‘They wrecked the railways’, by Warwick Goble

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They wrecked the railways

Warwick Goble

Photomechanical reproduction of a watercolour

4½ x 3 inches

H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, serialized in Pearson’s Magazine, 4 (July–Dec 1897): 338.

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Another powerful image depicting the Martians’ implacable destruction of human technology, making it impossible to move soldiers quickly to the point of battle. Having made no attempt to negotiate with the British government, or with anyone, the aliens show themselves to be master-strategists by destroying the country’s infrastructure as well as its people: the very model of imperial ‘maximum force’. [continued below]

Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke.

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Goble’s tottering war-machines have been criticised as unconvincing, but the artist is faithful to Wells’s description of their ungainliness; indeed, their stumbling gait accentuates our sense of their alien nature –coming from a world where, apparently, bilateral symmetry is not the norm – by suggesting the problems of walking on three legs. The artist conveys the trashing of the train-track by juxtaposing a series of diagonals against the billowing black smoke, the indeterminate outlines of a bridge, and the swaying lines of ruined landscape. The baroque treatment of space, with the broken sleepers [railroad ties] and track practically tumbling out of the frame, further adds to the queasiness of Goble’s unsettling design.

Bibliography

Wells, H. G. The War of the Worlds, serialized in Pearson’s Magazine. London: Pearson, 1897.

Created 6 September 2017