Nobody Has A Name
In H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, the narrator is never named, and neither is his wife, his younger brother, the curate or the artilleryman. The people who do get names, Ogilvy, Henderson and Stent, are all dead by chapter six. This is a character guide with full spoilers, from the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number thirty-six.
I counted word forms across the twenty-seven chapters. The word brother appears about one hundred and four times, wife thirty-seven, curate thirty-nine, artilleryman twenty-nine, and Ogilvy only twenty-two. The story is told through people we know by their jobs and their relationships.
The Narrator
He writes about philosophy and lives at Maybury, near Woking. In the first chapters he is learning to ride a bicycle and drafting a paper about how moral ideas will develop. He is curious and a little smug, and he is wrong about almost everything on the first night, telling his wife the Martians can’t leave the pit.
What makes him a good narrator is that he keeps admitting his weakness. He says fear turned him into a child, and he says he wanted to be in at the death, and he never excuses either. Later he describes himself as an animal among animals. By Putney Hill the artilleryman tells him his hair has turned grey.
And he puts the worst thing he does on the record, with no witnesses. He lets the reader judge. In the epilogue he still cannot feel safe: crowds in Fleet Street look to him like ghosts, and he wakes in the night from dreams of the black dust. That is the character.
The Wife
She is the person he is trying to get back to, and she barely speaks. At dinner on Friday she says the Martians may come to their house. On the drive to Leatherhead she answers only in single words, and the narrator remembers her face being very white when they parted.
Then she vanishes from the book for most of its length. The narrator imagines her in every danger, and his need to reach Leatherhead drives him through the whole story. When he finally learns Leatherhead was destroyed, she appears alive in his garden, with his cousin. In the pages I read, the book never says how they escaped.
Ogilvy, Henderson and Stent
Ogilvy is the astronomer at Ottershaw. He scoffs at the idea of life on Mars, puts the odds at a million to one, and then becomes the first person to find the cylinder. He is also the first to think there might be men inside, and tries to help them.
Henderson is a London journalist, deaf in one ear, and he sends the first telegram. Stent, the Astronomer Royal, is tall and fair, sweating and irritable, giving orders in a high voice. He and Ogilvy even telegraph for soldiers to protect the Martians from the crowd.
All three walk toward the pit under a white flag, wanting to show the Martians that humans are intelligent. They are the first to die.
The Artilleryman
He is a driver in the artillery, from battery number twelve of the Horse Artillery, and he comes over the narrator’s fence on Saturday night in shock. His account of the lost battle is the first honest picture of the Martian machines, and the next morning he says the soldiers are bringing bows and arrows against the lightning.
When the narrator meets him again at Putney Hill, he has changed into a prophet. Humans are finished, he says, but a few can live underground in the drains and learn. It is persuasive, and the narrator believes it for hours. Then he sees the burrow is barely ten yards long, and the man has spent more time playing cards and drinking champagne than digging.
That is the sharpest portrait in the book: a plan that is bigger than the person making it. The narrator leaves him, and the book never says what became of him.
The Curate
He is first seen at Halliford, covered in soot, asking why God allows this. He is a fugitive from Weybridge, shaken that his church and Sunday schools are gone. The narrator has no patience for him, and tells him to keep his head.
In the buried house, the curate eats too much, weeps, and fights for the peephole. In his worst hour he shouts that he failed the poor and must now bear witness. It is the only honest thing he says. The narrator strikes him down with the blunt side of a meat chopper, and a Martian drags the body away.
The book does not make him a villain, only a man who could not bear what was true.
The Brother
The narrator’s younger brother is a medical student in London, and for four chapters he is the hero. He is practical. He pockets his ten pounds, grabs a bicycle from a looted shop, and later buys three places on a steamer for thirty-six pounds. He travels through Sunday London, hears the Black Smoke dispatch at dawn, and walks into the great flight northward.
On a lane near Barnet he saves two women from robbers. Mrs Elphinstone is hysterical and keeps calling for George. Her sister-in-law is cool and quick: she drives the pony, slashes with a whip, and later fires a revolver to help him. Together they cross the Barnet road, reach the Essex coast, and watch the Thunder Child charge the Martians.
The brother is last seen on the steamer at dusk, watching something huge climb into the sky.
The Martians
They have no names and no individual voices. The narrator says they are heads, with big eyes, a beak and sixteen tentacles. They don’t eat; they inject blood. They don’t sleep, and have no sex. He believes they talk without sound.
He also asks us to look at them fairly. He recalls what humans did to the dodo and the Tasmanians, and says that this war has taught us pity for the creatures we dominate. In the end it is not our guns that kill them but the smallest things on earth, which the ending explains.
Faces In The Crowd
A few people last only a page, and stay with you. The landlord of the Spotted Dog sells the narrator a dog cart, and is found dead on the hill. A man whose bag splits spills gold in the road, and is run over reaching for it. Lord Garrick, the Chief Justice, lies on a stretcher by a hedge, dying of thirst. A blind man in a Salvation Army uniform cries eternity from a cart. An old man would rather save his orchids.
Who Is Who
So the book gives us a small cast, and nearly everyone is known by a role. If you remember one thing, remember this: the narrator survives by watching, the artilleryman is practical but never quite does the work, and the curate is the one who cannot adapt at all. If this helped, subscribe, and tell me in the comments who you would trust in that cellar.
