H G Wells Omnibus, page 401
Teddy’s momentary triumph faded. “No,” he said, “I ‘aven’t.”
“Nor won’t. Nor won’t. You’ll never see the things I’ve seen, never. Not if you live to be a ‘undred… Well, as I was saying, that’s how the Famine and Riotin’ began. Then there was strikes and Socialism, things I never did ‘old with, worse and worse. There was fightin’ and shootin’ down, and burnin’ and plundering. They broke up the banks up in London and got the gold, but they couldn’t make food out of gold. ‘Ow did WE get on? Well, we kep’ quiet. We didn’t interfere with no-one and no-one didn’t interfere with us. We ‘ad some old ‘tatoes about, but mocely we lived on rats. Ours was a old ‘ouse, full of rats, and the famine never seemed to bother ‘em. Orfen we got a rat. Orfen. But moce of the people who lived hereabouts was too tender stummicked for rats. Didn’t seem to fancy ‘em. They’d been used to all sorts of fallals, and they didn’t take to ‘onest feeding, not till it was too late. Died rather.
“It was the famine began to kill people. Even before the Purple Death came along they was dying like flies at the end of the summer. ‘Ow I remember it all! I was one of the first to ‘ave it. I was out, seein’ if I mightn’t get ‘old of a cat or somethin’, and then I went round to my bit of ground to see whether I couldn’t get up some young turnips I’d forgot, and I was took something awful. You’ve no idee the pain, Teddy—it doubled me up pretty near. I jes’ lay down by ‘at there corner, and your aunt come along to look for me and dragged me ‘ome like a sack.
“I’d never ‘ave got better if it ‘adn’t been for your aunt. ‘Tom,’ she says to me, ‘you got to get well,’ and I ‘AD to. Then SHE sickened. She sickened but there ain’t much dyin’ about your aunt. ‘Lor!’ she says, ‘as if I’d leave you to go muddlin’ along alone!’ That’s what she says. She’s got a tongue, ‘as your aunt. But it took ‘er ‘air off—and arst though I might, she’s never cared for the wig I got ‘er—orf the old lady what was in the vicarage garden.
“Well, this ‘ere Purple Death,—it jes’ wiped people out, Teddy. You couldn’t bury ‘em. And it took the dogs and the cats too, and the rats and ‘orses. At last every house and garden was full of dead bodies. London way, you couldn’t go for the smell of there, and we ‘ad to move out of the ‘I street into that villa we got. And all the water run short that way. The drains and underground tunnels took it. Gor’ knows where the Purple Death come from; some say one thing and some another. Some said it come from eatin’ rats and some from eatin’ nothin’. Some say the Asiatics brought it from some ‘I place, Thibet, I think, where it never did nobody much ‘arm. All I know is it come after the Famine. And the Famine come after the Penic and the Penic come after the War.”
Teddy thought. “What made the Purple Death?” he asked.
“‘Aven’t I tole you!”
“But why did they ‘ave a Penic?”
“They ‘ad it.”
“But why did they start the War?”
“They couldn’t stop theirselves. ‘Aving them airships made ‘em.”
“And ‘ow did the War end?”
“Lord knows if it’s ended, boy,” said old Tom. “Lord knows if it’s ended. There’s been travellers through ‘ere—there was a chap only two summers ago—say it’s goin’ on still. They say there’s bands of people up north who keep on with it and people in Germany and China and ‘Merica and places. ‘E said they still got flying-machines and gas and things. But we ‘aven’t seen nothin’ in the air now for seven years, and nobody ‘asn’t come nigh of us. Last we saw was a crumpled sort of airship going away—over there. It was a littleish-sized thing and lopsided, as though it ‘ad something the matter with it.”
He pointed, and came to a stop at a gap in the fence, the vestiges of the old fence from which, in the company of his neighbour Mr. Stringer the milkman, he had once watched the South of England Aero Club’s Saturday afternoon ascents. Dim memories, it may be, of that particular afternoon returned to him.
“There, down there, where all that rus’ looks so red and bright, that’s the gas-works.”
“What’s gas?” asked the little boy.
“Oh, a hairy sort of nothin’ what you put in balloons to make ‘em go up. And you used to burn it till the ‘lectricity come.”
The little boy tried vainly to imagine gas on the basis of these particulars. Then his thoughts reverted to a previous topic.
“But why didn’t they end the War?”
“Obstinacy. Everybody was getting ‘urt, but everybody was ‘urtin’ and everybody was ‘igh-spirited and patriotic, and so they smeshed up things instead. They jes’ went on smeshin’. And afterwards they jes’ got desp’rite and savige.”
“It ought to ‘ave ended,” said the little boy.
“It didn’t ought to ‘ave begun,” said old Tom, “But people was proud. People was la-dy-da-ish and uppish and proud. Too much meat and drink they ‘ad. Give in—not them! And after a bit nobody arst ‘em to give in. Nobody arst ‘em….”
He sucked his old gums thoughtfully, and his gaze strayed away across the valley to where the shattered glass of the Crystal Palace glittered in the sun. A dim large sense of waste and irrevocable lost opportunities pervaded his mind. He repeated his ultimate judgment upon all these things, obstinately, slowly, and conclusively, his final saying upon the matter.
