“The time traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him)
was expounding a recondite matter to us” (opening line).
The son of an unsuccessful shopkeeper, Herbert George Wells managed to escape a dead end apprenticeship by earning a scholarship to the Norman School of South Kensington in London where he then studied biology and zoology under celebrated evolutionary biologist T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”). “Bertie” but known as “H.G.” to his friends graduated and became a teacher and writer of fiction. The 1890s were a profitable time to be a writer –journals and magazines had begun taking off, thanks to the rising literacy among an educated populace, much like the enlightenment period of the 1760s, and learned men like Wells and his contemporary Arnold Bennett seized on the opportunity to both edify and entertain the reading general public. It was an exciting time of intense intellectual development for Wells, even as poor health plagued him and his notorious sexual liaisons became the stuff of legend. Wells was offered a sizable payment for the publication of his debut The Time Machine from William Ernest Henley (1843-1903), poet and editor of The New Review (Henley was incidentally the one-legged inspiration for Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island). Wells later dedicated the book to him.
Originally titled “The Chronic Argonauts,” the earliest version of The Time Machine was actually published while Wells was still a student; it was serialized in Science Schools Journal. Like in so many classic Jules Verne novels (indeed Jules Verne might rightly be regarded as the literary predecessor to HG Wells), The Time Machine begins in a gentleman’s club before an eccentric adventurer embarks on a wild voyage. An anonymous narrator describes a group of unnamed men only identified by a unique moniker (such as Medical Man, Provincial Mayor, Psychologist, Very Young Man, Editor, Doctor) are skeptically discussing the concept of time, and whether geometry as abstraction is sufficient for understanding time when our consciousness demands that we move from beginning to end in a linear way. One man, known only as The Time Traveller, mentions time as a fourth dimension of space –length, breadth, thickness, and also duration– “there is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it” (4).
The Time Traveller then offers the group a demonstration with a small model he has constructed, it is maddeningly elusive in its description as a “glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some crystalline substance.” The turn of a lever sends it backward or forward in time. “We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery. There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone –vanished!” (8-9).
“’Upon that machine,’ said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, ‘I intend to explore time. Is that plain? I was never more serious in my life’” (11).
While most the gentlemen seem to be skeptical of this demonstration, they are nevertheless interested in learning how the magic trick was performed. And so about a week later, they visit The Time Traveller’s home to see the full-scape machine, when suddenly The Time Traveller arrives to dinner late, appearing haphazard and disheveled –“I’ve lived eight days… such as no human being ever lived before!”
He then recounts his extraordinary journey, which began last week, wherein he describes pulling the lever on his machine for the first time in anticipation like “a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder” which he says leads to a dizzying moment where he lands back in his laboratory as if falling, and the clock begins spinning as his housekeeper Mrs. Watchett keeps zooming through the room without noticing him. Then night came on “like the turning out of a lamp” faster and faster, “night followed day like the flapping of a black wing” trees rise and fall into the ground and “the whole surface of the earth seemed unchanged – melting and flowing under my eyes.” While the landscape was “misty and vague” with trees and tall buildings rising and disappearing “like dreams” “slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances!”
The Time Traveller then claims he landed in the year 802,701 AD where London is entirely unrecognizable. As he steps away from his machine, he takes the levers with him and meets a strange species of gentle, diminutive humanoids. These creatures are known as the “Eloi.” They stand four feet tall and are clad in purple robes with large eyes and eat primarily a diet of fruit. Their society appears to be peaceful and communistic as they blissfully dwell among the majestic ruins of a long-dead civilization (nearby, stands a colossal White Sphinx construction with a bronze entrapment at the base). Shortly after arrival, The Time Traveller realizes that his time machine has been stolen! Lacking the proper tools or weapons to retrieve it, he decides he must wait. In the coming days, he joins the Eloi on their daily rituals and even rescues a young female named “Weena” from drowning (she becomes his companion).
