by H. G. Wells
“For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and came through the passage here, limping, because my heel was still painful, and feeling sorely begrimed. I saw the Pall Mall Gazettedj on the table by the door. I found the date was indeed to-day, and looking at the timepiece, saw the hour was almost eight o‘clock. I heard your voices and the clatter of plates. I hesitated—I felt so sick and weak. Then I sniffed good wholesome meat, and opened the door on you. You know the rest. I washed, and dined, and now I am telling you the story.
“I know,” he said, after a pause, “that all this will be absolutely incredible to you. To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures.”
He looked at the Medical Man. “No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?”
He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner, to tap with it nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentary stillness. Then chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the carpet. I took my eyes off the Time Traveller’s face, and looked round at his audience. They were in the dark, and little spots of colour swam before them. The Medical Man seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our host. The Editor was looking hard at the end of his cigar—the sixth. The Journalist fumbled for his watch. The others, as far as I remember, were motionless.
The Editor stood up with a sigh. “What a pity it is you’re not a writer of stories!” he said, putting his hand on the Time Traveller’s shoulder.
“You don’t believe it?”
“Well—”
“I thought not.”
The Time Traveller turned to us. “Where are the matches?” he said. He lit one and spoke over his pipe, puffing. “To tell you the truth ... I hardly believe it myself.... And yet...”
His eyes fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white flowers upon the little table. Then he turned over the hand holding his pipe, and I saw he was looking at some half-healed scars on his knuckles.
The Medical Man rose, came to the lamp, and examined the flowers. “The gynaeceum‘sdk odd,” he said. The Psychologist leant forward to see, holding out his hand for a specimen.
“I’m hanged if it isn’t a quarter to one,” said the Journalist. “How shall we get home?”
“Plenty of cabs at the station,” said the Psychologist.
“It’s a curious thing,” said the Medical Man; “but I certainly don’t know the natural order of these flowers. May I have them?”
The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly: “Certainly not.”
“Where did you really get them?” said the Medical Man.
The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. “They were put into my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time.” He stared round the room. “I’m damned if it isn’t all going. This room and you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times—but I can’t stand another that won’t fit. It’s madness. And where did the dream come from? ... I must look at that machine. If there is one!”
He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the door into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light of the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew; a thing of brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the touch—for I put out my hand and felt the rail of it—and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory, and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts, and one rail bent awry.
The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his hand along the damaged rail. “It’s all right now,” he said. “The story I told you was true. I’m sorry to have brought you out here in the cold.” He took up the lamp, and, in an absolute silence, we returned to the smoking-room.
He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with his coat. The Medical Man looked into his face and, with a certain hesitation, told him he was suffering from overwork, at which he laughed hugely. I remember him standing in the open doorway, bawling good night.
I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a “gaudy lie.” For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober. I lay awake most of the night thinking about it. I determined to go next day and see the Time Traveller again. I was told he was in the laboratory, and being on easy terms in the house, I went up to him. The laboratory, however, was empty. I stared for a minute at the Time Machine and put out my hand and touched the lever. At that the squat substantial-looking mass swayed like a bough shaken by the wind. Its instability startled me extremely, and I had a queer reminiscence of the childish days when I used to be forbidden to meddle. I came back through the corridor. The Time Traveller met me in the smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. He laughed when he saw me, and gave me an elbow to shake. “I’m frightfully busy,” said he, “with that thing in there.”
“But is it not some hoax?” I said. “Do you really travel through time?”
“Really and truly I do.” And he looked frankly into my eyes. He hesitated. His eyes wandered about the room. “I only want half an hour,” he said. “I know why you came, and it’s awfully good of you. There’s some magazines here. If you’ll stop to lunch I’ll prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all. If you’ll forgive my leaving you now?”
I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and he nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door of the laboratory slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up a daily paper. What was he going to do before lunch-time? Then suddenly I was reminded by an advertisement that I had promised to meet Richardson, the publisher, at two. I looked at my watch, and saw that I could barely save that engagement.dl I got up and went down the passage to tell the Time Traveller.
