established in 1855 and to this day is still one of Britain's foremost national newspapers.

From MCCONNELL 127: The Daily Telegraph (founded 1855) catered to the middle class; it featured "flamboyant, often sensational journalism."

GANGNES: Contrary to MCCONNELL, the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism writes that the Daily Telegraph (1855-present; founded as the Daily Telegraph and Courier) originally catered to a "wealthy, educated readership" rather than the middle class. Though it became associated with Toryism in the twentieth century, its politics in the nineteenth century were first aligned with the Whigs, especially in its liberal attitude toward foreign policy. This changed somewhat in the 1870s when it supported Benjamin Disraeli, and the paper became more Orientalist under the editorship of Edwin Arnold. The Telegraph also promoted the arts.

Source:

• Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press and The British Library, 2009, pp. 158-159.

From STOVER 60: There was a "signalling mania" during this time; Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin) fed the "mania" through his 1896 article "Intelligible Signals Between Neighbouring Stars."

From MCCONNELL 130: Wells was also learning to ride a bicycle during this time.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 202: "William Frederick Denning (1848-1931) was the chief authority on cometary systems and meteorites."

GANGNES: There are quite a few real "Henderson"s associated with the nineteenth-century press. However, given the role of "Henderson" in this novel, it seems unlikely that the name was meant to refer to any particular journalist.

Source:

• Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press and The British Library, 2009.

From MCCONNELL 135: A fictional society; the International Astronomical Union was founded in 1919.

From STOVER 27: "The Astronomer Royal was director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, but 'Stent' is not recorded as one of them." "Stent" may have been used for political reasons.