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The Time Machine | Reading Pointers for Sharper Insight

Reading Pointers for Sharper Insight

To better appreciate The Time Machine, it will be helpful to explore some of the historical, social, and scientific assumptions on which Wells based his story:

As a Socialist, Herbert George Wells was very concerned with the relationship between the working class and the ruling class in England.

  • The Industrial Revolution had established a wealthy and politically powerful middle class, as well as creating a new form of urban poverty not previously known.

  • Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto (1848) asserted that revolution was unavoidable in any society in which the means of production (the factories) were owned by one class (the capitalists) and operated by another (the workers). According to Marxist philosophy, the wealth of the middle class capitalists was made possible only by the exploitation of the workers.

  • Wells saw that the gap between capitalists and workers was widening and he hypothesized where such a discrepancy would lead in the future. Thus, he developed the Eloi (future descendents of the capitalists) and the Morlocks (future descendents of the workers).

Wells was also a historian and a sociologist, greatly interested in the scientific theories and advancements of his day.

  • The theories asserted in Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) provided the scientific background Wells needed for his two social classes to evolve into two distinct species as described above.

  • Note that while most movie versions of The Time Machine portray the Morlock/Eloi division as the result of some human-made disaster, like a nuclear war, Wells shows it as the inevitable result of natural forces. This is why his Time Traveler travels some 800,000 years into the future, not merely a century or two.

  • Contemporary theories about gravitational drag and the influence of gravity on the orbits and rotation of bodies in space allowed Wells to envision his pessimistic view of the end of the world. Again, this dreary view is the inevitable result of natural forces. There is nothing the human race did to cause it, and nothing people can do to prevent it.

As a writer, Wells experimented with storytelling techniques that would add a greater degree of credibility to his fiction:

  • The Time Machine is told by an unnamed first-person narrator, who is an invited guest at the Time Traveller's two dinner parties and who speaks directly with the Time Traveller to confirm and clarify his story.

  • Just as the narrator and the Time Traveller are unnamed, the other guests at the dinner parties are also known only by type—the Medical Man, the Journalist, etc. Only Filby is named, but he is not identified.

Generally regarded as a science fiction story, The Time Machine is much more a social commentary on the state of class relations in late-nineteenthcentury England and an exploration of the nature of humanity and the place in the Universe that we inhabit.