GANGNES: In this case, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "common well-being; esp. the general good, public welfare, prosperity of the community."

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"

GANGNES: The 1898 volume inserts the following paragraph between these two:

"I followed them to my study, and found lying on my writing-table still, with the selenite paper weight upon it, the sheet of work I had left on the afternoon of the opening of the cylinder. For a space I stood reading over my abandoned arguments. It was a paper on the probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a prophecy: 'In about two hundred years,' I had written, 'we may expect——' The sentence ended abruptly. I remembered my inability to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how I had broken off to get my Daily Chronicle from the newsboy. I remembered how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had listened to his odd story of 'Men from Mars.'"

Through this revision, Wells reminds the reader that the narrator is a philosophical writer. There is an irony here: in his paper, the narrator speculates on moral development two centuries after what ends up being the arrival of the Martians. Speculating about far-future morality is proven folly in the face of an unforeseen present crisis that leaves human beings struggling to live at all, let alone live according to a certain moral code. There is also an implicit irony to the fact that the Martians are at least two centuries ahead of human beings technologically, and they have their own "moral" codes far different to what the narrator might have expected. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: In this case insipidity would be defined as "want of taste or judgement; weakness, folly" (Oxford English Dictionary). The narrator is not altogether pleased with the French operator's comments; France cheers England's "triumph" over the Martians, after having offered no aid during the crisis. Essentially, his "tousand congratulation" are in poor taste considering the circumstances.

GANGNES: Another instance of casual anti-Semitic language, though the narrator does not seem to mean it disparagingly, and it is not nearly as offensive as "the Jew" clutching at gold in the narrator's brother's story. The word did not have to be changed (if, indeed, it would have been changed) for the volume because this entire section was cut.

GANGNES: district in north London just southeast of Primrose Hill and northeast of Regent's Park, adjacent to the London Zoo

GANGNES: "to supplement, supply the deficiencies of anything" (Oxford English Dictionary)

GANGNES: The Epilogue was completely overhauled for the 1898 volume. Firstly, it was split into two parts: Book II, Ch. IX ("Wreckage") and Book II, Ch. X ("Epilogue"). The first five paragraphs of the serial's Epilogue were cut, and eight new paragraphs were written for the beginning of Book II, Ch. IX, the rest of which came from the serial's Epilogue. A few other paragraphs from the serial were cut for the new Epilogue (see below notes).

This rearrangement and supplementation of text has been simplified and/or glossed over in other scholars' accounts of revisions between the Pearson's version and the 1898 volume of the novel. When mentioned at all, it is often said that for the volume, Wells added "The Man on Putney Hill" and a "new Epilogue." Comparison of the text reveals that the reality of the revision was far more complicated, with a fair amount of text preserved from the serial to create the reworked Epilogue. Engaging with these nuanced changes offers insights into not only the editorial process of collecting serialized works for volume publication, but also the degree to which rearranging, tweaking, and supplementing text can affect pacing, characterization, and "message" at the end of a novel. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: "a ringing of a bell or bells, bell-ringing; the sound or music so produced" (Oxford English Dictionary)

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: In the 1898 volume, a large paragraph is added between these two:

"For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain."

In the serialized text, a similar rumination on microorganisms and their role in the Martians' destruction is positioned, though not phrased the same way, closer to the end of the installment's epilogue. Changing the order of these mental asides by the narrator alters the pacing and reveals background information at different points in the narrative. See text comparison page.

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

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 227: "an important thoroughfare in London's West End area. The (fictitious) home of Sherlock Holmes was at 221B Baker Street."

GANGNES: The majority of the Sherlock Holmes stories, like The War of the Worlds, were serialized in a popular general-interest periodical--in this case, The Strand Magazine. Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Holmes stories, was an active fiction writer around the same time as Wells, and they published in some of the same periodicals.

More information:

• The Strand Magazine collection on HathiTrust
• Article on the Strand on the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia website

This installment comprises the text that is roughly comparable to Book I ("The Coming of the Martians"), part of Chapter XV through the beginning of XVII of the 1898 collected edition and subsequent versions.

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

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 version. Likely the extent to which the break between Chapters XVI and XVII changed the flow of the narrative made this installment ending redundant. It works very effectively in the serial as a suspense-building hint at the next part of the narrative, but is perhaps not necessary in a collected volume. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: In the Pearson's Chapter XIV, the number of Londoners is written as "five million"; it is correct here, and Chapter XIV was changed in the volume so that both would read "six million."

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: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "to frown, scowl; to look angry or sullen"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 229: Essex is "a county of southeast England bordered by Cambridge and Suffolk (on the north), the river Thames (on the south), London (on the southwest), and the North Sea, Middlesex, and Hertford (on the east)."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 230: Harwich is "a North Sea port in northeast Essex, at the confluence of the rivers Stout and Orwell, about seventy miles northeast of London."

GANGNES: Essex is 32-33 miles east of New Barnet; essentially the same area as Chelmsford (where the narrator's brother's friends live).

GANGNES: in this case, someone who is fleeing from danger; see Oxford English Dictionary

GANGNES: area of London on the north side of the Thames; north of the British Museum and on the way north to Haverstock Hill, where the narrator's brother goes next

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 228: "In the 1890s [Chalk Farm Station] was a busy station on the London and North-Western Railway (terminus Euston), at the junction of Adelaide Road and Haverstock Hill, immediately north of Primrose Hill in central London."

