Context — The War of the Worlds — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
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 attempts to apply it to human society, Mars and its supposed canals, germ theory, invasion stories and early science fiction, 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): he worked as a draper, a pharmacist and a teacher, and won a free studentship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, known as Darwin's Bulldog.
Writing the novel in Woking, where Wells lived in 1895 and 1896 and cycled round 'marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians', and its serialisation in Pearson's Magazine from April to December 1897 before Heinemann published it as a book in 1898.
The British Empire, which by 1913 was the largest empire in history, and the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s, 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', Herbert Spencer's phrase 'survival of the fittest', which Darwin adopted, and the attempts to apply it to human society that Huxley, Wells's teacher, attacked.
Mars in the 1890s: the canali, or channels, that Schiaparelli mapped in 1877, Percival Lowell's belief that they were canals built by intelligent beings on an ageing planet short of water, and the light seen on Mars in 1894 that opens the novel.
Germ theory, put forward by Louis Pasteur and developed by Robert Koch, who identified the bacteria behind tuberculosis and cholera, so that by the end of the 1800s it was established, and the Martians 'slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared'.
Invasion stories, beginning with The Battle of Dorking (1871), and Wells's new kind of science fiction, an invasion from space; 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'.
OCR credits context in this essay only where it is relevant to the question: social, historical and cultural ideas, or literary context such as the conventions of the Gothic or of science fiction, woven into the argument rather than written as a paragraph of background.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
