Book One, Chapters 14 to 17: the exodus from London — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Book One, Chapters 14 to 17: the exodus from London
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The narrator's younger brother in London: the slow spread of the news, the Black Smoke and the night of panic, his escape north and his rescue of Mrs Elphinstone and her sister-in-law,
the Martians' advance seen from a ditch near Halliford, the crush on the road at Barnet, the flight across Essex to the sea, and the Thunder Child's attack as the steamer escapes.
Key quotations: 'The majority of people in London do not read Sunday papers', 'London in danger of suffocation!', 'It was the dawn of the great panic', 'a grotesque mingling of profit and panic', 'the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes', 'as methodically as men might smoke out a wasps’ nest', 'that swift liquefaction of the social body', 'a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human beings rushing northward', 'We cannot cross this—hell', 'It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind', 'like the blade of a plough tearing through the water', 'And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the land'.
Form: the brother's story, told second-hand by the narrator, which lets the novel show London and the sea where the narrator cannot be.
Context: the Thunder Child as a torpedo ram, a type of late Victorian warship, and the navy's failure to save London.
