SOURCE: Eisenstein, Alex. “Very Early Wells: Origins of Some Major Physical Motifs in The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.” Extrapolation 13 (1972): 119-26.

[In the following essay, Eisenstein traces Wells's formulation of the Morlocks and their underground environs in The Time Machine to his childhood home, Atlas House.]

In The Early H. G. Wells,¹ Bernard Bergonzi treats the dualistic future world of The Time Machine mainly as an expression of the traditional mythic schism between Paradise and Perdition. To support his interpretation, he cites the contrasting imagery associated with the two distinct human habitats—and species—delineated in the story: descriptions of the upper realm and its people are predominately sunny and idyllic; those of the lower, somber and infernal.

Yet, beyond the demonic role he thus ascribes to the Morlocks, Professor Bergonzi further claims that these creatures “represent an exaggerated fear of the nineteenth century proletariat.”² Of course, in terms of the tale's quasi-Darwinian rationale, they are literally the biological and social descendants of the working class, but Mr. Bergonzi attributes to them a much closer identity with the toiling masses: “Since the Morlocks on one level stand for the late nineteenth century proletariat, the Traveller's attitude towards them symbolizes a contemporary bourgeois fear of the working class, and it is not fanciful to impute something of this attitude to Wells himself. From his school days in Bromley he had disliked and feared the working class in a way wholly appropriate to the son of a small tradesman—as various Marxist critics have not been slow to remark.”³ A brief quotation from the last third of the narrative, establishing the protagonist's overwhelming desire (by then) to slaughter all Morlocks, immediately precedes the above discussion in its original context. With such a preface, Mr. Bergonzi's commentary strongly implies that a real-life corollary of this homicidal urge became a deepseated affliction of the Wellsian psyche.

This malign conjecture further suggests that the Morlocks must ultimately derive from that hypothetical antipathy for Victorian Labor. However, despite the ready assertion of “various Marxist critics,” the formulation of these bestial hominids and their plutonian abode stems from other and more primary childhood referents.

First among the latter is Atlas House, the birthplace of Wells and home of his infancy and early childhood. Its particular situation and character reflect, to a large degree, the peculiar dichotomy of the world of A.D. 802,701. His father's crockery shop opened onto High Street, and directly behind the shop lay the small parlor of the Wells home. From this parlor, “a murderously narrow staircase with a twist in it led downstairs to a completely subterranean kitchen, lit by a window which derived its light from a grating on the street level, and a bricked scullery, which, since the house was poised on a bank, opened into the yard at the ground level below.”⁴ These lines from Wells's autobiography firmly establish his own feeling about the cellar rooms; although the lowest floor allowed direct access to level ground and open air, he thought of these rooms as “completely subterranean.” (The dim illumination from the grate doubtless served as a constant reminder of this subsurface condition.)

A fanciful extension of the underground status to the backyard should have been fairly automatic for any normally imaginative pre-school youngster, and especially for one who played there so long and so often that he “learnt its every detail.”⁵ Several of these physical details enhanced the subterranean aura. Beginning at the rear wall of the house, a brickwork pavement spread across half the yard,⁶ thus linking it, by similarity of texture, to the indoor domain of the scullery. Large “erections in the neighbors' yards on either side” and “a boundary wall”⁷ at the far end hemmed in the backyard, isolating it from the outer world—and, perhaps, vaulting upward like the steep sides of a pit. One adjunct of the yard actually simulated some gloomy catacomb: “Between the scullery and the neighbour's wall was a narrow passage covered over,”⁸ where his father stored many piles of red earthenware for the shop. The cellar and the yard, in many of their dominant features, recall the industrial character of the Morlock caverns. Together, they functioned as the apparent site of all the necessary work accomplished in the limited universe accessible to Wells as a toddler—the place where everything was produced, cleaned, or otherwise prepared for use above or below. All the fixtures on that level bespoke some form of utilitarian labor: “In the scullery was a small fireplace, a copper boiler for washing, a provision cupboard, a bread pan, a beer cask, a pump delivering water from a well into a stone sink, and space for coal … beneath the wooden stairs.”⁹ In the yard stood “a brick erection, the ‘closet,’ an earth jakes over a cesspool, … and above this closet was a rainwater tank. Behind it was the brick dustbin …”¹⁰ and from the house, “an open cement gutter brought the waste waters of the sink to a soak away”¹¹ in the center of the half-paved yard. (Note the prevalence of metal, stone, and stone-like materials, and the numerous vessels for storage or processing, along with mechanisms and conduits for the conveyance of working fluids and the disposal of wastes.)