He learns of another species living below-ground on the planet –“The Morlocks”—they are like Lemurs with pale chinless faces and pinkish-grey eyes, who dwell in subterranean wells where machinery whirrs all throughout the day and night. They appear to be mostly blind and nocturnal. The Time Traveller admits a certain degree of fear and disgust for the Morlocks. Unlike the Eloi, they are carnivorous, feasting on the bodies of the Eloi whom they hunt at night.
This distinct class-based future civilization offer The Time Traveller the chance grant his listeners some fascinating observations on the weakening of mankind in a state of peace, a world with no strife –“Humanity had been quite strong, energetic and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions” (31). Mankind had evolved into differentiated species: the “graceful children” of the Upperworld and subterranean nocturnal like division of “Capitalist and Labourer.” Above ground are the Haves “pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty” and below ground are the Have-Nots, “the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.” One an aristocracy which triumphed over man and nature, the other a reactive collective that evolved to adapt to its environment. It’s worth noting that HG Wells often entertained and embraced 19th century socialist thought, particularly in his youth, and even joined a Fabian Society but he grew bored by the lack of action. He was friends with George Bernard Shaw (who arranged for Wells to be booted out of the London Fabian Society) and Emile Zola, as well.
“I felt pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upperworld people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants; but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi, like the Carlovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable” (55).
“Looking up at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years I had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence” (59).
“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes – to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed… It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers” (74).
The Time Traveller grows desperate to retrieve his machine. Weena leads him to a dusty, old building akin to a museum (a “Palace of Green Porcelain”) where he finds skeletons of all manner from various creatures along the evolutionary timeline as well as artifacts from ages gone by, including some matches. However, he and Weena are suddenly attacked by the Morlocks in the night so The Time Traveller starts a nearby forest fire and Weena disappears while The Time Traveller flees back to the rest of the Eloi only to find that the Morlocks have opened the White Sphinx where his machine has stashed. He rushes into the Sphinx just as the Morlocks begin to surround him, and he quickly reactivates his time machine before they can attack. Once again, he travels rapidly forward in time, stopping amidst a “sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world” and catching a glimpse of futuristic giant crabs chasing large butterflies on a red beach, before he witnesses the eventual decline and decay of the earth as the sun burns up into a giant red light and the planet grows cold and still, as all life is extinguished. He then grows fearful and reverses course back to his home. “So I came back…” he says to his rapt audience of listeners.
In some ways, The Time Machine might be interpreted as a somber polemic against the decadence and stagnation of elite attitudes; a plea for the aristocracy to be humbled and seek improvement for the working classes. It presupposes that our economic system influences the very evolution of our species, but Wells certainly doesn’t offer much comfort in his vision of the future. With such a desolate, pessimistic message, Margaret Drabble notes: “Wells’s most disheartening conclusion is thoroughly Darwinian: humanity has reached a tragic state of degeneracy because at one point it achieved such a level material comfort that it lost the need to fight for survival.” We might rightly read elements of Nietzsche and Einstein in The Time Machine, but nevertheless this is a cautionary tale about the current trajectory of humankind. What have we evolved from? And how are we evolving forward? Are we at an inflection point of biological progress or regression? The bleak, elemental vision of future life on earth in The Time Machine is enough to grant even the passing reader a moment for pause and reflection.
While in later years (in his 1931 preface), Wells admitted a certain degree of novice with his first novel, he does at least mercifully leave us with a wondrous Verne-esque coda to the novella in which our anonymous narrator returns to the Time Traveller’s home the following day just as an extraordinary cacophony occurs and The Time Traveller mysteriously disappears –“The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows, he has never returned.” Interestingly enough, despite being a scientific-minded novel, we are asked to place our trust in mere testimony, our anonymous narrator’s account of The Time Traveller’s story.
Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY (first published in 1895, included in Everyman’s Library in 1935, 2010 hardcover edition).
The Time Machine is always most particularly pivotal in making us contemplate how seeing any possible future can shake up our minds. I remember when a got a graphic novel version of The Time Machine for my nephew. We may always in one way or another think very carefully about how much control we can or at least should have over things to come. Now 130 years since its original release, this H. G. Wells classic is a most refreshing reminder of how glorious the young science fiction universe was. Thank you for your review.