From MCCONNELL 175: "a surveying instrument with a telescopic sight, for establishing horizontal and vertical angles"

From DANAHAY 85: "A mirror mounted on a pole, used in this situation to communicate the whereabouts of the Martians and warn the artillery of their approach."

From MCCONNELL 175: "a moveable mirror, usually mounted on a tripod, used to transmit signals by sun flashes"

From DANAHAY 85: "An apparatus for telegraphing by means of the sun's rays flashed from a mirror."

Note: There is a photograph of heliograph operators in DANAHAY Appendix I.

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 DANAHAY 86: busily

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"

From DANAHAY 87: "a broad embankment raised as a fortification"

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 DANAHAY 87: a horse-drawn bus

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 DANAHAY 87: "literally means day of worship; people are dressed as if for going to church on Sunday"

From MCCONNELL 178: "the priest of a parish"

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 HUGHES AND GEDULD 210: north bank of the Thames

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 210: This is the Church of St. Nicholas; it is later smashed by the Martians.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 110: Chertsey is ~1 mile northwest of Weybridge.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 210: southern side of the Thames

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

From MCCONNELL 180: "willows cut back to the trunk, so as to produce dense masses of branches"

From DANAHAY 90: a large travelling bag or suitcase

GANGNES: The scene beginning at this point and running through the end of the chapter was significantly revised with dozens of small rewordings. In addition to deemphasizing some of the narrator's personal emotions, as Wells does in other parts of the novel, these changes show Wells grappling with exactly how to describe the appearance and movement of the Martian fighting machines and the nigh-cinematic scene of destruction that makes this novel highly suited to visual adaptation. See text comparison page.

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 HUGHES AND GEDULD 210: Reference to Daniel 7:2: "and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea."

From MCCONNELL 182: "an abrupt rise of tidal water flowing inland from the mouth of an estuary"

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

From MCCONNELL 183: "a path along the bank of a river for the horses or men who tow boats on the river"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 110: Laleham is ~2 miles north of Weybridge.

From DANAHAY 92: a loud, metallic ringing sound

From MCCONNELL 184: "welt or ridge"

From DANAHAY 93: "a member of the clergy who is either in charge of a parish or who is serving as an assistant in a parish."

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 DANAHAY 94: "small clumps of trees, not large enough to be a wood"

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 version. This is another instance of removing the narrator's commentary on his own feelings and reactions, especially those that seem weak or cowardly. See text comparison page.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 211: north shore of the Thames

GANGNES: From this point through the end of the installment is one of the most heavily reworked scenes in the novel. There are significant cuts, additions, rearrangings, and rephrasings. The revisions alter the curate's mood and the narrator's emotional and intellectual responses to the curate's outburst. Through these edits, Wells seems to be grappling with how to most effectively present a critique of religion. See text comparison page.

From DANAHAY 95: "A mackerel is a seawater fish that has rows of dark markings on its back. The rows of clouds resemble these markings."

From MCCONNELL 188: "In Genesis 18:20-28, the Lord sends fire from heaven to destroy the sinful people of Sodom and Gomorrah."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 211: possible reference to the Kepler epigraph at the beginning of the novel

From HUGHES AND GEDULD: Upper Halliford is "a district southwest of greater London, between Sunbury and Shepperton, thirteen miles west-southwest of the city center."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 234: "Walton (on the Naze) [is] a town on the North Sea, about seventy-five miles northeast of London."

GANGNES: Reference to Proverbs 9:10: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding." This line is part of the cuts made to this installment between the serialized version and the volume. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: With his mind still on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, MCCONNELL identifies this quote as referencing Genesis as well. STOVER and DANAHAY both identify the reference as coming from Revelation, but disagree on which passage. An examination of each passage would suggest that Stover is correct, though DANAHAY's passage also describes destruction.

From MCCONNELL 188: "A slightly inaccurate quotation from Genesis 18:28."

From STOVER 130: reference to Revelation 19:3: "Hallelujah! The smoke from her goes up for ever and ever." ("her" = the harlot of Babylon, Rome)

From DANAHAY 96: "Revelations[sic] 6:16-17 describes the end of the world in these terms."

From STOVER 131: reference to Revelation 6:16

GANGNES: Note that this is the passage DANAHAY cited earlier in the curate's speech.

