"Public Imbecility and Journalistic Enterprise": The Satire on Mars Mania in H.G. Wells's the War of the Worlds (Report‪)‬

* On 11 August 1894, Punch of London entertained readers with this poem titled, "A Vote of Thanks," purportedly written by "a hard-up journalist," poking fun at the fanciful speculations about men on Mars that were popular throughout the 1890s. (1) Reports of strange lights on Mars from observatories in France and California had been interpreted as signals from Mars, which spurred international interest in the possibilities of extraterrestrial communication. On 18 August 1894, Punch lampooned the nineteenth-century fascination with photographs sought to provide evidence for intelligent life on Mars with a piece titled "The Message from Mars." (2) Though Punch characteristically interpreted the situation with a comic lens, prominent scientists at the time did write wildly speculative newspaper accounts, sensational scientific-journal articles, and books, which seriously considered the possibility and sometimes supported it. Perhaps the best articulated summary of the sensationalism of Mars appeared in a 1896 review of three popular astronomers' books in the Edinburgh Review: "[it] was the time of the great Mars boom when public imbecility and journalistic enterprise combined to flood the papers and society with 'news from Mars,' and queries concerning Mars, most exasperating to grave thinkers and hard workers in science" ("New Views about Mars" 368). (3) The reviewer's derisive quotation marks around "news from Mars" and reference to "public imbecility" emphasize the prevalence of these wildly speculative contributions to the debate about extraterrestrial life and testify to the public's appetite for these accounts. Along with writers that refuted and/ or lampooned the idea of extraterrestrial communication--such as the Punch poem's and the Edinburgh Review article's anonymous authors--speculative writers who supported this idea in the 1890s perpetuated what Robert Crossley has referred to as Mars mania. (4) The most famous fiction writer to lampoon the print media's perpetuation of Mars mania was H.G. Wells, whose interest in contemporary discussions concerning intelligent life on Mars is evident in The War of the Worlds. While the serialization of his story did not appear until 1897 in Pearson's Magazine, Wells began writing it in 1895, not long after the Martian Opposition of 1894, which many scholars cite as the height of sensational speculation about Mars. (5) Throughout The War of the Worlds, Wells not only alludes to real periodicals--even to the same articles upon which Mars mania fed--but also appropriates journalistic style to establish a solid connection between the symbolic representation of the novel and the 1890s print environment. The journalistic style of the novel was not lost on Wells's contemporaries. One early commentator on The War of the Worlds, in an unsigned review in the Critic, suggests that the novel "proceeds in journalistic style to tell of the coming of the first cylinder" and that it is "an Associated Press dispatch, describing a universal nightmare" (qtd. in Parrinder 68; 69). This reviewer hints at the ways in which journalistic style foregrounds the apocalyptic tone of Wells's fictional catastrophe. Wells, however, does not merely imitate journalistic style as much as he exposes the newspaper's use of his style--or, to be more precise, the techniques and devices of fiction. Wells's appropriation of periodicals, then, exposes their use of the sensational techniques of fiction. Wells features the market for periodicals prominently in The War of the Worlds, and its presence as the only viable system of information-distribution in the novel amplifies the effect of the repeated failures of print media throughout the novel.