“You can say what you like,” he said. “It didn’t ought ever to ‘ave begun.”
He said it simply—somebody somewhere ought to have stopped something, but who or how or why were all beyond his ken.
Table of Contents
H. G. Wells Biography
Early Life
Teacher
Artist
Personal Life
Writer
Political Views
The Fabian Society
Class
Democracy
World Government
Eugenics
Race
Zionism
First World War
Japan
Soviet Union
Other Endeavours
Summary
Religious Views
Literary Influence
Final Years
THE WAR IN THE AIR
PREFACE TO REPRINT EDITION
CHAPTER I. OF PROGRESS AND THE SMALLWAYS FAMILY
1
2
3
4
5
CHAPTER II. HOW BERT SMALLWAYS GOT INTO DIFFICULTIES
1
2
3
4
5
CHAPTER III. THE BALLOON
1
2
3
4
5
CHAPTER IV. THE GERMAN AIR-FLEET
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
CHAPTER V. THE BATTLE OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC
1
2
3
4
5
6
CHAPTER VI. HOW WAR CAME TO NEW YORK
1
2
3
4
5
6
CHAPTER VII. THE “VATERLAND” IS DISABLED
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
CHAPTER VIII. A WORLD AT WAR
1
2
3
4
5
CHAPTER IX. ON GOAT ISLAND
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
CHAPTER X. THE WORLD UNDER THE WAR
1
2
3
4
5
CHAPTER XI. THE GREAT COLLAPSE
1
2
3
4
5
THE EPILOGUE
Table of Contents
From the Pages of
Title Page
Copyright Page
H. G. Wells
The World of H. G. Wells andTheWar of the Worlds
Introduction
Praise
BOOK ONE - THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
Chapter 1 - The Eve of the War
Chapter 2 - The Falling Star
Chapter 3 - On Horsell Common
Chapter 4 - The Cylinder Opens
Chapter 5 - The Heat-Ray
Chapter 6 - The Heat-Ray in the Chobham Road
Chapter 7 - How I Reached Home
Chapter 8 - Friday Night
Chapter 9 - The Fighting Begins
Chapter 10 - In the Storm
Chapter 11 - At the Window
Chapter 12 - What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton
Chapter 13 - How I Fell in with the Curate
Chapter 14 - In London
Chapter 15 - What Had Happened in Surrey
Chapter 16 - The Exodus from London
Chapter 17 - The “Thunder Child”
BOOK TWO - THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS
Chapter 1. - Under Foot
Chapter 2 - What We Saw from the Ruined House
Chapter 3 - The Days of Imprisonment
Chapter 4 - The Death of the Curate
Chapter 5 - The Stillness
Chapter 6 - The Work of Fifteen Days
Chapter 7 - The Man on Putney Hill
Chapter 8 - Dead London
Chapter 9 - Wreckage
Chapter 10 - The Epilogue
Endnotes
Inspired by The War of the Worlds
Comments & Questions
For Further Reading
From the Pages of
The War of the Worlds No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own: that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. (page 9)
“The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one.” (page 14)
Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. (page 27)
“They’re coming!” (page 36)
One or two adventurous souls, it was afterwards found, went into the darkness and crawled quite near the Martians; but they never returned, for now and again a light-ray, like the beam of a warship’s searchlight, swept the common, and the Heat-Ray was ready to follow. (page 42)
“They wiped us out—simply wiped us out.” (page 61)
Humanity gathered for the battle. (page 78)
Canisters smashed on striking the ground—they did not explode—and incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes. (page 100)
If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every northward and eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress. (page 118)
All the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins. (page 142)
The Martians interchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation. (page 146)
“It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants.” (page 172)
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The War of the Worlds was first published in 1898.
Originally published in mass market format in 2004 by Barnes & Noble Classics
with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By,
Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.
This trade paperback edition published in 2008.
Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading
Copyright.© 2004 by Alfred Mac Adam.
Note on H. G. Wells, The World of H. G. Wells and The War of the Worlds,
Inspired by The War of the Worlds, and Comments & Questions
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The War of the Worlds
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eISBN : 978-1-411-43346-5
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FIRST PRINTING
H. G. Wells
Social philosopher, utopian, novelist, and “father” of science fiction and science fantasy, Herbert George Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, Kent. His father was a poor businessman, and young Bertie’s mother had to work as a lady’s maid. Living “below stairs” with his mother at an estate called Uppark, Bertie would sneak into the grand library to read Plato, Swift, and Voltaire, authors who deeply influenced his later works. He showed literary and artistic talent in his early stories and paintings, but the family had limited means, and when he was fourteen years old, Bertie was sent as an apprentice to a dealer in cloth and dry goods, work he disliked.
He held jobs in other trades before winning a scholarship to study biology at the Normal School of Science in London. The eminent biologist T. H. Huxley, a friend and proponent of Darwin, was his teacher; about him Wells later said, “I believed then he was the greatest man I was ever likely to meet.” Under Huxley’s influence, Wells learned the science that would inspire many of his creative works and cultivated the skepticism about the likelihood of human progress that would infuse his writing.