From MCCONNELL 190: European scarab beetle

From DANAHAY 97: large European flying beetle

The majority of the annotations on this page draw from the following critical editions of The War of the Worlds, which will be cited and tagged according to the last name(s) of the editor(s) of that edition:

DANAHAY: Martin A. Danahay. The War of the Worlds. Broadview Press, 2003.

HUGHES AND GEDULD: David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld, eds. 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. Indiana UP, 1993.

MCCONNELL: Frank McConnell, ed. The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition. Oxford UP, 1977.

STOVER: Leon Stover. The War of the Worlds: A Critical Text of the 1898 London First Edition, with an Introduction, Illustrations and Appendices. McFarland and Company, Inc, 2001.

Madeline Gangnes has added additional annotations and resources, especially those that address materials related to Pearson's Magazine and adaptations of the text. They are cited with their source(s) (where applicable) and tagged as GANGNES.

This page incorporates several elements. Its main body is a transcription of the text of the third installment of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds as it was published in Pearson's Magazine in June of 1897. This text was created by Madeline Gangnes by comparing the Project Gutenberg text with the digital facsimiles of Pearson's Magazine generously hosted by HathiTrust. Facsimile pages of the installment are interspersed throughout this page. Each image includes a detailed caption in order to facilitate text-to-speech accessibility. Textual markers that indicate the beginning and end of each page's text are incorporated for text-to-speech and to make clear which text corresponds to which page of the magazine.

This installment comprises the text that is roughly comparable to Book I ("The Coming of the Martians"), Chapters IX-XI of the 1898 collected edition and subsequent versions.

This is the cover of the June 1897 issue of Pearson's Magazine:

From DANAHAY 68: weariness, lack of energy

From DANAHAY 68: a word for cart

From STOVER 93-4: "The narrator's neighbor in Woking assumes, with a touching faith in bourgeois property values, that 'the insurance people' will settle for damages once the Martians are defeated."

From MCCONNELL156: "military engineers, builders of trenches, fortifications, etc."

From DANAHAY 69: "engineers who built bridges, forts and other structures the army might need"

From MCCONNELL156: "The famous 'Blues,' or Royal Horse Guards, consolidated in 1819."

From DANAHAY 69: the Royal Horse Guards: elite British army cavalry unit

GANGNES: STOVER corrects HUGHES AND GEDULD's annotation, though does not mention them specifically in the note, despite referencing them in other notes.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 206: "Their notion is that there was an operational or tactical dispute--about how to deal with the situation--among the officers of the elite Horse Guards at the Horse Guard barracks (a building in central London opposite Whitehall). The Horse Guards are the cavalry brigade of the English Household troops (the third regiment of Horse Guards is known as the Royal Horse Guards)."

From STOVER 94: Horse Guards here "is a shorthand reference to the British War Office, located on Horse Guards Parade near Downing Street in London. As Americans refer to the Department of Defense as 'The Pentagon' after its office building, so the British called its War Office 'the Horse Guards.' Not to be confused with the Household Calvary regiment The Royal Horse Guards, even then a tourist attraction when on parade."

From MCCONNELL 156: "In Matthew 4:19 Christ tells Peter and Andrew that He will make them 'fishers of men.'"

GANGNES: In the 1898 edition, this sentence (slightly edited) is preceded by, "It hardly seemed a fair fight to me at the time." In the revised version we are offered this bit of foreshadowing and characterization without a strong emotional component. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: village to the north and slightly east of Woking

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 227: "a village in Surrey, about four miles north of Woking"

From DANAHAY 71: "a piece of mobile artillery, usually pulled by horses"

From DANAHAY 71: the Oriental Institute

From STOVER 96-7: "The mosque was built for Muslim students at the Oriental College, a center for distinguished Indian visitors from the British Raj." Unlike in the novel, the mosque still stands today.

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. Another removal of the narrator's emotions. See text comparison page.

From MCCONNELL158: "An apparent slip. Everywhere else these cousins are the narrator's cousins, not his wife's."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 230: "A town in central Surrey, about twelve miles due east of Woking. It is sixteen miles southwest of central London, on the river Mole."

From DANAHAY 71: large group

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 207: Wells uses this name in place of the name of a real pub: the Princess of Wales.

From DANAHAY 72: the name of a local pub

From MCCONNELL 159: "a light, two-wheeled vehicle with two seats, back to back: horse-drawn"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 231: "a street that extends south, at almost a right angle, from the northeast end of Maybury Road"

From MCCONNELL 159: fence pickets

From DANAHAY 72: a large metal cover used to keep food hot

From DANAHAY 73: speeding

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 207: heading due south

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."

