Dec 23, 2009

The War of the Worlds | Critical Overview

The War of the Worlds was published early in Wells’s career, at the tail of a string of successful novels that are still considered classics today: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and The Invisible Man (1897). Critics of the time were split between finding the book a marked improvement on his earlier works and a repeat of the same old formula. For instance, John St. Loe Strachey, in a review in the English magazine The Spectator, notes that “One reads and reads with an interest so unflagging that it is positively...