As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly truncanted at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment1—a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight had, apparently, just been blown in.
I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had happened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the man-servant appeared.
We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. “Has Mr.—gone out that way?” said I.
“No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him here.”
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.
Epilogue
ONE CANNOT CHOOSE BUT wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past,1 and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians,
the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casualdm places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness2 still lived on in the heart of man.
Endnotes - The Time Machine
Chapter I
1 (p. 3) Our chairs, being his patents: The Time Traveller has invented and patented furniture in addition to his secret time-travel device, another kind of chair.
2 (p. 3) the Psychologist: Wells reduces his characters to disciplines or social roles; see also the Provincial Mayor, who speaks a few paragraphs down. Wells is concerned with character not as personality but as idea. The Provincial Mayor, for example, is not especially bright, and Wells mocks politicians for not being scientists.
3 (p. 4) Can a cube that does not last for any time at, all, have a real existence?: The Time Traveller says that in addition to “Length, Breadth, Thickness” (noted just below) an object must exist in time. Therefore time is the fourth dimension.
4 (p. 5) his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing: Wells must include this idea; otherwise, logic would suggest that the Time Traveller would age as he traveled ahead in time. In the world Wells has created, when traveling in time the individual neither ages nor grows younger.
5 (p. 6) Our mental existences... are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave: The Time Traveller asserts that thought is able to move back and forth in time. This statement, together with his reference to the balloon as a means to overcome gravity, indicates what his machine will accomplish: It will allow him to move backward and forward in time.
6 (p. 7) plough you for the Little-go. The German Scholars have improved Greek so much: Wells mocks contemporary classical scholarship, especially in Germany, where ancient Greek was regularized and systematized to the point that if a student were to use the Greek actually spoken by Homer or Plato he would probably fail (be ploughed) his examinations (the Little-go).
7 (p. 7) said 1: The “I” here is one of Wells’s witness-narrators, who provides a point of view not located within the protagonist, the Time Traveller, and is therefore seemingly objective.
8 (p. 9) Into the future or the past—I don‘t, for certain, know which: The point is that an object traveling through time is invisible to those whose time it passes through. This is the concept of “diluted presentation” noted a few paragraphs down.
Chapter II
1 (p. 15) anecdotes of Hettie Potter: Wells makes often snide allusions to his contemporaries. This may be a reference to Beatrice Webb (née Potter, 1858-1943); she and her husband Sidney Webb ( 1859-1947) were key figures in the Fabian Society, a Marxist socialist group founded in 1883—1884 to foster socialism without violent revolution. For a time, Wells himself was a member. The Silent Man may be the great artist, craftsman, and poet William Morris ( 1834-1896), another Marxist socialist, whose thinking was antithetical to that of Wells. The red-haired Filby may be the dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856—1950), yet another Fabian. Wells did not want the “workers’ paradise” envisioned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1848)—a utopia of leisure represented in this novel by the feckless Eloi—but an anthill society of disciplined laborers pushing humanity further and further into the technological conquest of the universe.
2 (p. 16) In writing it down... I feel . . . the inadequacy of pen and ink... to express its quality: The narrator (Hillyer) points out the disparity between the Time Traveller’s dramatic account and his own written words.
Chapter III
1 (p. 18) What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization: The Time Traveller expects the future to be a golden age. This reflects nineteenth-century optimism, especially the age’s faith in technology. He is disappointed to find instead a two-class society: the indolent, pleasure-loving Eloi, the degenerate remnants of an aristocratic class; and the subterranean Morlocks, the equally degenerate remnants of the proletariat, who feed and clothe the Eloi in order to eat them.
2 (p. 19) But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself... into whatever lay in my way: The Time Traveller fears that if he stops his passage through time in the wrong place he may materialize within an object and kill himself.