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. Another removal of the narrator's emotional responses to the invasion. The "loss" here is part of the novel's discussion of photography and photographic war journalism specifically. The chapter ends (after "that quivering tumult") with an additional sentence: "I overtook and passed the doctor between Woking and Send." See text comparison page.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 207: to the east

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 232: "a village in Surrey, about three-quarters of a mile east of Woking"

From MCCONNELL 161: "European variety of rose, with very pale red flowers"

From DANAHAY 74: "a round of coordinated fire by a body of soldiers"

GANGNES: The 1898 volume adds "I can best express my state of mind by saying that" to the beginning of this sentence. The change softens the impact of the narrator's emotions by adding an analytical "stepping back" from his feelings at the time. See text comparison page.

From DANAHAY 74: good luck

From HUGHES AND GEDULD: The narrator "went to Leatherhead by a southerly route, through Send, but returns by a northerly route."

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

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

From DANAHAY 75: struck or hit

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 208: some readers have mistaken this for the Orphanage that used to be in Oriental Road

From STOVER 103: "The orphanage on the crest of Maybury Hill was not built until 1909; in its place at the time there stood St. Peter's Memorial Home for the aged."

GANGNES: This passage through the next page is the most striking and detailed description of the Martian fighting machines in the novel. Despite the degree of detail offered by the narrator, the machines' physical appearance has been depicted quite differently across various illustrations. Wells made his dislike of Goble's illustrations clear in a passage he added to what would become Book II, Chapter II of the 1898 volume. See Installment 8. He also cut and changed some phrasing to deemphasize comparisons to human technologies. See text comparison page.

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 DANAHAY 76: in its path

GANGNES: In the 1898 edition, "wallowing" is removed.

From DANAHAY 76: jointed, able to bend and/or move

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."

GANGNES: The 1898 edition adds "That was the impression those instant flashes gave" before this sentence. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: The 1898 volume changes this to simply "imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand." This seems likely to be part of Wells's negative response to Warwick Goble's depictions of the Martian fighting machines, which resembled known human technology more than Wells would have liked. See text comparison page, note on "The Terrible Trades of Sheffield" below, and the additional passage in what would eventually become Book II, Chapter 2 in the 1898 volume.

From DANAHAY 76: without consciousness

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. Perhaps the sentence was thought to be redundant or that it revealed a piece of information the narrator could not have known at the time. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: The 1898 volume inserts "And in an instant it was gone." and a paragraph break before this sentence. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: The 1898 volume replaces this phrase with "in the rain and darkness"; another instance of deemphasizing the narrator's emotions in favor of a more "objective" perspective. See text comparison page.

From DANAHAY 77: a squatter is "a person living in a building without paying rent"

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 208: a real pub licensed in the 1890s

From DANAHAY 78: force

From STOVER 107: The narrator's false promise to return the dogcart was likely the cause of the landlord's death; he couldn't escape because the narrator had taken his means of conveyance.

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. Another clear instance of removing references to the narrator's emotional and physical responses to his predicament. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: This is cut from the 1898 volume and a paragraph break is added to separate out the final sentence. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: This should be Cobham, which was confused with Chobham--a village to the northwest of Woking mentioned several times in the novel. Cobham is five miles to the east and slightly north of Woking on the way from Woking (via Byfleet) to Leatherhead. It seems that either Wells or the editors of Pearson's mistakenly wrote "Street Chobham" instead of "Street Cobham"; the error is corrected in the 1898 version.

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

From STOVER 109: reference to Revelation 20:9: "and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

From MCCONNELL 169: "giant figures"

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: an exclamation to quietly get someone's attention; similar to "Psst!"

From MCCONNELL: "To 'unlimber' a gun is to detach it from its limber, a two-wheeled carriage drawn by four to six horses, and prepare it for firing."

From DANAHAY 81: "the part of the carriage on which the gun is pulled, and from which it has to be 'unlimbered' or detached"

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

From MCCONNELL 171: "formation for a conventional attack"

GANGNES: The 1898 volume replaces this with "complicated metallic case, about which green flashes scintillated" and changes "funnel" to "eye." Again we "lose" language about photography, despite the fact that the novel as a whole retains such references in other areas. See text comparison page.

From MCCONNELL 171: "In Greek myth the Titans were the gigantic and violent pre-Olympian gods whom Zeus vanquished in establishing the rule of reason and order."