GANGNES: In this case, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the door to "subsidiary building in the grounds of or adjoining a house, as a barn, shed, etc."

GANGNES: The 1898 volume replaces this sentence with "Now at the time we could not understand these things, but later I was to learn the meaning of these ominous kopjes that gathered in the twilight." The fact that Chapter XV is not divided in the volume allows for a smoother transition. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: "a bottle for wine, spirits, etc., twice the standard size and now usually containing 1½ litres (formerly two quarts); the quantity of liquor held by such a bottle" (Oxford English Dictionary)

GANGNES: The section beginning here and ending with "...across the pavement" is either removed from the 1898 volume or repurposed and moved until after an additional chapter--"The Man on Putney Hill"--is inserted. There is a lengthier note about "The Man on Putney Hill" at the beginning of Installment 9. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: This is a truly terrifying moment if we remember that the Martians do not digest food. They did not take the supplies in the pantry because they wanted them for themselves to consume; they took the supplies because they suspected that a human being was in the house, and by taking the provisions they can starve him out.

GANGNES: The tactile nature of the Martians' hunt for the narrator is a scene of intense tension in adaptations and illustrations of the novel. Byron Haskin’s 1953 film increases the danger posed by the machine's searching tentacle by adding a mechanical "eye" to its end, so that the characters must stay out of sight as well as sitting still.

More information:

• John M. Miller, "The War of the Worlds (1953)" on Turner Classic Movies' website

GANGNES: In this case, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a device for fastening or checking the motion of something, esp. a latch or other mechanism for fastening a door, window, etc."

GANGNES: In this case, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: "to pull or tear at (an object)."

GANGNES: In this case, the word refers to an organism's sex based on chromosomes (which most Victorians would conflate with gender). The "budding off" makes it clear that Martians do not have sexual intercourse, so any differences in chromosomes (if any) are inconsequential. The Martians have achieved a kind of asexual utopia, where their energies and emotions are not "wasted" on finding a mate. Human beings, with our base impulses and inefficient digestive systems, don't stand a chance against advanced beings who quickly process sustenance, never sleep, and don't have to bother with courtship and breeding.

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"

GANGNES: The text beginning with "I know it is..." and ending with "But I wander from my subject" several paragraphs later was cut from the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

STOVER argues, "The reason Wells cut this passage from the book version is probably aesthetic. He did not wish to give away too much, if he were to keep with the novel's deepest artistic ambiguity" (188). However, this assessment risks oversimplifying an extensive edit. Apart from "giving away too much"--offering a lot of information that the narrator would not find out until much later and therefore informing the reader of details about the Martians relatively early--this passage can come off as "preachy" or overly philosophical in a way that Wells may have later decided he disliked.

This omitted section tells us a great deal not only about the Martians' grisly study of a live human subject, but also about the narrator's ideologies. Looking back on his first glimpses of the Martians from a later time of safety, the narrator offers a kind of persuasive philosophical essay (he is, by trade, a professional writer of similar essays) on the ethical and moral lessons to be gleaned, from the Martians' behavior, about humans' treatment of other animals.

While the passage may "wander from [the narrator's] subject," it offers an intriguing dissonance between the narrator's terror of being killed by the Martians--to the point where he sacrifices others' lives--and his cool, high-minded defense of their consumption of human beings.

In the end, Wells retains only the first sentence of this passage in the volume to speak very briefly to the narrator's philosophical thoughts on the matter. What we gain in narrative flow and "artistic ambiguity" we may lose in characterization.

GANGNES: The first six paragraphs of Chapter XIX were cut from the text when it was collected as a volume, and replaced with a similar amount of text at the beginning of what became Book II, Chapter II of the 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

The replacement of this section relates to Wells's reorganization of the narrative toward the end of the novel. Certain devices, such as the foreshadowing in sentences like "The dreadful thing that happened at last between myself and the curate, and how in the end I escaped from that house, I will defer from telling in this chapter," are not as necessary in a volume; in fact, they can disrupt narrative flow. Foreshadowing helps keep a serial reader interested in an installment of a story and interested in buying the next one when it comes out.

GANGNES: MCCONNELL 240 identifies this as a "contradiction. The fourth start had fallen late Sunday night, north of where the narrator and the curate are hiding..., and the narrator only hears of it later, from his brother. So it is impossible for him to know, at the time, that this is the fifth star; he should think it is the fourth." A case could be made, however, that the narrator is writing this in retrospect, and therefore could be imposing his later knowledge of which cylinder it is onto his impressions at the time.

HUGHES AND GEDULD further complicate the matter by responding to MCCONNELL: "But the first three cylinders fell one after the other late on the nights of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Doubtless the narrator simply assumes that the fourth fell 'late Sunday night' and that this one (late Monday night) is the fifth. ... The real trouble is that--far from being unaware of the fourth cylinder--the narrator should be only too well acquainted with it. It fell the previous night, into Bushey Park, which he and the curate have just traversed. But Wells has forgetfully caused the park to contain nothing more remarkable than 'the deer going to and fro under the chestnuts.'"

GANGNES: In this case, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "An opening, an open space between portions of solid matter; a gap, cleft, chasm, or hole."

GANGNES: A great deal of text here was shifted around and significantly revised for the volume. See text comparison page.