Even the plots adjacent to the yard can be identified with basic functions performed by the Morlocks in their underworld, or with the underworld itself. “On one hand was the yard of Mr. Munday, the haberdasher, … who had put up a greenhouse and cultivated mushrooms … ; and on the other, Mr. Cooper, the tailor, had built out a workroom in which two or three tailors sat and sewed.”¹² On one hand, the “greenhouse” nurtured plants that commonly grow in dark, dank caverns; on the other, one of the notable vestigial “duties” remaining to the Morlocks lay in their capacity as clothiers for the Eloi.

But most important, the major occupation of the subsurface dwellers also loomed in the background of Atlas House. Beyond the boundary wall at the end of the yard spread “the much larger yard and sheds of Mr. Covell the butcher, in which pigs, sheep and horned cattle were harboured violently, and protested plaintively through the night before they were slaughtered.”¹³ This presence surely made an indelible impression on Wells, for it crops up again as the metaphoric essence of a subsequent major work, The Island of Dr. Moreau.

The concept of a hidden lower world exercised an even greater fascination for Wells, one that continued throughout his life. First Men in the Moon, though possibly somewhat derivative of Kepler's Somnium, clearly contains another surface elysium shielding a vast industrial substratum. The idea emerges, for perhaps its last public appearance, in a metaphor from the Autobiography that summarizes his early psychosexuality: “So at the age of seven …, I had already between me and my bleak protestant God, a wide wide world of snowy mountains, Arctic regions, tropical forests, prairies and deserts and high seas, … about which I was prepared to talk freely, and cool and strange below it all a cavernous world of nameless goddess mistresses of which I never breathed a word to any human being.”¹⁴

A unique bibliographic discovery made by Wells in his early life probably accentuated his receptivity to the concept of a hidden world below; it also lends some credibility to the notion that the infernal aspects of the Morlock habitat indicate the real creative roots of this environmental motif. (Bergonzi does not make this claim outright, but he might easily believe as much, if one may judge from his emphasis of these aspects.) In the words of Wells:

There was a picture in an old illustrated book of devotions, Sturm's Reflections, obliterated with stamp paper, and so provoking investigation. What had mother been hiding from me? By holding up the page to the light I discovered the censored illustration represented hell-fire; devil, pitchfork and damned, all complete and drawn with great gusto. But she had anticipated the general trend of Protestant theology at the present time and hidden hell away.¹⁵

Hell, of course, embodies the idea of an underworld without recourse to stamp-covered illustrations; nevertheless, the obscured drawing in Sturm was a physical metaphor of all such underworlds, and young Wells may have perceived it as such, if only unconsciously. Yet, among Wells's earliest experiences, all reading and even religious training must rank second to his awareness of Atlas House, for it preceded them all.

The quasi-subterranean kitchen of his birthplace pervaded his psyche to such a degree that he recreated it, under fictional circumstances fraught with gross improbability, in one of the most perilous scenes in The War of the Worlds. In the second chapter of Book Two, “The Earth Under the Martians,” the narrator is trapped in an abandoned house that barely escapes total destruction when a Martian cylinder lands nearby:

The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the house we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. … The earth all round it had splashed under that tremendous impact … and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent houses. … Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance the kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towards the cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great circular pit …¹⁶

The house is largely decimated, while the kitchen and scullery survive, though engulfed by earth on three sides. This result occurs despite the fact that the house collapses backward. Presumably, the kitchen is to the rear; how does the rear survive when the front is utterly demolished? It does so, of course, because the author contrived it so, by fiat. The event is not impossible, perhaps, but to me it seems most unlikely—compounding the coincidence of the landing itself. The precise physical situation must have held a fair amount of intrinsic significance for Wells; surely he could have trapped the narrator beside the impact crater in a manner less idiosyncratic or incredible?

