Context — The War of the Worlds — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of The War of the Worlds: H. G. Wells's training in biology under T. H. Huxley and his time in Woking, the British Empire and the fate of the Aboriginal Tasmanians,
Darwin's natural selection and social Darwinism, Mars and its supposed canals, germ theory, invasion literature and the scientific romance, and fears for civilisation at the end of the 19th century.
How to weave this context into an argument about the novel, a sentence at a time, rather than writing a separate paragraph of background.
H. G. Wells (1866 to 1946): a shopkeeper's son from Bromley who won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London and studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, known as Darwin's Bulldog; his first published book was a biology textbook.
Writing the novel in Woking, where Wells moved in 1895 and cycled round 'marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians', and its serialisation in Pearson's Magazine in 1897 before Heinemann published it as a book in 1898.
The British Empire at its height and the New Imperialism of the late 19th century, and the Aboriginal Tasmanians, 'entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants', as the narrator reminds his readers.
Darwin's theory of natural selection and the 'struggle for existence', and social Darwinism, which applied 'survival of the fittest' to classes, races and empires.
Mars in the 1890s: Schiaparelli's canali of 1877, mistranslated as canals, Percival Lowell's dying Martian civilisation, and the light seen on Mars in 1894 that opens the novel.
Germ theory, from Louis Pasteur's work in the late 1850s to Robert Koch's in the 1880s, and the Martians 'slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared'.
Invasion literature from The Battle of Dorking (1871) onwards, the scientific romance of Jules Verne and Wells, and late Victorian fears that civilisation was in decline at the fin de siècle.
Weaving context into an argument: a precise point of context joined to a quotation and a judgement in the same sentence, rather than a separate paragraph of background or of Wells's life, shown in a worked paragraph on the opening's 'ready to welcome a missionary enterprise'.