From DANAHAY 82: disjointed, told in short bursts

From DANAHAY 83: the hood of a monk's garment

GANGNES: A possible reference to, or evocation of, Lucifer as the "Morning Star" falling from Heaven. See Isaiah 14:12 and Luke 10:18. More information at the Wikipedia entry for Lucifer.

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

The majority of the annotations on this page draw from the following critical editions of The War of the Worlds, which will be cited and tagged according to the last name(s) of the editor(s) of that edition:

DANAHAY: Martin A. Danahay. The War of the Worlds. Broadview Press, 2003.

HUGHES AND GEDULD: David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld, eds. 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. Indiana UP, 1993.

MCCONNELL: Frank McConnell, ed. The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition. Oxford UP, 1977.

STOVER: Leon Stover. The War of the Worlds: A Critical Text of the 1898 London First Edition, with an Introduction, Illustrations and Appendices. McFarland and Company, Inc, 2001.

Madeline Gangnes has added additional annotations and resources, especially those that address materials related to Pearson's Magazine and adaptations of the text. They are cited with their source(s) (where applicable) and tagged as GANGNES.

This page incorporates several elements. Its main body is a transcription of the text of the second installment of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds as it was published in Pearson's Magazine in May of 1897. This text was created by Madeline Gangnes by comparing the Project Gutenberg text with the digital facsimiles of Pearson's Magazine generously hosted by HathiTrust. Facsimile pages of the installment are interspersed throughout this page. Each image includes a detailed caption in order to facilitate text-to-speech accessibility. Textual markers that indicate the beginning and end of each page's text are incorporated for text-to-speech and to make clear which text corresponds to which page of the magazine.

This installment comprises the text that is roughly comparable to Book I ("The Coming of the Martians"), Chapters V-VIII of the 1898 collected edition and subsequent versions.

This is the cover of the May 1897 issue of Pearson's Magazine:

From DANAHAY 56: "spoke to or grabbed hold of"

From DANAHAY 57: thin

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 204: from the southwest

GANGNES: which is to say, signalling peace or surrender

GANGNES: In this case, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: "a body of persons appointed to go on a mission on behalf of another or others"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD: Likely a reference to Revelation 9:2: "and there arose a smoke out of the pit...."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 204: to the north

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. This is another instance (see Installment 1) where a comment about the narrator's feelings has been removed. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: The differences between Cosmo Rowe's illustrations and Warwick Goble's exemplify the difficulties presented for illustrators by invisibility or near-invisibility. Different illustrators have chosen to depict the heat ray in different ways that make clear the cause-and-effect relationship of the ray being pointed and its targets being lit on fire. Usually this requires a visual representation, even though the ray is described as invisible.

GANGNES: The narrator is only able to see the people who are burning because the fire burning on their bodies creates light.

GANGNES: This sentence was cut from the 1898 volume. It begins a section of the text--from here through the end of Chapter V, that was heavily revised in the transition from serialized version to volume. Again, most of these revisions deemphasize the emotional (and sometimes physical) responses of the narrator to the Martians. This takes the focus of Wells's depictions of the Martians off of the narrator and perhaps allows the reader to form their own emotional response with minimal mediation from the narrator. See text comparison page.

From MCCONNELL 143: "a spiny shrub with yellow flowers, very common throughout England and Europe"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 204: "The Chertsey and the Chobham roads start at Woking station, then divide. The 'Something' that 'fell with a crash far away to the left' fell presumably to the west. So the road referred to here is presumably the Chobham Road."

From DANAHAY 59: "Literally collecting together, but here figuratively meaning becoming more numerous."

GANGNES: like the peace that the white flag was supposed to signal

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 203-4: "I did not dare to look back" is another reference to the petrifying gaze of the Gorgon (first referenced in Chapter IV). Gorgons are monsters from Greek myths "whose hair was a tangle of writing snakes." Humans were irresistibly tempted to look at them, but doing so would turn the viewer to stone.

Note: See Medusa as an example.

From DANAHAY 60: bowl shaped

From DANAHAY 60: immediately

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 204: distance of ~1 mile

From DANAHAY 60: twilight

GANGNES: riding a horse

GANGNES: In this case, an attack or conflict. Stent and Ogilvy sent their telegraph before there was any sign of overt hostility from the Martians; they contacted the barracks so that the soldiers might come to the pit and protect the Martians from being attacked by humans, not the other way around.

