One of Wells’ most distasteful anti-Semitic passages occurs in "The War of the Worlds." In the chapter, “The Exodus from London,” the hero’s brother describes what he saw as he fought his way, with the rest of the population, out of the city as the Martians advanced on it:
“Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced man lugging a small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes rested on it and disgorged a mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck the ground. They rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a cartwheel shaved him narrowly.
“So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands open, upon the heap of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A horse rose close upon him, and in another moment, half rising, he had been borne down under the horse’s hoofs.
“Before he could get to it, [my brother] heard a scream under the wheels, and saw through the dust the rim passing over the poor wretch’s back....The man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money, unable to rise, for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and dead. My brother...yelled at the next driver, and a man on a black horse came to his assistance.
“‘Get him out of the road,’ said he; and, clutching the man’s collar with his free hand, my brother lugged him sideways. But he still clutched after his money, and regarded my brother fiercely, hammering at his arm with a handful of gold....
“There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cart that the man on horseback stopped. My brother looked up, and the man with the gold twisted his head around and bit the wrist that held his collar....He released his grip on the fallen man and jumped back. He saw anger change to terror on the face of the poor wretch on the ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my brother was borne backward and carried past the entrance to the lane, and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover it.
“He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with all a child’s want of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at a dusty something that lay black and still, ground and crushed under the rolling wheels.”
The bearded and eagle-faced Shylock, with his love of gold, greater than his love of life, had gotten what the author felt he deserved.
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