Killer-bugs aside, in The War of the Worlds, Wells seeks to expose the political as well as biological arrogance of man. In 1898 the British Empire was at his height, stretching across a quarter of all the land on the globe and touching every continent. It was the most widespread Empire the world had ever known, a power on which the sun never set. "With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter." And yet, when the Martians arrive, the Imperial might appeared to count for nothing. As the artillery-man says, "they've made they're footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world." One of the only victories the humans do manage to inflict on the Martians comes from the Ironclad Thunder-Child of the Royal Navy. But even the Royal Navy - the backbone of the British Empire - is not able to stop the Martian onslaught.
And Wells chooses a special fate for London. It is would have been only natural for the Martians to chose to land around London: it was "the greatest city in the world", the "Mother of Cities", the hub of Empire, in 1898 as close as Earth had to a capital - at least in the eyes of the eminent Victorians whose power rested there. But Wells was not always so enthusiastic about the city, once referring to it as, "London, that like a bowl of viscid human fluid, boils sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and slops messily and uglily into the home counties." It is the suburban outgrowths that Wells allows the Martians to first demolish, and Wells himself was living in Woking, the home of the Narrator, when he wrote the book. In a letter to a friend he described his plan for his surroundings: "I completely wreck and sack Woking - killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways - then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity." There is perhaps no greater expression of Victorian middle-class aspirations than the expanding suburbs of the late nineteenth century. Whilst the working classes - Wells' future (literal) underclass the Morlocks (see The Time Machine, 1895) - suffered lives of danger and disease in slums and factories of the inner cities, the middle classes escaped to leafy streets of rows of miniature mock-ups of country estate houses. Here life was ordered, polite, and above all English. When the Narrator's brother attempts to get an English lady on a boat out of the country, she panics: "She had never been out of England before, she would rather die than trust herself friendless in a foreign country... She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very similar... Her great idea was to return to Stanmore. Things had been always well and safe at Stanmore." Indeed when the Martians first arrive, and indeed even after they unleash the first burst of their Heat-Ray, there is a nonchalance in the reaction of the people of these English towns. Even the Narrator quickly regains his calm: "With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure." Meanwhile, "Many had heard of the cylinder... and talked about it in their leisure, but it certainly did not make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done... [Indeed, the threat of an invasion of Britain - and therefore London - by the Germans was seen by many as a realistic eventuality even in 1898] All over the district people were dining and supping; working-men were gardening after the labours of the day, children were being put to bed, young people were wandering through the lanes love- making, students sat over their books... the stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years."
And yet, as becomes clear over the following days, for all the Narrator's talk of decency, respectability and so forth, under this veneer of respectability beats the heart of man's selfish instincts. Even as Woking goes about its everyday life, when the Heat-Ray is first used, the crowds flee in terror and, "three persons at least, two women and a little boy, were crushed and trampled there, and left to die amid the terror and the darkness." As the Martians step up their attack the Narrator tells of "savage struggles" for places on trains, and eventually the days of uncertainty give way to "the dawn of the great panic" as thousands upon thousands of people abandon everything and stream out of the capital in a "roaring wave of fear... the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing into a foaming tumult... banked up into a horrible struggle." The police and the railways "were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body... It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind." Respectability is abandoned, and the comfort of suburbia is demolished: "In one night the valley had become a valley of ashes... the countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that night had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn... Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal."
Wells was tapping into deep Victorian fears of social disorder, of behaviour that ran counter to an all encompassing ideology of ordered social progress. Time and again Wells tells of individual selfishness to survive overriding ideals of social responsibility - tramplings, stabbings, the police "breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect", trains that "ploughed through shrieking people." And as the war continues, the artillery-man tells of people "starving in heaps, bolting, treading on each other." In an era when Colonialism was reaching across the world to 'civilise' 'savage' cultures, Wells paints a picture of that very savagery running beneath the surface of complacent bourgeois life. In fact his point is as much that this 'savagery' is something that comes quite naturally to the human race. With regard to his brother Frank, to whom he admits owing a debt of the original idea for the novel, Wells writes of "A practical philosopher with a disbelief even profounder than that of the writer in the present ability of our race to meet a great crisis either bravely or intelligently... Our present civilisation, it seems, is quite capable of falling to pieces without any aid from the Martians."
