Literature: The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells)
The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, is an early science fiction novel studied at GCSE English Literature and narrated by an unnamed man who survives a Martian invasion of southern England, its power coming from the ordinariness of its setting as the cylinders land near Woking and destruction moves through named suburbs and real roads towards London. Wells's documentary realism and reversal of perspective, asking readers to recall what humans had done to the Tasmanians before condemning the Martians, turn the invasion into a mirror held up to British imperialism, evolution and the fragility of civilisation.
Before you start
Make sure you're comfortable with these topics first:
Method
- Establish what the question asks about: the invasion as a critique of empire, the presentation of humanity under pressure, the role of science and evolution, setting, or the narrator himself.
- Use the narrator's detachment as a method. He describes his own wife's danger and a man's death in the same measured register, and that flatness is what makes the horror credible.
- Draw on the named places. Woking, Weybridge, Sheen and the road to London are real, so name them in your answer; the specificity is the technique.
- Analyse the three minor figures as a structured argument, since Wells uses them deliberately: the curate collapses into hysteria and faith, the artilleryman fantasises about rebuilding civilisation underground and digs almost nothing, and the narrator's brother in London witnesses the crowd. Together they map possible responses to catastrophe.
- Read the ending carefully. The Martians die of infection, which denies humanity a victory and makes survival an accident of biology, so any argument about human resilience must confront that.
- Bring context in as the novel's own argument: Wells names Tasmania in the opening chapter, so the imperial reading is not imposed by modern readers but written into the book.
- Support each point with a method, whether it is the shift to the brother's narrative, the scientific register, the biblical imagery around the curate, or the reduction of London to an empty city.
Worked example
Plan a response to: how does Wells use the Martian invasion to comment on the British Empire?
- Set the thesis: Wells builds the invasion as an exact structural inversion of colonial conquest, and he says so in the first chapter, so the novel is less a warning about aliens than an argument about what England had already done to other peoples.
- Paragraph one, the explicit statement. In the opening the narrator compares the Martians' view of humanity to a man studying creatures in a drop of water, and then asks the reader to remember the Tasmanians, swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants. The comparison is unmistakable and is made before any Martian appears.
- Paragraph two, technological asymmetry. The heat-ray and the fighting machines make British artillery irrelevant, which reproduces the imbalance that made colonial conquest possible. The Army is brave and useless, and the novel dwells on that uselessness.
- Paragraph three, the treatment of the conquered. Humans are herded, harvested for blood and driven from their homes. Making the reader identify with the victims of an invasion is the whole mechanism of the argument.
- Paragraph four, the setting. Choosing Woking and the Surrey commuter belt places the atrocity in the heartland of the empire's beneficiaries rather than at its edges, so the English reader cannot hold it at a distance.
- Paragraph five, the ending as the sharpest point. The Martians are killed by bacteria: the invaders lose to biology, exactly as invading armies historically have. Humanity is not vindicated, merely lucky, and the narrator says the microbes were the humblest things God has put upon this earth.
- Add a qualification for the top band: the novel is also about evolution, about complacency and about class, and the artilleryman's fantasy of an underground elite shows Wells's interest in what people would build next. The imperial reading is the strongest but not the only one.
- Conclude: the invasion functions as a controlled experiment in which the English are given the experience they had inflicted, and the novel's refusal to award them a heroic victory is what keeps the argument intact.
Practice questions
Try each question, then tap to reveal the answer.
Q1Where do the Martians first land, and why is the location significant?Show answer
Answer: On Horsell Common near Woking in Surrey, ordinary commuter country. The familiarity makes the invasion feel real to a British reader and denies them the distance that a remote setting would allow.
Q2Name the three Martian weapons and their effects.Show answer
Answer: The heat-ray, an invisible beam that ignites whatever it touches; the black smoke, a poison gas that kills and settles as dust; and the fighting machines, tripods that give the Martians height, speed and reach.
Q3How are the Martians finally defeated?Show answer
Answer: By terrestrial bacteria, to which they have no immunity because their own world has none. They die without being beaten in any battle, so humanity survives by accident rather than by resistance.
Q4Contrast the curate and the artilleryman as responses to catastrophe.Show answer
Answer: The curate collapses into hysterical religious despair and becomes a danger to the narrator's survival. The artilleryman responds with grand plans for an underground society that will steal Martian technology, but has dug almost nothing and plays cards. One abandons the world to God, the other to a fantasy, and neither does anything useful.
Q5Why does Wells include chapters narrated from the brother's point of view in London?Show answer
Answer: They show the invasion at a scale the narrator cannot see: the collapse of order, the exodus, the crowds trampling each other on the road. The shift widens the novel from one man's escape into a social account of breakdown.
Q6Explain the effect of the narrator's calm, factual style.Show answer
Answer: Because he reports rather than exclaims, the reader is not told how to feel and the events carry their own weight. The scientific register also makes the invasion sound documented rather than imagined, which is the source of the novel's realism.
Q7What does the novel suggest about the stability of civilisation?Show answer
Answer: That it is thin. Within days the trains stop, the roads jam, people rob and trample each other, and the narrator himself kills. Wells presents order as a set of habits that depend on supply and communication rather than on character.
Exam-style questions
Written in the style of a English exam paper, with a full mark scheme.
Starting with the chapter in which the narrator watches the heat-ray used for the first time on Horsell Common, explore how Wells creates fear in The War of the Worlds. Write about this moment and the novel as a whole.
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How does Wells present the failure of human institutions in The War of the Worlds?
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See real English past-paper questions, with official mark schemes →
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