From MCCONNELL 238: "a still-common English term for a suburban dwelling house"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 216: "a fashionable name for a kind of small suburban house--in this case a two-family structure--popularly considered to be a 'better class' of dwelling"

GANGNES: Americans might call this kind of house a high-end "duplex," in that the structure itself is the size of a large house, but there are two "homes" within it, separated by a long dividing wall. Many semi-detached houses have two floors.

GANGNES: In this case, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "very small pieces or splinters of wood."

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).

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 228: "a small town in west Essex about sixteen miles north-northeast of London"

GANGNES: Chipping Ongar is to the east and slightly north of Edgware, about two-thirds of the way from Edgware to Chelmsford (relevant to the narrator's brother's journey).

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 228: "a town in northeast Sussex, on the river Colne, about seventy miles northeast of central London"

GANGNES: Colchester is near the east coast of England, ~25 miles northeast of Chelmsford.

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: In this instance, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a person's spirit; courage, strength of character; vigour, spiritedness, vivacity"

GANGNES: In this instance, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a low wall or barrier, often ornamental, placed at the edge of a platform, balcony, roof, etc. ... to prevent people from falling"

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: The Strand (technically just "Strand") is a road just south of Trafalgar Square (see below) and north of the Thames; it runs along to the east and then becomes Fleet Street (see above). The Strand Magazine, which published the Sherlock Holmes stories, took its name from the fact that its first publishing house was located on Southampton Street, intersecting with Strand.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 234: The Strand is "an important thoroughfare in central London. It runs parallel with the Thames (a very short distance away) and extends west from the Aldwych to Trafalgar Square. It is the location of fashionable stores, hotels, theatres, and office buildings."

From MCCONNELL: evening paper published 1880-1905

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 212: "Established in 1880, St. James's Gazette was a pro-Tory paper with features that also appealed to readers with intellectual literary interests."

GANGNES: St. James's Gazette (Pearson's mistakenly leaves off the second "S") was a conservative daily broadsheet. It included social, political, and literary commentary, news, marriage announcements, stock market prices, and advertisements.

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. 551.

GANGNES: MCCONNELL is partially incorrect here; his citation is more thorough in that it addresses both the pillar of fire and pillar of smoke, but the appropriate chapter is Exodus 13, not Exodus 15. The most thorough and correct citation here would be a combination of the two--Exodus 13:21-22--which STOVER cites, though inexplicably as a note at the beginning of Chapter XII rather than at the textual reference.

From MCCONNELL 173: "In Exodus 15:21-22, God sends a pillar of fire to guide the Israelites through the Sinai Desert by night, and a pillar of cloud to guide them by day."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 209: "See Exodus 13:21: 'And the Lord went before them [to guide the Israelites through the Sinai] ... by night in a pillar of fire.'"

From STOVER 114: quotes Exodus 13:21-22, then: "As the Lord guided the Israelites through the Sinai desert, so the Martians lead humanity through a wasteland of suffering. Ahead, leaving the old order behind, is the promise of world unity."

From MCCONNELL170: "That is, he drove the horse-drawn carriage of the heavy field guns."

GANGNES: As other scholars have pointed out (e.g., HUGHES AND GEDULD 210), the marked difference in the role of the artilleryman in the Pearson's version as compared with the volume constitutes a significant change between the two versions. He is the "man" in the new chapter--"The Man on Putney Hill"--added for the volume, and he is a conduit through which the novel explores how humankind might grapple (or fail to grapple) with such a crisis as the Martian invasion. See Installment 9.

GANGNES: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "absence or suspension of motive power, activity, or feeling"

GANGNES: This section is replaced in the 1898 edition with the following passage after "...rules in his body?":

"I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal."

This revision is particularly interesting because Wells removed language referring to steam engines and other human technologies in the narrator's description of the fighting machines in the previous chapter (beginning "And this Thing!").

In this site's page on "The Terrible Trades of Sheffield," a connection is drawn between these edits and Wells's opinion of Warwick Goble's illustrations, which were too close to human technologies. In the revision, then, Wells reframes human technologies as part of an analogy; Martian technology is beyond human technology to so extreme a degree as to be incomprehensible to humans.

From DANAHAY 75: church bells ringing

GANGNES: Which is to say, the church bells rang in such a way that indicated the time was midnight.

GANGNES: HUGHES AND GEDULD and STOVER both disagree with MCCONNELL about the meaning of this phrase.

From MCCONNELL 159: "The landlord fears he may be selling (not buying) a 'pig in a poke.'"

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 207: "One nineteenth-century slang meaning of 'pig' was goods or property. Hence the sentence might simply mean: 'I'm selling my bit of property.' Another slang meaning of 'pig' was nag, donkey, or moke; while 'bit of' was an adjectival term that could be used variously to express affection for the subject it preceded. ... Another possibility is a real pig, i.e., the landlord is surprised--after asking a pig buyer to pay a pound and drive the pig home himself--to be offered two pounds with a promise moreover to return the pig. According to this, people are simply talking at cross-purposes, and the narrator then explains that he wants a dogcart, not a pig."

From STOVER 98: "The landlord is puzzled by the narrator's haste to pay two pounds for his 'bit of pig' (=his valuable piece of property) coupled with a strong promise to return it."

GANGNES: In this case, the equivalent of dinner or an evening meal (hence it being "six in the evening"). See Oxford English Dictionary: "locally in the U.K. (esp. northern) ... a cooked evening meal"

GANGNES: In this case, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: "waging or carrying on regular recognized war; actually engaged in hostilities," which is to say, the narrator is imagining, and is excited about, an epic war between the British and the Martians.