It is also no coincidence that Wells selects South Kensington for "feats of peculiar atrocity". South Kensington, with its rows of museums and well-to-do residents was the educational heart of London, the symbol of Wells' own education and values of his teachers and fellow-socialists. It was not that Wells disapproved of such things, or even undervalued them - for him human history became "more and more a race between education and catastrophe" (Outline of History, 1920) - but that he perceived how fragile these values were in the face of the threats that the universe had to offer. Wells had used a similar device in The Time Machine where a Palace of Green Porcelain is rendered as a metaphorical South Kensington museum, but time and the decline of humanity has rendered it empty and meaningless to future-man; progress abandoned in crumbling books and decaying exhibits. However, in The War of the Worlds, Wells cannot quite bring himself to destroy the cradle of his own learning in vain - it is in South Kensington that he first hears the howling that heralds the defeat of the Martians - "It was as if the mighty desert of houses had found a voice for its fear and solitude" - and he has "half a mind to break into the Natural History Museum and find my way up to the summit of the towers, in order to see across the park." Places such as the Natural History Museum provided educational views into the past and provided chances to anticipate what the future held. Naturally, after the war a Martian specimin is placed on display in the museum.
Even the artillery-man that the Narrator encounters attaches a pre-eminence to knowledge, in particular science: "saving the race is nothing in itself... it's saving our knowledge and adding to it is the thing... Especially we must keep up our science - learn more." However, the model proposed by the soldier for the future survival of mankind owes a great deal less to the liberal gentlemen-scientists with whom Wells associated. Whilst, according to him, "it's the man that keeps on thinking [that] comes through," everyone else, it seems will have to go to the wall, and with them all the trappings of bourgeois life: "we've got to fix ourselves up according to the new state of affairs... It isn't quite according to what a man wants for his species, but it's about what the facts point to... Cities, nations, civilisation, progress - it's all over. That game's up... There won't be any more blessed concerts for a million years or so; there won't be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds at restaurants. If it's amusements you're after, I reckon the game is up. If you've got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck 'em away. They ain't for further use... men like me are going on living - for the sake of the breed..." More and more comfortable, sophisticated Victoriana goes up in smoke. Essentially the artillery-man espouses a philosophy of a controlled survival of the fittest, army of men for the post-apocalypse: "And we form a band - able bodied, clean-minded men. We're not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again... Able-bodied, clean-minded women we want also - mother and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies - no blasted rolling eyes. We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race."
Extreme though these views may seem, they were not a million miles away from the sentiments expressed in the growing field of Eugenics - the selective breeding of humans - championed by the likes of Francis Galton (1822 - 1911), Darwin's cousin and the archetype of the Victorian gentleman-scientist. Like some other social reformers of a range of political persuasions, Wells did toy with the idea of a limited form of Eugenics, but was ultimately critical of it. Eugenics is often confused with Social Darwinism, another political creed to emerge from Darwin's theory of natural selection. Social Darwinism was concerned with allowing the mechanisms of Darwinian to act upon society and maintaining laissez-faire socio- economic policies; and it attributed social inequalities to biological differences. It was the great champion of Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' (though Darwin did judge it "more accurate" and "sometimes equally convenient" to his own phrase of 'Struggle for Existence'." However, the artillery-man appears to reject the laissez-faire approach to life espoused by Social Darwinism. His fear is that in the aftermath of the Martians invasion, without strong controls, "The risk is that we who keep wild will go savage - degenerate into a sort of big savage rat" - a real risk given his proposals for the survivors to live in drains, railway tunnels and subways. Again, there is an echo of Wells' Morlocks in their subterranean world.
The Narrator's encounter with the artillery-man was absent from the first serialised version of The War of the Worlds - perhaps editorial attitude deemed the passage a little strong - and it is damning in its view of the petite bourgeoisie, "all those damn little clerks", skedaddling back and forth between work in businesses "they were afraid to take the trouble to understand" and wives "they married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world... And on Sundays - fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits!" Wells' frustration at the oppressed routine of lower-middle-class life can be found in his early non-scientific fiction, but in The War of the World the indictment of these lives is completed by the artillery- man's casting of them as potential collaborators to the Martian overlords: "the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they'll come and be caught cheerful... They'll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them." He even supposes that "Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them... get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed. And some, maybe, they will train to hunt us... there's men who'd do it cheerful." And Wells lends support to the artillery-man's advocacy by the Narrator ability to "find nothing to bring against this man's reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one would have questioned my intellectual superiority to his - I a professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a common soldier; and yet he had already formulated a situation that I had scarcely realised."