3 (p. 20) a winged sphinx: The Time Traveller, greeted by a hailstorm, identifies first a rhododendron, a decorative shrub with flowers, and a huge, weathered statue of a hovering sphinx. The frail flowers are pounded by the hail and may represent the relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks. The sphinx here symbolizes mystery or enigma: Is its smile one of mockery—because the Time Traveller’s expectations about the future are turned upside down? Is its condition, suggestive “of disease” (a few lines down), an image of the diseased state of humanity?
Wells may have expected his readers to link this sphinx to a quotation from Thomas Carlyle ( 1795-1881 ) on the cover of the novel’s first edition. Carlyle suggests the problem facing the future will be that of organizing labor not as an independent force with its own interests apart from those of capitalists, but as an integrated part of production. The Morlocks may be a labor force so well organized and so in control of production that its only task is to feed on those it once served.
4 (p. 21) very beautiful . . . but indescribably frail: This is the Time Traveller’s first encounter with the Eloi: small, weak, seemingly diseased, but beautiful in the style of nineteenth-century English art, like the figures in Pre-Raphaelite paintings or in the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley (1872—1898)—the kind of art for art’s sake that Wells despised.
Chapter IV
1 (p. 22) their Dresden-china type of prettiness: Dresden-china figurines, often of shepherds and shepherdesses, were purely decorative and of no practical use. The Eloi, though sexually active, are androgynous figures; for example, the male lacks a beard, a feature common to most men in the late-nineteenth century. The Time Traveller quickly concludes that the Eloi are of extremely limited intelligence, friendly but with no interests but sensual pleasure. Their language sounds like music but lacks real content. Like the inhabitants of the South Sea islands, they deck out the visitor with flowers by way of greeting, but they have no curiosity about him.
2 (p. 25) strict vegetarians: The Eloi eat only fruit, but whether this is by choice or by breeding is unclear; all other animals are extinct.
3 (p. 26) there were no small houses to be seen: The Eloi have only communal buildings, and the family no longer exists. Wells would approve of this society under other circumstances because it makes everyone children of society, and identity derives from community, not family or nation. The Eloi all dress alike, so the sexes are not dif ferentiated by costume. The children are simply copies of the adults, and grow up quickly, at least in sexual terms. A few lines down, the Time Traveller concludes that they live a communistic life, but he cannot at this point determine its nature.
4 (p. 28) the whole earth had become a garden: Here “garden” means a park with plants and trees,
rather than a place where food plants are cultivated—that is, there is no wilderness left. In the paragraphs that follow, Wells suggests that the new golden age he has entered, despite the fact that there is no private property, is a nightmare. In depicting the classless society of the future, Wells parodies the relationship between humans and the animals they eat.
5 (p. 29) The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating. This is Wells’s idea of what will result if his notions of industrial socialism and the unification of labor and production take effect. There will be no families, no nations, no patriotism, no religion.
6 (p. 30) the fate of energy in security: Wells shows his contempt for the golden age promised by the Marxists. Unless humanity continues to work (see, a few lines down, “the grindstone of pain and necessity”) it will degenerate. These ideas are not unique to Wells and reflect one of the major currents of late-nineteenth-century thought: the need to return to nature; this is the message to be found in W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land (1885).
Chapter V
1 (p. 36) their language was excessively simple.... few, if any, abstract terms: The Eloi communicate using nouns (concrete substantives) and verbs. Their minds produce almost no abstract thoughts or metaphors.
2 (p. 37) sanitary apparatus: The Time Traveller is fascinated by what he takes to be a sewage system, a novelty in England at the time the novel appeared.
3 (p. 37) Utopias: The word “utopia” derives from the Greek for “no place,” and signifies an imaginary community, perfect in laws and social relationships. Sir Thomas More coined the term in 1516, but Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888) and William Morris (News from Nowhere, 1891 ) had written about new utopias in the nineteenth century. Here Wells criticizes Morris, a Marxist.
4 (p. 37) gap between a negro and a white man: Wells’s racist attitude toward blacks, typical of his time, also reflects the attitude of the Time Traveller to the Eloi—he considers them inferior.