GANGNES: In this case, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "something continued or constantly repeated without change; a stereotyped phrase, formula, etc.; stereotyped diction or usage."

GANGNES: This indicates that the weather is volatile and likely heralds an imminent storm. See Oxford English Dictionary on "barometer": "an instrument for determining the weight or pressure of the atmosphere, and hence for judging of probable changes in the weather, ascertaining the height of an ascent, etc" and Encyclopædia Britannica entry.

GANGNES: In this usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: "of the atmosphere or weather: Like that of a closed up room; confined, stifling, without free circulation."

GANGNES: North and slightly to the east of Upper Halliford, where the narrator and curate are located at this point. Roughly a half-hour walk or less, depending on where in Upper Halliford and where in Sunbury-on-Thames.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 234: "a town in Middlesex, known fully as Sunbury-on-Thames, thirteen miles west-southwest of London"

GANGNES: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "partially cooked by boiling"

GANGNES: towns/villages on the banks of the Thames, past Halliford toward central London; Richmond is farther away from Halliford than Kingston

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 230: "Usually called Kingston-on-Thames. A municipal borough in northeast Surrey, about nine miles southwest of central London."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 233: "a borough of greater London, on the Thames in North Surrey, about eight miles west-southwest of central London"

GANGNES: This line is cut from the 1898 version because it is no longer true. As HUGHES AND GEDULD (210) and others point out, the artilleryman becomes a major figure in the volume, featured in Chapter 7 of Book II, "The Man on Putney Hill." See text comparison page, the earlier note about the artilleryman on this page, and the note about the artilleryman on the Installment 3 page.

GANGNES: In this case, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the door to "subsidiary building in the grounds of or adjoining a house, as a barn, shed, etc."

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

GANGNES: This is the policeman who is depicted running from the Heat Ray in both of Cosmo Rowe's illustrations (the Installment 1 header image and the Installment 2 frontispiece).

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: Changed to "Knaphill" in the 1898 edition and subsequent versions.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 204 and 230: Knaphill is ~3 miles due west from Horsell Common. The distances might seem exaggerated to today's readers, but they are presented from a pedestrian's perspective.

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: It is not clear whether "Markham" is supposed to refer to a real editor of a specific newspaper. W. O. Markham edited the British Medical Journal, but that publication was not an illustrated paper. It is highly likely that "Markham" is a fictional character who is an acquaintance of the narrator.

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. 78-9.

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: A variation on this line is used as the first sung lines in track 1 ("The Eve of the War") of Jeff Wayne's 1978 musical adaptation of The War of the Worlds (LP only; not originally performed live as a play). In the musical, the line is altered to "The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, he said." In the novel, Ogilvy is telling the narrator that there may well be life on Mars, but it is not likely to be "man-like," i.e., intelligent and capable of communicating in the way humans communicate. The musical's altered line instead has Ogilvy opine that regardless of what kind of life might be on Mars, the odds that Martians would come to Earth are very low.

The musical incorporates narration adapted from the novel, instrumental music, vocals, and "plot" additions. The LP set was sold with an accompanying illustrated booklet related to the novel's plot. The musical has recently been updated as "The New Generation." Live performances of the musical with accompanying stage effects tour the United Kingdom.

More information:

• Website dedicated to Jeff Wayne's musical
• "The Eve of the War" recording

GANGNES: village to the north of Woking but south of Chertsey

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 232: "A small village about two miles north-northwest of Woking, Surrey, and about three miles from the narrator's home in Maybury. It is the location of Ogilvy's observatory."

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

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

GANGNES: Adaptations of The War of the Worlds have tended to modify their settings to match those of their main audience. To aid in establishing their time periods and locations, they open with a prologue that is similar to this one, but with several details changed to suit the adaptation.

The 1938 RADIO DRAMA (Orson Welles, Mercury Theatre on the Air)) begins: "We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."

The 1953 FILM ADAPTATION (Byron Haskin)) includes a bit of narration before the title that briefly discusses war technology from WWI and WWII, then begins: "No one would have believed, in the middle of the twentieth century, human affairs were being closely watched by a greater intelligence. Yet, across the gulf of space, on the planet Mars, intellects vast and unsympathetic regarded our Earth enviously, slowly and surely drawing their plans against us."

The 2005 FILM ADAPTATION (Steven Spielberg)) begins: "No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century, that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than our own. That as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they observed and studied. Like the way a man with a microscope might scrutinize the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world. Yet, across the gulf of space, intellects, vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our plant with envious eyes. And slowly and surely, drew their plans against us."

Perhaps most interestingly, the opening lines were modified to fit a fictional setting: the DC Comics universe. The DC "Elseworlds" comic "SUPERMAN: WAR OF THE WORLDS" (1988) accommodates the existence of Krypton in this way: "No one would have believed, in the early decades of the twentieth century, that the Earth was being watched keenly and closely across the gulf of space by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own. One such older world was Mars, where minds that are to our mind as ours are to the beasts--intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic--regarded Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. Another such world, unknown alike to our earth and to the red planet... was the doomed sphere called Krypton." The narration goes on to link the fates of Earth, Mars, and Krypton to establish their similarities and draw them together under the Elseworlds Martian invasion.

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)

This installment comprises the text that is roughly comparable to Book II, Chapter VIII ("Dead London") through Chapter X ("The Epilogue") of the 1898 collected edition and subsequent versions. "The Man on Putney Hill"--Book II, Chapter VII of the volume--did not appear in the Pearson's version.

