By Alexander Sutherland
‘A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were clear again he saw the monster had passed and was touching landward. Big iron upper works rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram Thunder Child…’
This is the opening description of the warship Thunder Child in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, steaming towards the seemingly unstoppable Martian ‘Fighting Machines’ in Chapter 17. Portrayed as humanity’s last desperate attempt to stave off the Martian invasion, Wells depicts an epic clash of iron titans over who rules Earth. Thunder Child’s challenge to the Martians is brave but ultimately doomed as although she kills two fighting machines, she is sunk in an apocalyptic cataclysm of steam, steel and smoke that obscures her fate and the ever-distant Essex coast.(1)
What does this have to do with identity and nationalism? The scene is highly indicative of the civil-military context of 1890s Britain. The 1889 Naval Defence Act doubled naval spending, unleashing a wave of unprecedented warship construction in an era of rising nationalism. British popular navalism, a social and political movement to increase naval spending, ship-building and tie national identity to the navy was on the rise.(2) Alongside nationalism, British liberalism was adapting to the circumstances, with Wells and others pinning their flag to the navalist cause.(3) Explicitly disavowing the reactionary Army, they found in the Royal Navy a service more accommodating to the ideas of professionalism and progress. The navy’s reliance on engineers and middle-class norms of professional service contrasted with the class-bound and Tory nature of the army. Throughout Wells’s text, the British army is frequently beaten and humiliated by the Martians, derided as ‘the Cardigan men’, a reference to Lord Cardigan and his infamously disastrous ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at the Battle of Balaclava.(4) So Wells chooses a Royal Navy ironclad as the greatest foe of the Martian machines.
Thunder Child, as a symbol of British power, is both celebrated in the moment, and then tragically cut down. But Wells’s Thunder Child is not just a symbol of imperial Britain, it is also a symbol of the future of human identity. Wells saw in ships the pinnacle of human achievement, a testament to humanity’s ability to construct something other than itself. Sophisticated technology can only be designed and operated by humans who know how to do so, their worth and their value defined by the contents of their intelligence and experience, not by the confines of their birth and class. In Thunder Child, he articulates an identity that embodies his British liberal politics and his conception of humanity’s future. Thunder Child’s name hints at this larger goal. Powerful but young, it represents humanity’s drive, if not destiny, for a future defined by progress and technology. It is why Thunder Child’s collision with the Martians disguises its fate, escaping from the limited view of humanity’s horizons into the future.(5)
Figure 1: Depiction of HMS Polyphemus (1881) on the day of her launch. (Source: Dawlish Chronicles : HMS Polyphemus – The original of H.G. Wells’ Thunder Child).
The choice of ship, I argue, reinforces this point further. A ‘torpedo ram’ was a very rare kind of ironclad built in the late-19th century. Designed to sit low in the water, launch torpedoes at ships and then ram them, the Royal Navy only built one, HMS Polyphemus (1881), which Thunder Child is likely based on. This design, to say the least, was impractical and not popular.(6) Adaptations and portrayals have often changed the ship’s design or, unfortunately, removed the scene entirely. The confusion as to what kind of ship Wells chose as humanity’s champion serves a point of encapsulating its mechanical complexity and the future of human identity. The narrator struggles to understand the concept and design of the ship from a distance ‘About two miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water almost, to my brother’s perception, like a waterlogged ship’.(7) The narrator, likewise, struggles to understand the Fighting Machines, implicitly comparing them when the two different machines engage in combat. This highlights their roles as symbols of Martian and Human identity.(8)
Thunder Child embodies both the final defeat of the old, structured world and the prospect of a future beyond hierarchy and structure, led by men of merit rather than by birth and class.
References:
(1) H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Modern Library, 2002), 103-11.
(2) Tim Cook, ‘H. GEEK WELLS: EVOLVING THE ENGINEER FROM THE WAR OF THE WORLDS TO ‘THE LAND OF THE IRONCLADS’, The Wellsian, 37 (2014), 45.
(3) Matthew Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, 1902-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 84-89.
(4) Wells, War of the Worlds, 38, 52.
(5) Ibid., 51.
(6) Antony Preston, The World’s Worst Warships (Conway Maritime Press, 2002), 30-2.
(7) Wells, War of the Worlds, 107.
(8) Cook, ‘H. GEEK WELLS’, 51-54.
Bibliography:
Cook, Tim, ‘H. Geek Wells: Evolving the Engineer from The War of the Worlds to “The Land Ironclads”’, The Wellsian, 37 (2014), 38-49.
Johnson, Matthew, Militarism and the British Left, 1902-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Preston, Antony, The World’s Worst Warships (Conway Maritime Press, 2002).
Wells, H. G., The War of the Worlds (Modern Library, 2002).
Identity Hunters 