Plot Summary

H.G. Wells‘ novel opens with the Time Traveller explaining his plans to
travel in time to a group of his Victorian peers (most only named by an
occupational label.) The next scene is a dinner party a week later with the
narrator and a few of the Time Traveler’s previous guests. The Time
Traveller enters the room in terrible shape. After he has cleaned up and has
eaten, he begins to tell them of his trip in time.

The narratorial voice switches to that of the Traveller himself, and he tells
them that he went to the year 802701 A.D. The England of the distant future
is a beautiful place, almost a Utopia, but civilization is in majestic ruin. He
first encounters the Eloi, a race of pretty, vacuous beings descended from
humans. All other animals are apparently extinct, and the vegetarian Eloi
have every need mysteriously provided for. Then, he discovers that someone
has taken his time machine and he is frantic until he realizes that it has been
locked in the bronze base of a nearby statue. He gives up on trying to free
his machine, and later saves a drowning Eloi named Weena.

Weena tags along with the Traveller, and he soon discovers the existence of
the Morlocks, a race of subterranean creatures descended from the human
working class that maintain the underground machines that support the Eloi.
He goes off exploring in the countryside with Weena in tow, and in the
process of going through a ruined museum he lets the time get away from
him and the Morlocks come out to attack after dark. He gets away from
them, but inadvertently starts a forest fire and Weena is killed in the chaos.
The Traveller makes it back to the statue and finds that the doors are open.
He goes inside to get his machine, and the Morlocks try to trap him. The
Traveler manages to escape and goes far into the future to a time where the
place he once lived is a beach with monstrous crabs. He travels on to an era
near the end of the world, a time of darkness and cold. Then, he returns to
his own time.

The only one who seems to believe his story is the narrator. The narrator
goes into the lab to talk to the Time Traveller, but he and his machine are
gone.

Review

Time travel was not a new concept, but Wells’s novel was one of the earliest
on this theme and established some concepts and principles that remain with
us. having said that, I found the behaviour of Wells’ s protagonist in many
ways puzzling. If you had invented a time machine, what would you do?
Where would you go? Would you go back to the nativity, to the Globe in
1605, to assassinate Hitler? Or would you travel 800,000 years into the
future, as Wells’ time traveller does, without packing a sandwich, let alone
a camera or a weapon? I know that is a ridiculously literal response to a
science fiction story, but good science fiction is above all plausible. If I
could forward travel in time I would like to know how society reshapes
itself in 100 years, what new technology is developed, whether extra-
terrestrial life is encountered, so many other things – but 800,000 years??
Given that the existing span of human civilization can be measured in single-
figure thousands of years, it seems wildly optimistic to imagine that humans
will still be around this far into the future.

I appreciate I am still being too literal – time travel is simply a device to

allow Wells to speculate on how human society will evolve, and we need not
get too absorbed with the precise date – this is simply the vaguely distant
future. In these future humans have evolved into two distinct races, the Eloi
and the Morlocks. The Morlocks live underground, and predate upon the
simple-minded Eloi. Society is decaying terminally. Into this world the time
traveller is pitched, loses his machine, and is forced to confront his slowly
dawning realisation that this is no Utopia he had hoped man would have
built for himself.

Wells’s conception of time travel is quaint. It does not involve Government-

led endeavours and vast resources – an independent inventor working in his
shed is able to master the feat after a few years of study. He sets off in an
extraordinarily blase fashion, making no preparation whatsoever – this is a
quick jaunt into the future, not an expedition risking life and limb, back in
time for a quick bath and dinner at eight. Victorians were of course great
explorers, and often quite eccentric into the bargain, but Wells’ s time
traveller takes this to the extreme.

One of the most distinctive features of Wells’ writing is his focus on the
personal, the everyday, even when his themes are global or astronomical. As
I mentioned in my review of ‘War of the Worlds’, the Martian conflict is
constrained within the English Home Counties and described from the limited
perspective of two individual observers. The scenes from ‘The Invisible
Man’ are all rooted in suburban and rural England. Kipps and Mr Polly
follow the same pattern – his protagonists are every man. It is no
coincidence that the central characters in ‘The War of the Worlds’ and ‘The
Time Machine’ are both unnamed. This allows them to act as representatives
of their class and time.

However, politically, ‘The Time Machine’ is a difficult book. Wells is

commonly considered as a socialist, but his portrait of a future in which the
working class has become a cannibalistic underground monster, preying on
the weak and enfeebled middle classes, is profoundly pessimistic. It not
only expresses “Wells’s horror at the realities of 19th-century class
relations, but also his fears about what utopian socialism and communism
were offering in their place” (Matthew Taunton). It is hard to travel back
from the dystopia of 800,000 to 1895 and find a way to avoid this co-
evolution and class war.

It has been interesting to revisit Wells, but I remain ambivalent about his
status as a writer. Influential, without question. I think his social comedies
have aged less well than his science fiction. But if I ever am at a loss to put
into words my thoughts and feelings about a novel or a writer, there is
always one reliable solution, and that is to turn to George Orwell. Try it – he
almost always has something sensible and interesting to say about any
author of his time or before. Reliably, he puts his finger on this sense of
unease. In ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, published in Horizon in
1941, he wrote:
“Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in
some sense Wells’s own creation… I doubt whether anyone who was writing
books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language,
influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the
physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”

But he goes on to say

“the singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like
an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate
thinker now…. Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience
for a boy to discover H. G. Wells…. But because he belonged to the
nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not
grasp the tremendous strength of the old world… He was, and still is, quite
incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal
loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe
as sanity. “

Orwell anatomises with extraordinary precision why Wells’s utilitarian

version of socialism had not come to pass, even though the scientific
advances he anticipated had been realised and indeed exceeded:

“Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if
they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to
slay them…Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The
succession of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement
stopped short at the other war and never really began again, and since 1920
he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it is,
after all, to have any talents to squander.”

“Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present “.
Wow.