This is the cover of the December 1897 issue of Pearson's Magazine: the 1897 Double Christmas Number:

GANGNES: For the 1898 volume, Wells inserted a new chapter--"The Man on Putney Hill"--just before this point in the text. This chapter features a reunion between the narrator and the artilleryman he met in Woking in Installment 3. In this new chapter, the artilleryman shares his grandiose plans for a new human civilization that would be rebuilt in the water mains beneath London, so that even when the Martians take over, Britons can preserve their culture and thrive there until they are ready to rise up against the Martians. It soon becomes clear to the narrator that the artilleryman has gone mad: the "gulf between his dreams and his powers" is insurmountable. See the 1898 version of the text in facsimile and the Project Gutenberg transcription.

GANGNES: In addition to the new chapter ("The Man on Putney Hill"), five paragraphs of text were added here in the 1898 volume as the beginning of a new chapter (Book II, Ch. VIII) called "Dead London." See text comparison page. The effect of these additions is that the narrator's experience wandering through an empty London is drawn out and given more narrative room to breathe; in the Pearson's version the narrator encounters the dying Martians much more quickly after his arrival in London.

GANGNES: This line and "That, at any rate, would be completion." (below) were cut from the 1898 volume. Perhaps Wells decided that less of the narrator's internal commentary on his feelings would be more effective. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: To "lie in state" is "the tradition in which the body of a dead official is placed in a state building, either outside or inside a coffin, to allow the public to pay their respects" (Wikipedia). The "black shroud" here refers metaphorically to a burial shroud or a shroud worn by mourners. Here, then, Wells compares the entire city of London and its inhabitants as corpses, and the black smoke (and resulting black dust) as its burial covering.

GANGNES: These are potential ways to kill oneself and join the rest of London, the narrator considers.

GANGNES: Lost its balance or similar and fell.

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."

GANGNES: In the 1898 volume, the following line is added between these two sentences: "All about me the red weed clambered among the ruins, writing to get above me in the dimness." The addition perhaps adds a sense of being lost in an alien landscape rather than a familiar city; the Martians and their flora have not just destroyed London; they have taken over it. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: In his illustrations for the 1906 limited-edition Belgian volume, Henrique Alvim Corrêa sometimes takes a fantastical/magic-realist approach to his depictions, literalizing metaphors and making the mundane strange. In this case, Corrêa literally draws the narrator's conception of London's buildings resembling skulls:

GANGNES: The 1898 volume inserts a new sentence between these two: "Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a day too soon." See text comparison page. This revelation raises the stakes in the volume; the serial mentions the Martians' flying machines but does not emphasize the danger posed by them, but the volume stresses that the Martians were improving their flying technology so that they could travel farther across Britain and beyond.

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

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: The narrator here is commenting on the process of historical documentation: historians must gather personal narratives (like his and his brother's) together and synthesize them into "official" records of history. The narrator simultaneously downplays the importance of his account and asserts its role in the creation of historical records.

GANGNES: Which is to say, in spite of the weakened state of Britain during the Martian invasion and the rebuilding period, no other country took advantage of this weakness and attacked Britain or its colonies. The narrator takes heart about the human spirit from this, despite the fact that in the same paragraph he mentions cannibalism, and we must remember what he, himself, did to the curate.

GANGNES: French, "Name of God!"

GANGNES: French, "Long live England!"

GANGNES: "Special constables" in the Victorian period were private citizens who were appointed or volunteered to help the official police keep the peace in times of crisis. The "white badge" (below) likely refers to the white armbands issued to special constables in the nineteenth century. "Staff" may indicate their truncheons, or the narrator was given another kind of wooden weapon.

More information:

• "History of the Metropolitan Police Service - 19th Century" on Wikipedia
• "The History of the Special Constabulary" on the Old Police Cells Museum website

GANGNES: Someone had broken in while the narrator was gone.

GANGNES: STOVER (248) incorrectly comments on this line as if it were the ending of the serialized version of the text:

"All critics think this is a weak ending, and ending it was in the serial version of 1897. The Epilogue is new to the book but it, too, strikes the very same note."

This is likely due to some confusion over the fact that an Epilogue was "new to the book"; Wells wrote a new Epilogue for the 1898 volume, for which he retained and rearranged portions of the serialized text, including this scene with the narrator's cousin and wife.

The asterisk inserted here indicates a "hard break" (paragraph break of several lines) in the serialized text, but it is not, as Stover calls it, the novel's ending. Rather, it is simply a pause at the conclusion of the narrator's journey before he reflects on his telling of it, and the outcome and aftereffects of the Martian invasion.

GANGNES: The following two paragraphs are cut from the 1898 volume, likely because a similar discussion of microorganisms appears in a different place in the revision. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: The hypothesis here is that the Martians do not bury their dead because the dead do not decompose on their planet, or at least do not decompose in a way that risks making others ill.

From MCCONNELL 297: "A contradiction. In Book I, Chapter Fifteen, the black smoke is said to produce unusual lines in the blue of the spectrum."

GANGNES: This contradiction appears in the volume because of an added passage in Chapter XV. See note in Installment 6.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 225: "This contradicts the earlier statement that the Black Smoke contained 'an unknown element giving a group of four lines in the blue spectrum'. ... Actually, argon, as an inert gas, cannot combine with another element to form a compound."

