What’s in a Name?

One of the most curious and distinctive features of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds is that its main characters remain unnamed. The narrator, his wife, and his brother go through the entire Martian invasion without ever being referred to by name. This bold choice not only sets Wells apart as an innovative storyteller but also amplifies the universality of the narrative, inviting readers to step into the shoes of these anonymous figures and experience the Martian onslaught firsthand.

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Unnamed Characters and the Power of Universality

The absence of names doesn’t hinder the relatability of the characters; instead, it enhances it. The narrator, a writer and philosopher, describes the Martians’ Heat-Ray attack with raw emotion: “I stood staring, not as yet realizing that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.” His anonymity makes the fear and desperation feel immediate and personal—emotions that could belong to anyone.

Similarly, the narrator’s brother, who heroically saves two women during the chaotic evacuation of London, embodies human decency without a name to tether him to a specific identity. At its core, The War of the Worlds is a tale about humanity as a collective—its vulnerability, adaptability, and resilience in the face of an existential threat.

By leaving his protagonists unnamed, Wells shifts the focus from individual heroics to the broader human condition. The Martian invasion is impartial and random, striking towns and cities without regard for who lives there. The unnamed characters reflect this impartiality, suggesting the events could happen to anyone, anywhere.

This lack of personal naming extends beyond the central trio. The Artilleryman and the Curate, two significant figures in the narrator’s journey, are identified only by their roles. These symbolic roles are explored in more depth on our Book page and throughout the chapter summaries.

Even the astronomer Ogilvy is defined more by his profession than by personal traits. This choice reflects Wells’ broader approach to storytelling—favoring clarity, plausibility, and thematic weight over detailed character development.

In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells reflected on his early writing process, saying, “I was doing my best to make the science fiction I wrote as plausible as possible, to give it a documentary quality.” This comment helps explain why personal names may have felt unnecessary to his narrative goals, as he focused more on realism and theme than individual character development.

“Name-Free” Cast of Main Characters

This is not a comprehensive list of every unnamed figure—just the ones central to the novel’s emotional arc.

• The Narrator
• His Wife
• His Brother
• The Artilleryman
• The Curate

Note: Several minor characters do receive names—such as Mrs. and Miss Elphinstone, who accompany the narrator’s brother. But the majority of speaking roles, including many with emotional or symbolic weight, remain unnamed or defined by role alone (e.g., “the landlord of the Spotted Dog”).

Wells’ Storytelling Pattern and Intent

This technique wasn’t unique to The War of the Worlds. In The Time Machine (1895), Wells refers to his protagonist simply as “the Time Traveller,” and in The Invisible Man (1897), the main character is known only by his surname, Griffin.

This pattern suggests Wells deliberately used anonymity to keep the focus on philosophical and scientific ideas rather than personal dramas. This choice reflects his broader focus on collective experience—a theme explored more deeply in our H.G. Wells biography.

Unlike contemporaries such as Jules Verne, who gave his protagonists clear identities (e.g., Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days), Wells often chose to anonymize his characters to emphasize ideas over action.

Wells wrote during the late Victorian era, a time marked by rapid scientific progress and societal upheaval. As a socialist and futurist, he was deeply concerned with humanity’s trajectory—its potential for both greatness and self-destruction. The novel’s themes of imperialism, evolution, and the consequences of unchecked technology reflect those concerns.

The unnamed narrator, a reflective everyman, may even mirror Wells himself, serving as a lens through which readers experience the collapse of civilization. The anonymity intensifies both the personal immediacy of the catastrophe and its broader, collective implications.

Literary critic Patrick Parrinder, who edited the Penguin Classics edition of The War of the Worlds, has noted Wells’ tendency to use generic characters as a way of emphasizing broader human experiences. His commentary supports the idea that Wells intentionally shifted focus away from individual identity to explore civilization-wide themes.

Named Civilians and Emotional Realism

Naming Ogilvy early in the novel, while leaving the narrator unnamed, creates a subtle contrast—one that emphasizes the narrator’s everyman role against Ogilvy’s scientific authority. Ogilvy’s character may have been modeled after real-life scientific figures of the time, and his inclusion adds to the novel’s documentary feel—a technique Wells used to anchor his speculative fiction in a plausible world.

Characters like Stent (the Astronomer Royal) and Henderson (a journalist) help establish the scientific and media institutions at play before society collapses. But not all named characters are authority figures. Others, like Miss and Mrs. Elphinstone, represent civilians caught in the chaos.

Introduced during the brother’s flight from London, these women offer a rare glimpse of individualized character within the novel. Miss Elphinstone, in particular, displays composure and decisiveness, helping drive their escape forward, while Mrs. Elphinstone reacts with fear and uncertainty. Their inclusion adds emotional realism and contrast, grounding the novel’s grand-scale disaster in moments of human complexity.

Wells in Context: Was He the First?

Wells was not the first author to leave characters unnamed. Writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Samuel Richardson had all used the technique in earlier centuries. Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart featured an unnamed narrator to heighten psychological intensity. Hawthorne’s allegories, such as Young Goodman Brown, used symbolic or generic names to focus on moral and societal themes. Richardson’s epistolary novels sometimes masked characters behind pseudonyms or titles.