From MCCONNELL 146: "a small knoll or hill"

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. This is another instance of deemphasizing the narrator's emotional and physical responses to the Martians; the replacement sentence from the volume reads: "All about me gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that pitiless sword of heat seemed whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before it descended and smote me out of life." See text comparison page.

From MCCONNELL 148: "Collars at the time were detached from the shirt, generally made of celluloid, and fastened around the neck with a stud."

GANGNES: A macabre parallel to the "little boy" who was crushed in the previous scene.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 231: "a railroad bridge about three-quarters of a mile northeast of Woking Station"

GANGNES: This is one of a handful of sections that was not cut from the 1898 volume where the narrator explicitly evaluates his own mental and emotional state. The rumination here evokes associations with depression and the feelings of isolation it can cause. It is not clear whether Wells is speaking from experience in this instance. From a narrative perspective, asides like this may call the narrator's reliability into question; he cannot function as an objective journalist figure (indeed, no journalist is "objective") if he is emotionally compromised.

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. This is yet another instance where a comment about the narrator's feelings has been removed. There are a few smaller edits in the next few paragraphs that have a similar effect. Some refer to the narrator's wife's emotional responses as well. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: In this instance, unbelievable; the narrator is relieved that his wife believes his story about what happened to him because his neighbors did not.

From DANAHAY 64: a cloak or cape

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 HUGHES AND GEDULD 205: "a chemically inactive, odorless, colorless, gaseous element, no. 18 on the Periodic Table of the Elements. It had just been discovered and was in the news. Wells had written it up in 'The Newly Discovered Element' and 'The Protean Gas,' Saturday Review 79 (February 9 and May 4, 1895): 183-184, 576-577."

GANGNES: The above articles from the Saturday Review are available in scanned facsimile here ("The Newly Discovered Element") and here ("The Protean Gas").

GANGNES: An artillery projectile. See Wikipedia entry) on different kinds of shells.

From MCCONNELL 151: "term describing an unusual state of irritability or stimulation in an organism"

From MCCONNELL 151: burning/roasting

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 151: "This introduces another 'Darwinian' theme of the story: the transformation of an established, normal-seeming social order by extreme stress from the outside."

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 DANAHAY 64: "Wells compares the opening of the 'war' with the Martians to the reaction that would have accompanied a declaration of war [by Britain] against another country like Germany."

From DANAHAY 66: a joke or hoax

GANGNES: Because the newspapers didn't hear from Henderson after he sent a telegram with the news about the capsule's landing, the newspaper decided that it must have been a hoax, so it did not report a story on it. People have been murdered by the Martian heat-ray by this point, and hardly anyone who wasn't at the pit knows about the incident.

GANGNES: In this case, courting.

GANGNES: MCCONNELL is somewhat at odds with HUGHES AND GEDULD and STOVER here; H&G's identification of "Smith" as referring to the newsagent W. H. Smith is important to the print culture of Victorian Britain. I include MCCONNELL to show that critical/annotated editions are not infallible.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 205: "Cutting into or 'poaching on' W. H. Smith's monopoly of selling newspapers inside the station. The chain of W. H. Smith to this day has the exclusive rights to selling newspapers, magazines, and books in m any British railroad stations."

From MCCONNELL 153: "'Trenching' means encroaching. The newsboy is selling his papers at a station where Mr. Smith has a permanent newsstand."

From STOVER 91: "Reference to W.H. Smith, whose chain of stationery stores to this day has the exclusive rights to sell newspapers, books, and magazines in British railway stations."

From DANAHAY 66: "the Victorian term for any large detached modern house"

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."

GANGNES: town to the southwest of Woking

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 227: "Since 1855 an important garrison town in Hampshire, thirty miles southwest of London and about ten miles west of Woking, Surrey.

GANGNES: As HUGHES AND GEDULD point out (see below), this is a mistake that was not corrected in any of the novel's revisions. The error is somewhat jarring considering that Wells painstakingly situates the Martian invasion at extremely specific real locations. For more information on where this project situates the landing site, see the map page on The (De)collected War of the Worlds.

HUGHES AND GEDULD 206: "This is a slip. The second cylinder falls to the northeast ... in or near the 'Byfleet' or 'Addlestone' Golf Links (really the New Zealand Golf Course, then the only course thereabouts and the one Wells must mean)."