If anyone might doubt that an edifice like Atlas House could adequately serve as model for an extensive subterranean world, he should consider the psychological effect of entering such a building on the first floor and then discovering another ground level below. Even from an adult observer, the first encounter with this situation may elicit a sense of suddenly penetrating a dimension of existence normally veiled beneath the mundane, surface world.

From infancy, of course, Wells became increasingly familiar with this bi-level arrangement; it could hardly have seemed very strange to him for all his youth, much less the rest of his life. Nevertheless, this condition does not preclude the possibility that the structure of Atlas House retained a powerful grip on his imagination; it merely indicates that such an influence probably developed in a fairly gradual manner. Still, at some early point in his life, there had to be a first time for Wells to experience and perceive the “odd” nature of Atlas House. Whether the metaphoric significance occurred to him immediately, or rather seeped slowly into his mental storehouse without conscious realization, cannot be determined by the literary tools and data currently available; indeed, that question may remain forever moot. Even so, the circumstantial evidence for a connection between early environs and fictional setting cannot be summarily dismissed—especially in view of the complementary origin of the Morlock race.

What of these Morlocks, then? What are their prototypes, if not—at least, not entirely—the imps of Satan that once infested Anglican dogma? What is the principal inspiration for this savage race, if not a similarly savage revulsion for the brutish workers of the world? The actual source again involves childhood fantasizing about Atlas House, this time spurred by a natural-science book Wells read at age seven: “There was Wood's Natural History, also copiously illustrated and full of exciting and terrifying facts. I conceived a profound fear of the gorilla, of which there was a fearsome picture, which came out of the book at times after dark [the gorilla, of course; not the picture] and followed me noiselessly about the house. The half landing was a favourite lurking place for this terror. I passed it whistling, but wary and then ran for my life up the next flight.”¹⁷ The Morlocks share all the insidious, nocturnal habits of the imaginary ape: like him, they emerge at night to ambush the dawdler from shadowed hideaways; they clamber up from lower levels to chase and terrorize small and youthful innocents.

That the Morlock race is a literary amalgam of apes and several other creatures has never been a great secret; the story itself indicates as much, and Bergonzi duly notes this. Nevertheless, his own investigation of the early H. G. Wells never leads him to suspect (or betray that he does) the true bedrock origins of Wells's creations. The real psychological significance of the Morlocks lies not in any apprehensive loathing for the proletariat, but rather in a profound early fear of wild animals in general and specifically of the gorilla, conceived as a personal household nemesis. In conjunction with the metaphoric aura of the house, this fear-fantasy provided the essential basis for the vision of the future contained in The Time Machine. All else, even the ostensible, socio-scientific explanation in the story, are mere after-the-fact rationales overlaid on the germinal idea.

As mentioned above, Wells's first knowledge of wild animals soon crystallized into a fear of monumental proportions: “… I was glad to think that between the continental land masses of the world, which would have afforded an unbroken land passage for wolves from Russia and tigers from India, and this safe island … stretched the impassable moat of the English Channel.”¹⁸ Even much later, at age thirteen, he was still prone to bestial nemeses of the night, as in the following description of the terrors attending the weekend journey to his Uncle Tom's riverside inn, Surly Hall: “My imagination peopled the dark fields on either hand with crouching and pursuing foes. Chunks of badly trimmed hedge took on formidable shapes. Sometimes I took to my heels and ran. For a week or so that road was haunted by a rumour of an escaped panther … That phantom panther waited for me patiently; it followed me like a noiseless dog, biding its time. And one night on the other side of the hedge a sleeping horse sighed deeply, a gigantic sigh, and almost frightened me out of my wits.”¹⁹ The hobgoblin activities recorded here bear an acute resemblance to those executed by the malevolent ape of Atlas House; Wells evidently retained the primary image long after its inception.