GANGNES: The "blue spectrum" line is not in the serial. See Installment 6 note. HUGHES AND GEDULD (225) speculate that this kind of "carelessness in this final chapter probably reflects Wells's changing intentions regarding its publication." These "changing intentions" had much to do with Heinemann's insistence on the book being longer (HUGHES AND GEDULD 5-6).

GANGNES: The following two paragraphs were cut from the 1898 volume. They are substituted in a different part of the ending with a shorter comment about the Martians' flying machines inserted farther up. See note above and text comparison page. In the revision process, the flying machines become a point of frightening calamity avoided rather than a scientific discussion.

GANGNES: A "score" is 20 miles, so roughly 20-40 miles.

GANGNES: This sentence was cut from the 1898 volume; we lose this referencing back to the Nature article. See text comparison page.

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: This is a reference to the real article in Nature that was mentioned in Installment 1 ("A Strange Light on Mars").

GANGNES: Possibly a reference to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), or at least to the theories about using electricity to reanimate dead flesh that inspired her story. See Sharon Ruston, "The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein" on the British Library's website.

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.

GANGNES: Illustrations of the Red Weed vary significantly across illustrations and adaptations of The War of the Worlds. In many cases, the weed resembles a creeping vine or red kelp. Only one of the novel's major illustrators, Johan Briedé, took the "cactus-like" quality of the plants to heart. Briedé's illustrations were published in The Strand Magazine in 1920 with an introduction from Wells himself.

More information:

• “The War of the Worlds: Illustrated by Johan Briedé.” The Strand Magazine, no. 350, February 1920, pp. 154–163.

This installment comprises the text that is roughly comparable to Book II, Chapter II ("What We Saw from the Ruined House") through Chapter VI ("The Work of Fifteen Days") of the 1898 collected edition and subsequent versions.

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

GANGNES: Which is to say, the human being captured by the Martians.

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

GANGNES: The following sentence is added here to the 1898 volume: "And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in this place certain further details which, although they were not all evident to us at the time, will enable the reader who is unacquainted with them to form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures." Wells makes a clearer distinction in the collected volume between his narrator's thoughts and feelings during the time of the narrative, and those during the writing of the narrative. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: There are many small changes made to the descriptions of the Martians for the collected volume (see text comparison page). A seemingly nitpicky one is that every instance of a present-tense state of being (e.g., "differs," "do," "have," etc.) is past-tense in the volume. This is perhaps not a material difference, but it does affect the reader's understanding of whether the Martians might still be around at the end of the narrative, and/or if human beings can no longer consider Martians to be a thing of the past even if they defeat them; the Martians still exist on other planets.

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: In this case, strange and unbelievable (not inherently a good thing).

GANGNES: The 1898 version of the novel adds two paragraphs here about the thoughts of "a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute" on Martian technology and anatomy. This is commonly thought to be a cheeky reference to Wells himself. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: This line is replaced in the 1898 volume with "A hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life." This constitutes a subtle foreshadowing about the ultimate fate of the Martians and is perhaps a bit more elegantly constructed than the serial's sentence.

GANGNES: The narrator heard about the Red Weed spreading across England through its waterways.

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.

GANGNES: The Fighting Machines, Handling Machines, Heat Ray, and other Martian technologies that are useful rather than for ornamentation or protection from the elements.

GANGNES: In this case, not just the "natural" process that we commonly associate with Charles Darwin's capital-E Evolution, but rather, a biological evolution progressing alongside technological innovation. Martians' technologies are far more evolved than humans', but their tools and technologies are as well.

GANGNES: The Fighting Machines, Handling Machines, and so forth, serve as body augmentations for the Martians, in a way. Their physiology as mostly brains with dexterous tentacles for digits makes them ideally suited to operate in this way.

GANGNES: The text from this point through the end of the chapter was cut from the 1898 volume and replaced by a more objective rumination on the differences between human and Martian technology--including the absence of the wheel in Martian machines--and more observations about the specifics of Martian anatomy and abilities. Instead of ending on the Martians' killing of a young boy for food, the chapter concludes with the curate drawing the narrator's attention back to him. See text comparison page.

From STOVER 199: "The 'Handling Machines' are robots, which here make them their first appearance in science fiction."

GANGNES: Illustrations of the Martians' technology have strongly favored the iconic tripod fighting machines, with almost no depictions of the handling machines. A notable exception is the below image by Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa, who created it as part of a series of illustrations for a limited-edition Belgian volume (1906):

GANGNES: Here, Wells leaves us to imagine what death-by-Martian would look like. All we know is that the narrator does not seem to think that Martians are cruel, and that they inject themselves with blood from living victims in order to survive.

GANGNES: The 1898 volume is revised and reorganized here in such a way that there is another chapter--"The Days of Imprisonment"--before "The Death of the Curate." Between the first two paragraphs of this chapter in the serial and the third one ("After the eighth day..."), there is a massive amount of text added and shifted around to restructure the narrator's account of the time he and the curate spent in the ruined house before the curate died. These changes alter the pacing significantly. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: In this case, a tool or object the narrator can use to knock the curate unconscious or make him quiet some other way.

GANGNES: the end of the handle of the meat cleaver

GANGNES: The Martian tentacle's search for the narrator was revised and expanded somewhat for the 1898 volume. The changes slow the pacing down and increase tension. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: The narrator thinks that the Martians are smart enough to tell by looking at the curate's head injury that there must be some other human inside the house who had attacked the curate.

