H. G. Wells had written the basis for his brief novel The Time Machine in a series of stories published in The Science Schools Journal in 1888. Labeled a dystopia by some critics, the story acts as a warning to readers that man’s future may not be a positive one. Wells wrote in the tradition of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), the extremely popular cautionary futuristic tale of a threatening underworld.
The nameless characters in The Time Machine meet together in the home of a man called simply the Time Traveller on a Thursday in late-Victorian England. Guests include representatives from important vocations: a mayor, a doctor, an editor, and a psychologist, all men. The Traveller introduces his guests to a machine, described in detail by the narrator, that will allow him to travel through time. As they observe him, he sits in the saddle of his metal two-levered machine, pulls the levers, and disappears. The men follow his written instructions to return one week later when they will learn of his discoveries.
When the Traveller arrives, his appearance is disheveled, pale, and bloody. As critic Harry Geduld suggests, he falls into a tradition of scientists not taken seriously, such as Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Dr. Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). After cleaning himself up, the Traveller tells a tale of arrival in London in the year A.D. 802,701.
Two distinct groups populate the land, the first being the small, robed Eloi, who move with an aristocratic bearing and seem to have the perfect society. Then the Traveller learns of the smelly, cannibalistic subterranean Morlocks, supposedly descendants of the working class, who leave their caves at night in the dark to attack the Eloi. Biographers suggest that the dark imagery associated with the Morlocks grew from Wells’s childhood in a house with its kitchen completely underground. He recorded memories of strange dark men marching through the kitchen in order to store bags of coal under the staircase. He had also nursed an irrational fear and dislike of working men, a strange attitude for a boy whose own father practiced a trade.
In typical quest fashion, the Traveller meets with a guide, whose life he first saves, a female named Weena. His home base is a museum filled with artifacts, some of which he recognizes, some he does not. He worries over the disappearance of his time machine, which he had disabled by removing its levers, fearful of never being able to return to his own time. He eventually avoids an attack by the Morlocks by threatening them with fire. However, Weena disappears, leaving the Traveller lonely. Wells himself had admitted his debt to Jonathan Swift’s prose satire Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The story of the lone traveler threatened by inhabitants of an alien land had haunted Wells in the manner Swift intended for it to haunt his readers, as reflecting the disinterested attitude of a civilization in jeopardy of losing its humanity.
The Traveller at last discovers his machine and departs as the Morlocks surround him. Before returning to his own time, he moves forward, landing on a deserted shore where he sees only giant crabs, suggesting a mutation of life. Through eight different versions of the story, many published in various venues, Wells varied details, describing evolved beings some critics determined too gruesome. In a version printed in the New Review, Wells described creatures resembling rabbits that represented further evolved Eloi, hunted and eaten by the evolved Morlocks in the form of centipede-like monsters.
The Traveller moves further forward, viewing the earth 30 million years into the future in its last decline as a deserted, sterile landscape. His guests remain skeptical about the Traveller’s report, and some critics suggest this as the novel’s goal. Wells hoped to depict men blindly complacent in the face of a grim evolutionary future. As the Traveller again departs, he leaves behind a flower of unknown species, the only hard evidence of his travel.
Wells stressed how important the time he spent with Thomas Henry Huxley, a great proponent of the theories of Charles Darwin, proved to his writing. He sent a copy of the book to Huxley with a note reminding him that Wells had been his student, asking him to accept the novel with “the central idea—of degeneration following security,” which “was the outcome of a certain amount of biological study.” He added as a partial excuse for what could be considered a presumptuous act, “The book is a very little one.” Wells’s tale has been retold a number of times, taking various dramatic and written forms. Most suggest his original warning: that if humans do not learn to co-exist peacefully, all civilization will disappear.
Bibliography
Connes, G. A. A Dictionary of the Characters and Scenes in the Novels, Romances, and Short Stories of H. G. Wells. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Press, 1969.
Firchow, Peter. “H. G. Wells’s Time Machine: In Search of Time Future and Time Past.” The Midwest Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 123–136.
Geduld, Harry M., ed. The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s Scientific Romance with Introduction and Notes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Gill, Stephen M. Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells: A Critical Study. Cornwall, Ontario: Vesta Publications, 1975.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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