cters before he was halfway through and then, frankly discarding any attempt at characterisation, he becomes an out-and-out pamphleteer. One curious thing that you can hardly help noticing if you have read most of H. G.'s novels is that he deals with very much the same people in book after book. He appears to have been content to use with little variation the few persons who had played an intimate part in his own life. He was always a little impatient with his heroines. He regarded his heroes with greater indulgence. He had of course put more of himself in them; most of them in fact are merely himself in a different guise. Trafford in Marriage is indeed the portrait of the man H. G. thought he was, added to the man he would have liked to be.... The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles's Mercury Theater on Halloween, 1938--in which the Martians land in New Jersey instead of suburban London--threw many listeners into a panic. The novel was updated again for the George Pal movie version in 1953, which had spectacular special effects for that time. The War of the Worlds marks the end of the first, most satisfactory phase of Wells's literary career. With his move, late in 1897, to a larger house in Worcester Park, Surrey, where he could exercise his remarkable talent for entertaining guests, Wells began trying to live up to what he saw as his responsibilities as a public figure. His fiction shows an increased concern to supply positive conclusions for the issues it raises. enormously effective The War of the Worlds .... In plot and fictional technique it bears some resemblance to Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year: both novels are offered as eyewitness accounts of a great disaster which befalls mankind and particularly the inhabitants of London. In each case the disaster had a special topical interest at the time of publication: an outbreak of the plague in 1720 in Marseilles set Londoners to recalling the horror of 1665, while in the 1890's ...