GANGNES: In the 1898 volume, this sentence is replaced with simply, "This was the second cylinder." The change of a chapter's end in this way produces quite a different effect. The serialized sentence heightens the drama and serves as a very effective cliffhanger by evoking an image of destruction. The shorter, more straightforward chapter end sentence from the 1898 volume is freed from the pressure of contributing to a cliffhanger. It has a more objective, informative, journalistic tone while still promising action in the next chapter. See text comparison page.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 228: "Located about three-quarters of a mile of central Woking. Now known as West Byfleet Golf Course."

From STOVER 49: "Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) laid the foundation of modern astronomy with his calculation of planetary motions, as immortalized in Kepler's laws." Epigraph quote is from a letter to Galileo quoted by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Wells slightly abridged the quote.

More information:

• Background information and digital facsimile images on The British Library's website
• Wikipedia entry on The Anatomy of Melancholy
• Transcription of the text of The Anatomy of Melancholy on Project Gutenberg

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 231: "Eastern sector of the town of Woking, Surrey. The location of the narrator's house and also of Wells's home at the time of the writing of [The War of the Worlds]."

GANGNES: Daily News here is changed to Daily Chronicle in the 1898 volume and subsequent editions. The discrepancy between Daily News in the serialized version and Daily Chronicle in the volume could be due to an error on Wells's part that was corrected for the 1898 edition.

The Daily News (1846-1912) was first advertised as a "Morning Newspaper of Liberal Politics and thorough Independence," set up as a rival to the Morning Chronicle. It was edited by Charles Dickens at its launch. The paper "advocated reform in social, political, and economic legislation, fought for a Free Press in supporting the repeal of the Stamp Act, campaigned for impartial dealings with the natives of India and supported Irish Home Rule." It was known for its detailed war reporting, which boosted its circulation.

The Daily Chronicle was a later name (beginning in 1877) of the Clerkenwell News (1855-1930). The paper was "liberal and radical," with a daily column entitled "The Labour Movement" featured in the 1890s. Interestingly, the paper eventually merged with the Daily News (becoming the News Chronicle), but not until 1930--after even the 1925 edition of The War of the Worlds, let alone the 1898 edition.

Source:

• Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, editors. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Academia Press and The British Library, 2009, p. 128 and 158.

GANGNES: town to the north of Woking, farther than Ottershaw

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 228: "A small town about three miles north of Woking, Surrey."

The majority of the annotations on this page draw from the following critical editions of The War of the Worlds, which will be cited and tagged according to the last name(s) of the editor(s) of that edition:

DANAHAY: Martin A. Danahay. The War of the Worlds. Broadview Press, 2003.

HUGHES AND GEDULD: David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld, eds. 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. Indiana UP, 1993.

MCCONNELL: Frank McConnell, ed. The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition. Oxford UP, 1977.

STOVER: Leon Stover. The War of the Worlds: A Critical Text of the 1898 London First Edition, with an Introduction, Illustrations and Appendices. McFarland and Company, Inc, 2001.

Madeline Gangnes has added additional annotations and resources, especially those that address materials related to Pearson's Magazine and adaptations of the text. They are cited with their source(s) (where applicable) and tagged as GANGNES.

This page incorporates several elements. Its main body is a transcription of the text of the first installment of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds as it was published in Pearson's Magazine in April of 1897. This text was created by Madeline Gangnes by comparing the Project Gutenberg text with the digital facsimiles of Pearson's Magazine generously hosted by HathiTrust. Facsimile pages of the installment are interspersed throughout this page. Each image includes a detailed caption in order to facilitate text-to-speech accessibility. Textual markers that indicate the beginning and end of each page's text are incorporated for text-to-speech and to make clear which text corresponds to which page of the magazine.

This installment comprises the text that is roughly comparable to Book I ("The Coming of the Martians"), Chapters I-IV of the 1898 collected edition and subsequent versions.

This is the cover of the April 1897 issue of Pearson's Magazine:

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

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

From DANAHAY 41: minute organisms, protozoa

From STOVER 52: Phrase is from Percival Lowell's Mars (1895).

More information:

• Facsimile of Lowell's Mars (1895)

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 197: Reference to Psalm 49: 12 "Nevertheless man being in honour abideth not: he is like the beasts that perish."

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: ages-long

From DANAHAY 42: thinner; less dense

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

GANGNES: Which is to say, invade Earth and destroy human beings; Earth is closer to the Sun than Mars is.

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 MCCONNELL 127: "The clockwork would keep the telescope rotating in synchronization with the movement of its celestial object."

From MCCONNELL 128: a timepiece