“A Certain Amount of Scientific Education”: Science, Sensation, and the Everyman Narrator in the Serialised War of the Worlds (1897)

Abstract: This essay compares the 1897 serialised version of The War of the Worlds in Pearson’s Magazine to Wells’s 1898 and 1924 revisions of the text for book publication. I argue that the serialised narrator is fallible, embodied in his responses, relatively nonscientific in his language, and thus far more an everyman than the later texts’ unreliable, clinical, and intellectually dishonest narrator. By highlighting the importance of layperson experiences, Pearson’s serialization offers working- and middle-class readers more empowering affects with which to approach science and raises questions for scholars about how authors shaped their texts for periodicals’ and books’ differing audiences.