In brief
On a Thursday evening in a house at Richmond, a scientist known only as the Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that time is a fourth dimension and that he has built a machine to move along it. A week later he limps into the same dining room, late, filthy and starving, eats his mutton and tells them where he has been. In the year 802,701 he found a garden world of small, pretty, idle people, the Eloi, and lost his machine to something living under the ground. The Morlocks, pale and afraid of light, turned out to be the other half of mankind, and they farm the Eloi for meat. He befriended one of them, Weena, lost her in a burning forest, recovered the machine and rode on until the Earth was almost dead. Then he came home and told it. The next day he left again, and three years later the man who wrote all this down is still waiting.
The book runs to little over thirty thousand words. Wells uses his machine for one purpose only: to take the direction his own society was moving in, and follow it to the end.
The argument
The Time Machine makes two arguments, and the second undoes the comfort of the first. The first is about class. The Traveller’s explanation starts from what any Londoner of 1895 could see: underground railways, basement workrooms, and a countryside closed to the poor. “About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion” (ch. 8). Extended far enough, the division becomes biological: “above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots”. Then comes the twist that gives the book its horror. The workers have become the farmers and the aristocrats the livestock, “mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon” (ch. 10). The Traveller tries to take satisfaction in this: “Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him.” He cannot keep it up: the Eloi still look too much like people.
The second argument is about success. Wells studied biology under T. H. Huxley, who had argued in Evolution and Ethics (1893) that the process of nature is no friend to human morals, and the novel takes that to its limit. Evolution has no destination, and an easy life selects for nothing. “It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble” (ch. 13). Humanity reached the security it wanted, and the mind, with no more work to do, went out. “It had committed suicide.” The garden future that William Morris had recently imagined is the disease here, not the cure.
The Traveller, the narrator reports, saw in civilisation “only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end”, and the narrator’s reply is one of the best sentences Wells wrote: “If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so” (Epilogue).
The shape of the book
The Time Machine is built as a frame. An unnamed guest narrates the two dinners (ch. 1 to ch. 3), then hands over to the Traveller’s own account, set in quotation marks for most of the book, and takes it back for the disbelieving aftermath and the disappearance (ch. 16). The future is therefore always hearsay, told after dinner to men who think it a yarn.
Inside the frame the book works like a detective story in which the detective keeps being wrong. First, the Eloi are a decayed triumph of comfort, and that seems to explain everything: “Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are” (ch. 6). Then he sees a white creature in the ruins and the wells make sense, so the Morlocks must be the oppressed workers of a ruling class (ch. 8). Then he goes down a well, sees a red joint of meat (ch. 9), and has to admit “that my second hypothesis was all wrong” (ch. 10). The last version arrives only as he leaves (ch. 13), and even that he hedges: “It is how the thing shaped itself to me, and as that I give it to you.”
The voice
The tone is that of a clever man talking after dinner. The physics in the first chapter is patter, but good patter: “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it” (ch. 1). His complaints are domestic: “If only I had thought of a Kodak!” (ch. 9). In the ruined library, facing the end of all human writing, he thinks of “my own seventeen papers upon physical optics” (ch. 11).
The Medical Man, handed two flowers from the far future, looks at them as a doctor would: “The gynæceum’s odd” (ch. 16). The Traveller himself finally offers them a way out: “Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop.”
The end of the world
The finest writing in the book is the chapter that has no plot, “The Further Vision” (ch. 14). Fleeing the Morlocks, the Traveller goes on instead of back. The Earth stops turning, “with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the earth”. Enormous crabs creep on a red beach under a swollen sun. He pushes on until, “more than thirty million years hence”, the crabs have gone too, and there is snow, and an eclipse.
Lord Kelvin’s calculations of the sun’s cooling had given the Victorians a dying solar system, and Wells went to look. Class and Morlocks shrink to an episode. “All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.” Then, on a shoal, a round black thing with trailing tentacles starts to hop about, and the Traveller, who has outfaced everything else, climbs back on his machine in dread of fainting there.
The people
The Time Traveller
The Time Traveller never receives a name. He is an inventor of patent chairs and a writer of papers on optics, charming, a little vain and quick to violence: he batters Morlocks with relish, and admits a “thirst for murder” (ch. 11). A week among his descendants takes the Victorian scientist down to a frightened animal with a stick, and he tells it that way.
Weena
Weena is the one person in the future with a name, and she is treated rather like a pet. The Traveller pulls her out of a river while the other Eloi watch her drown (ch. 8). Her death in the forest fire is offstage and uncertain (ch. 12). She matters because of what she leaves: the two withered flowers from his pocket, which she put there (ch. 10), the book’s last image of “gratitude and a mutual tenderness” (Epilogue).
The Eloi and the Morlocks
The two races share one stock and both are ruined. The Eloi have kept their beauty and lost everything else. The Morlocks tend machines without any sign of understanding them, but they have kept some initiative. On his own theory they are the children of the people who built his England, and his hatred of them is not quite fair.
How it was made
The Time Machine took seven years to find its form. Wells first tried the idea in “The Chronic Argonauts”, a story in his college paper in 1888. In 1894 W. E. Henley ran seven linked anonymous essays reworking the material in the National Observer, and when he moved to The New Review he serialised the story there from January to May 1895, paying Wells £100. Holt published a book in New York on 7 May and Heinemann in London on 29 May. The two texts differ, and nearly all modern reprints follow Heinemann.
One passage was lost on the way. For the serial, at Henley’s urging, Wells added a frozen landscape of hopping, kangaroo-like creatures, probably the last descendants of mankind, and a giant centipede. He cut it from the book.
The underworld had a closer source. Wells’s family spent much of its time in a dark basement kitchen below his father’s failing shop; he was a draper’s apprentice in a basement; his mother became housekeeper at Uppark, a country house with servants’ tunnels beneath it.
Readers and critics
The book made Wells’s name. Serious study of the scientific romances began with Bernard Bergonzi’s The Early H. G. Wells (1961). Wells called the book, in a preface of 1933, an “assault on human self-satisfaction” in the tradition of Swift. Jules Verne, asked about him in a 1903 interview, drew the line that has followed them both: “I make use of physics. He invents.” Borges, in his essay on Coleridge’s flower, set the Traveller’s withered blooms beside the flower a dreamer brings back from paradise.
Afterlives
George Pal’s film of 1960, with Rod Taylor, won an Academy Award for its time-lapse effects. Simon Wells, the author’s great-grandson, directed the 2002 remake with Guy Pearce. Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships (1995), authorised by the Wells estate for the centenary, sends the Traveller out again with an intelligent Morlock as a companion. Wells judged its survival drily in 1931: the book had “lasted as long as the diamond-framed safety bicycle, which came in at about the date of its first publication”.
How to read it
- Know which text you have. The Heinemann text is the usual one, and Gutenberg’s has its sixteen chapters and epilogue; the Holt text differs. Dover’s edition restores the cut passage.
- Do not stop at the Morlocks. The real ending is the beach in chapter 14 and the narrator’s reply in the Epilogue.
Read next
- H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). The next year’s fable, with the same biology and an even colder eye.
- William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890). The garden future the Eloi resemble, meant in earnest.
- E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909). A deliberate reply to Wells, on what total comfort does underground.