But what set Wells apart was his sustained use of anonymity across multiple characters in a full-length speculative novel.

Rather than using namelessness as a tool for mystery or allegory, he used it to universalize the experience of invasion and survival—a first in science fiction. His stylistic consistency helped elevate this technique from a literary curiosity to a storytelling method aligned with genre and theme.

Modern readers often praise this stylistic decision for its immersive quality. Some reviewers of the Penguin Classics edition describe the narrator’s anonymity as creating a “diary-like intimacy,” allowing them to step more fully into the story.

How Adaptations Name the Nameless

Wells’ choice to leave his main characters unnamed poses challenges for visual and performance-based media. Film, television, and stage adaptations often rely on named characters to create emotional connections and streamline dialogue. As a result, most adaptations assign names to the protagonists—some purely invented, others seemingly drawn from Wells’ own life.

You could say these names anchor the story to specific identities, making the adaptation more accessible—but also sparking debate.

The table below highlights two common strategies: creating functional names that suit the story’s tone, or selecting names that reflect Wells’ real-life connections.

💡 Bonus Insight: Author in the Adaptation

The 2019 BBC miniseries doesn’t just assign names to the unnamed narrator and his partner—it deliberately echoes key elements of H.G. Wells’ personal life. Like Wells, the character George is romantically involved with Amy while still married to someone else. The addition of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy reflects Wells’ real-life affairs and the children he fathered beyond his marriage. These choices go beyond homage: they recast the anonymous narrator as a semi-biographical figure, blending fiction with the complicated realities of Wells’ own relationships.

These naming choices reveal a deeper layer of adaptation. Some names, like Ray Ferrier or Dr. Forrester, reflect genre tropes and emotional framing. Others—like George, Amy, or Sarah—create personal resonance by tying the characters back to Wells himself. While often subtle, this pattern speaks to how modern storytellers navigate the gap between Wells’ anonymity and contemporary character-driven expectations.

Spotting a familiar name? This list may help explain why…

What’s Lost (or Gained) When We Name Them?

For purists, naming characters risks diluting the novel’s timeless universality. By giving them fixed identities, adaptations shift the focus from humanity as a whole to individual struggles. A character like Ray Ferrier turns the invasion into one man’s ordeal rather than a global crisis.

On the flip side, naming is often a necessary compromise. Modern audiences expect character-driven storytelling, and visual media especially require names to assign roles and facilitate dialogue. The 1938 broadcast’s Professor Pierson is a perfect example: his credibility as a named scientist helped sell the realism of the piece.

The Nameless Tradition in Literature and Film

Wells’ approach followed and helped evolve a tradition already present in literature, especially among writers like Poe and Hawthorne. But his impact on speculative fiction and novel-length realism helped popularize the technique for modern audiences.

Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947) delays naming Dr. Rieux to emphasize collective experience. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) leaves its father and son unnamed to highlight universal survival instincts. Even in film, Cloverfield (2008) uses minimal naming to increase immediacy and chaos.

This literary device strips away identity to expose raw human nature. In Wells’ hands, it became a lens for examining humanity as a species.

Why It Still Matters Today

In today’s media landscape—crowded with personality-driven narratives—Wells’ choice feels radical. But it’s still effective. With global threats like pandemics and climate change looming large, the power of universal storytelling feels more relevant than ever.

Leaving characters unnamed was not just a quirk of style. It was a deliberate strategy to shift focus from who we are to what we face. And that’s what makes Wells’ vision so enduring.

Even today, authors and screenwriters continue to name or withhold names strategically—often to signal whether a story’s focus is deeply personal or broadly existential.

It also reflects Wells’ socialist ideals: individual identity fades in the face of a collective human crisis. By minimizing personal identifiers, Wells challenges readers to see themselves not as heroes, but as part of a species struggling to survive together.

Frequently Asked Questions

👀Explore more…

Want to explore how each character and chapter adds to Wells’ vision?
Check out our chapter summaries, book overview, and Wells’ biography for deeper thematic insights.

Curious how your favorite adaptation compares to the original novel? Explore our True Adaptation Checklist to see how it holds up.

📚 Sources & Further Reading

• Amazon.com. Customer Reviews: The War of the Worlds (Penguin Classics).
• Britannica. The War of the Worlds (novel) | Summary, Analysis, & Characters.
• eNotes.com. The War of the Worlds Analysis.
• eNotes.com. The War of the Worlds: Main Characters and Their Contextual Significance.
• Goodreads. The War of the Worlds Quotes.
• IMDb. War of the Worlds (2005) ⭐ 6.5 | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi.
• Interesting Literature. A Summary and Analysis of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.
• Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Patrick Parrinder.
• SparkNotes. The War of the Worlds: Character List.
• War of the Worlds Central. War of the Worlds Adaptations Through the Years.
• Wells, H.G. Experiment in Autobiography (1934). Project Gutenberg Canada
• Wikipedia. List of works based on The War of the Worlds.
• Wikipedia. The War of the Worlds.
• Wikipedia. War of the Worlds (2005 film).