GANGNES: Which is to say, all the narrator can think about is eating food.

GANGNES: This paragraph was revised and expanded somewhat to include evidence of remorse from the narrator over his role in the curate's death (see text comparison page):

"During these days, in a rambling, inconclusive way, I thought much of the curate and of the manner of his death.

On the thirteenth day I drank some more water, and dozed and thought disjointedly of eating and of vague impossible plans of escape. Whenever I dozed I dreamt of horrible phantasms, of the death of the curate, or of sumptuous dinners; but, asleep or awake, I felt a keen pain that urged me to drink again and again. The light that came into the scullery was no longer grey, but red. To my disordered imagination it seemed the colour of blood."

We get no such indication that the narrator regrets sacrificing the curate's life to save his own in the serial.

GANGNES: red or red-brown

GANGNES: The 1898 version adds the following small paragraph between these two sentences (see text comparison page):

"Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon the mound of rubble. I could see in any direction save behind me, to the north, and neither Martians nor sign of Martians were to be seen. The pit dropped sheerly from my feet, but a little way along the rubbish afforded a practicable slope to the summit of the ruins. My chance of escape had come. I began to tremble."

GANGNES: There is no paragraph here in the 1898 volume; it was moved to after "...gently swaying" (with a new sentence to end it: "And oh! the sweetness of the air!") and renamed, "The Work of Fifteen Days." See text comparison page.

GANGNES: There are no Earth plants around to compete with the Red Weed for space; the red Martian plants are taking over Earth's green vegetation.

GANGNES: This paragraph is revised and expanded into a lengthy passage wherein the narrator grapples with the changes in the countryside around him after finally escaping from the ruined house. He is reckless and dazed for a few moments before he gets a hold of himself again and begins to search for food. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: In this case, vulnerability or lack of safety.

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: This line was cut from the 1898 volume. It is the kind of text marker designed to keep serial audiences engaged in the narrative and clamoring to buy the next installment, but in a volume it may come off as unnecessary foreshadowing that distracts from the flow of the narrative. Wells has substituted another form of foreshadowing that is simultaneously subtler and more detailed. The following sentence was added just before this point (between "upon it." and "The fronds"): "Now by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead." See text comparison page.

GANGNES: The 1898 volume adds a few sentences here wherein the narrator again comments on the landscape through which he is traveling alone (see text comparison page):

"Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I would come upon perfectly undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors closed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if their inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; the tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper."

The addition enhances the desolate mood of the narrator's journey and contributes to the visual writing style for which Wells is so often lauded.

GANGNES: Presumably the narrator is hoping to eat one of the dogs, as he planned to with the dog that came near the ruined house.

GANGNES: It is not clear whether the Martians ate these animals, humans ate them, or other animals ate them. The text suggests that the Martians prefer to eat human beings.

GANGNES: Which is to say, like a chimney sweep covered in coal dust from cleaning a chimney.

GANGNES: The 1898 volume here adds the line "She seemed asleep, but she was dead." This becomes a problem for consistency between the serial and the volume; see HUGHES AND GEDULD note in Installment 9.

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

This installment comprises the text that is roughly comparable to Book I ("The Coming of the Martians"), part of Chapter XVII and Chapter I of Book II ("London Under the Martians") of the 1898 collected edition and subsequent versions.

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

GANGNES: The battle of the Thunder Child is one of the most action-packed scenes in the novel. It has been a favored scene for many adaptations and illustrations, including the album cover for Jeff Wayne's musical adaptation (see Installment 1 annotations):

More information:

• Website dedicated to Jeff Wayne's musical
• "Thunder Child" recording
• Dr. Zeus's War of the Worlds book cover collection
• Dr. Zeus's War of the Worlds interior illustration collection

GANGNES: From this point to the end of the paragraph was cut for the 1898 edition. As the notes on Installment 6 indicate, a significant portion of the end of Installment 6 was moved to the next chapter, changing the flow and creation of suspense as the narrative moves toward what would become the split between Books I and II. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: The New River is actually an aqueduct created in the 1600s, hence the fact that is a source of drinking water here. See "The New River" on the History of London website.

GANGNES: This is another instance of the unreliability of the press during a time of crisis, especially when the government is in disarray. There is a tension throughout the novel of the citizens' hunger for official news--to the point where they will pay exorbitant prices for a newspaper--and the uselessness of the scraps of information they receive.

GANGNES: area of London east of Southwark Bridge and Tower Bridge (and the Tower of London), on the north bank of the Thames

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 230: "a tough, working-class district in London's East End. It is north of Commercial Road and East India Dock Road, about five miles east of Charing Cross."

GANGNES: Due to the shifting around of the narrative, this sentence is changed in the 1898 edition to: "Of the falling of the fifth cylinder I have presently to tell. The sixth star fell at Wimbledon." See text comparison page. HUGHES AND GEDULD (215) assert that this is "a slip"; the sixth and seventh cylinders "must fall on Tuesday and Wednesday nights." See below note on "Fifth Cylinder" that complicates matters further.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 230: Highgate is "a district of north London, on a hill below Hampstead Heath. One of the most picturesque parts of London, it was (in the 1890s) and still is an area of many fine houses."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 231: Neasden is "a northwest suburb of greater London, about six miles from the city center. It is now heavily residential but it was quite rural in the 1890s."

