H.G. Pozzuoli

The War of the Wenuses

J.W. Arrowsmith, 1898. Reprinted by Routledge/Thoemmes, 1998.

H.G. Pozzuoli was a pseudonym of C.L. Graves and E.V. Lucas.

They flocked to my wife's banner, which was raised in Regent's Park, in front of the pavilion where tea is provided by a maternal County Council... My mother, who joined the forces and therefore witnessed the muster, tells me it was a most impressive sight...The members of the Ladies' Kennel Club, attended by a choice selection of carefully-trained Chows, Schipperkes, Whippets and Griffons, garrisoned various outposts...Leaving Regent's Park by the Clarence Gate, they passed down Upper Baker Street, along Marylebone Road into Edgware Road

'Translated from the Artesian of H.G. Pozzuoli', the title page says, and the two Punch contributors who wrote this parody of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds have stuffed it with jokes and puns. Some are fairly obvious (artesian/wells), some rather laboured (a pozzo is a well in Italian; Pozzuoli is an Italian city with mineral water springs), some are lost on modern readers. But to continue with the story:

Earth has been attacked by 'astral women' from the planet Wenus, arriving in spaceships shaped like huge crinolines. 'A vision of ultra-mondane loveliness', their terrible Mash-Glance destroys men in an instant. Two regiments of Life Guards are 'razed to the ground.' Disguised in his wife's skirt and cook's Sunday bonnet the narrator has gone into hiding; meanwhile his wife has organized an army of women to march on Whiteley's department store, where the Wenuses are encamped. Her army too is destroyed, by strategically deployed cups of tea, and the Wenuses depart undefeated, ascending into space in giant soap bubbles.