The Time Machine

About this book

The Time Machine was H. G. Wells’s first novel, published in 1895 when he was twenty-eight. It is a short book in which an inventor builds a device for traveling through time, uses it, and comes back to tell his dinner guests what he found. Wells is generally credited with popularizing the idea of a machine that moves through time at will, and the phrase “time machine” itself comes from this book.

It has remained a standard text because it does two things at once. It is an adventure story, with a stranded traveler, a strange landscape, and a threat in the dark. It is also a thought experiment about where humanity might end up if the social arrangements of Wells’s own day continued for hundreds of thousands of years. Later writers have borrowed the device endlessly; the particular future Wells imagined has remained his own.

The story

The book opens at a dinner party in Richmond, where the host, known only as the Time Traveller, explains to his skeptical guests that time is a fourth dimension and shows them a small model that vanishes when a lever is pressed. A week later the same guests arrive to find him late, disheveled, and limping. Over dinner he tells them where he has been.

He has traveled to the year 802,701. The England he found there is a garden, inhabited by the Eloi, small, gentle, childlike people who do no work and show no curiosity. His machine disappears soon after he arrives, and in searching for it he discovers that the Eloi are not the only inhabitants. Below ground live the Morlocks, pale creatures who shun the light and keep the machinery running. Working out the relationship between the two peoples, and recovering his machine, occupies the rest of his account, along with a further trip even deeper into the future.

Themes and historical context

Wells trained as a biologist at the Normal School of Science in London under T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s most prominent defender, and The Time Machine applies evolutionary thinking to human society. The Traveller’s successive theories about the Eloi and the Morlocks (first a paradise, then a decayed aristocracy and its laboring underclass) track the way a scientist revises a hypothesis as new evidence appears.

The split between the two species is Wells’s extrapolation from the class structure of late-Victorian Britain, in which the comfortable classes lived above ground and industrial labor was increasingly hidden away. The book does not treat either side as heroic. Its larger subject is entropy: the idea, drawn from the physics of the period, that the sun and the earth would eventually run down. The Traveller’s final glimpses of a dying world were among the first attempts in fiction to picture that.

The novel appeared in a decade of anxiety about degeneration and the future of empire, and it was an immediate success, launching Wells’s career as a writer of what he called “scientific romances.”

Who should read it

At around 32,000 words it is a novella rather than a novel, and most readers finish it in a couple of hours. The framing device (a story told at a dinner table) and the Victorian scientific vocabulary are the only hurdles, and both are small. It is a natural first book for anyone curious about early science fiction, and it reads well alongside The War of the Worlds, written by Wells a few years later.