GANGNES: Highgate is to the north and slightly east of Chalk Farm; Neasden is to the northwest of Chalk Farm.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 227: "England's second largest city, in northwest Warwick, about 110 miles northwest of London."

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 232: "an eminence north of Regent's Park, with the London Zoo below. It commands an extensive view of London."

GANGNES: Primrose Hill is just south of Chalk Farm.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 234: "a small town in Essex, about four miles west of the North Sea and sixty-five miles northeast of central London."

GANGNES: Tillingham is north of Foulness and northeast of Southend.

GANGNES: villages on the eastern coast of England; the sailors are traveling from north to south along the coast

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 228: Clacton (officially Clacton-on-Sea) is "a resort town on the North Sea, about eighty miles northeast of London."

GANGNES: port city in Germany

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 227: "a river about forty miles long in the south of England. It flows from Saffron Walden to Mersea Island, where it enters the North Sea."

GANGNES: wide river flowing in from the east coast of England, north of Foulness and Southend; Maldon (below) lies at the western point where it narrows

From MCCONNELL 227: haggling

GANGNES: Again we see a comparison of Martian technology (especially the Heat Ray) to cameras and photography.

GANGNES: In the 1898 edition, this is the point where the novel is split into two books. Book II is called "Earth Under the Martians," and this chapter becomes Chapter I of Book II: "Under Foot."

GANGNES: In the 1898 edition, nearly the entirety of the text from this point through "...heels of fact" (the beginning of page 454) is cut and replaced by a new paragraph and a half. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: This section is part of a major cut to the chapter that occurred when the novel was split into two parts (as discussed above). In the serialized version of the text, the novel's narrator spends much more time reflecting on his own feelings and responses, as well as the storytelling process, than in the volume. Here Wells makes explicitly clear the narrator's unreliability (which is implicit in other parts of the text). Moreover, there is a strange critique of "romanticized" fiction that sets fiction up against this narrator's journalistic account of the invasion (which, of course, is fiction as well). The narrator's appeals to authority here may come off as prematurely defensive and disruptive of the narrative flow. It seems that Wells ultimately decided they would not be a strong start to Book II of the volume. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: Cut in the 1898 version and replaced by a longer section. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: This section was significantly revised for the 1898 version. Most notably, in the Pearson's version Twickenham is deserted, whereas in the 1898 version the narrator and curate cross paths with several other people who are fleeing, and there is more damage in the town. This creates quite a different effect: the serial evokes the haunting quality of a ghost town; the volume expresses an environment of urgency and destruction. See text comparison page.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 233: "a district of greater London south of the Thames, between Richmond (on the west) and Roehampton (on the east), about eight miles west of central London"

GANGNES: east of Twickenham, north of Richmond, west of Barnes, and south of Chiswick; essentially the same area as Mortlake

GANGNES: area of London on the south bank of the Thames, east of Twickenham, north of Richmond, and south of Chiswick; essentially the same area as Sheen

GANGNES: explosion

GANGNES: unconscious

GANGNES: See notes below from MCCONNELL and HUGHES AND GEDULD about a possible inconsistency or oversight in the order of the cylinder landings. This makes mapping them even more complicated.

GANGNES: The 1898 volume adds this sentence: "Save that an unknown element giving a group of four lines in the blue of the spectrum is concerned, we are all still entirely ignorant of the nature of this substance." See text comparison page. HUGHES AND GEDULD (214) note that the addition creates an inconsistency; the epilogue describes "three lines in the green."

GANGNES: Should be "Street Cobham." This is an error that was likely made in the typesetting process for Pearson's, as it does not appear in other versions. The mix-up is understandable, especially as the narrator has spoken so often of Chobham and Chobham Road.

HUGHES AND GEDULD (119) point out that Street Chobham (with an H) is "well west of the Martians' line of march."

GANGNES: village on the north bank of the Thames, slightly northwest of Ditton between Walton and Kingston

From DANAHAY 113: large park; part of Greater London

GANGNES: now spelled "Bushy Park"; in Hampton

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

GANGNES: Cut from the 1898 volume; perhaps it was thought to be redundant. See text comparison page.

GANGNES: a village about 12 miles to the north of central London; Londoners are fleeing north from the Martians

GANGNES: which is to say, cause the engine driver harm or even death by pushing him into the coal furnace that fuels the steam for the engine

From DANAHAY 116: "sack"=looting

GANGNES: The narrator's brother is one of the first to arrive during the process of looting a bicycle shop, which allows him to steal a bicycle before they are all taken.

GANGNES: the northbound road through Chalk Farm

GANGNES: road to the west from Chalk Farm; the narrator's brother decides to travel west instead of north because the Haverstock Hill road is blocked

GANGNES: The text was significantly revised for the 1898 volume from this point through "...in time to save them"; Wells seems to have spent a great deal of effort grappling with how to describe the havoc and conflict of the flight from London. See text comparison page.

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 229: "a suburban area of greater London, in Middlesex, about seven miles northwest of the city center."

GANGNES: north of Chalk Farm (on the narrator's brother's path)

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 233: "a town in south-central Hertford, about twenty miles north-northwest of central London"

GANGNES: about 11-12 miles north of Edgware (relevant to narrator's brother's journey)

From HUGHES AND GEDULD 228: "a small town in central Essex, about twenty-five miles east-northeast of London"

GANGNES: about 38 miles east of Edgware (on narrator's brother's journey)

GANGNES: Corrected to "companion" in 1898 volume. See text comparison page.

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