A relevant sidelight on Morlock origins—the Wood volume also triggered in Wells inklings of the rigorous Darwinian principles he later acquired in formal sessions with T. H. Huxley: “Turning over the pages of the Natural History, I perceived a curious relationship between cats and tigers and lions and so forth, and to a lesser degree between them and hyenas and dogs and bears, and between them again and other quadrupeds, and curious premonitions of evolution crept into my thoughts.”²⁰ This revelation reinforces the impression that this book was an important wellspring for the speculative constructs employed in The Time Machine.

In like manner the dominant apparition of The War of the Worlds can be traced to Wells's first direct encounter with the wider Universe. In his fourteenth year, while delving into an attic storeroom in Up Park (his second home), he uncovered the following treasure:

… There was a box, at first quite mysterious, full of brass objects that clearly might be screwed together. I screwed them together, by the method of trial and error, and presently found a Gregorian telescope on a trip in my hands. I carried off the wonder to my bedroom. … I was discovered by my mother in the small hours, my bedroom window wide open, inspecting the craters of the moon. She had heard me open the window. She said I should catch my death of cold. But at the time that seemed a minor consideration.²¹

Here is the inanimate progenitor of the Martian war machine—both are tripodal devices assembled from cylinders. The parts of the telescope screw together, whereas the cylinders from Mars unscrew to open. Both the telescope and the war machine involve optical systems—the first for concentrating distant radiation, the other for projecting concentrated radiation over considerable distance (the narrator repeatedly calls the heat-ray mechanism a “camera” or “projector”).

The war machines are variously described, but most often as metallic and “glittering.”²² Nothing glitters like gold, of course—except, perhaps, the highly polished tube of a brass telescope; the cowled head of one of these monster machines is termed a “brazen hood”²³ soon after their initial appearance in the story.

The notion of three-legged fighting machines could have sprung from contemplation of any tripod-mounted apparatus—for instance a portrait camera, which possesses the same general attributes that qualify the telescope as a prototype. Even a ringstand or a milking stool could be prime suspects; one of the marching engines of holocaust is actually likened to a milking stool, in a passage describing its exotic mode of locomotion.²⁴ A telescope, of course, figures prominently in the first chapter; yet, somewhat later, British defenders introduce a much more suggestive instrument—the heliograph. But Wells never built a heliograph, nor did he handle a camera in his early years; tripod ringstands remained outside his direct experience until he entered the Normal School of Science in 1884, and his childhood acquaintance with milking stools was surely no better than second hand. Furthermore, the telescope—and only the telescope—engaged his mind and spirit with the remarkable vistas and wonders of Space. No other similar artifact affected his outlook to the extent, and in the direction, that this one did. Such examples as these illustrate how Wells's imagination transformed the objects of commonplace experience into the fundamental imagery of his fictions.

Notes

1. Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961).

2. Bergonzi, p. 53.

3. Bergonzi, p. 56.

4. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 22.

5. Ibid., p. 23.

6. Ibid., p. 23.

7. Ibid., pp. 23 and 22, respectively.

8. Ibid., p. 23.

9. Ibid., p. 22. Elsewhere in the Autobiography (p. 48), Wells recaptures a vivid impression of the working ambience of “washing day, when the copper in the scullery was lit and all the nether regions were filled with white steam and the smell of soapsuds.”

10. Wells, p. 22.

11. Ibid., p. 23.

12. Ibid., p. 23.

13. Ibid., p. 22.

14. Ibid., p. 58.

15. Ibid., p. 29.

16. Seven Science Fiction Novels of H. G. Wells (New York: Dover), p. 406; Seven Famous Novels by H. G. Wells (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1934), p. 347; TWOTW (New York: Popular Library, 1962), p. 128.

17. Wells, Autobiography, p. 54. From the context, the half-landing in question is not clear (there were several, as the house possessed three stories above ground); however, inasmuch as meals were always eaten in the cellar kitchen, this anecdote probably refers to the landing between cellar and parlor, which would be passed on the way to bed after evening meal.

18. Ibid., p. 95.

19. Ibid., pp. 54-55.

20. Ibid., p. 106.

21. Wells, The War of the Worlds, Ch. 10.

22. Ibid., Ch. 10.

23. Ibid., Ch. 10, para. 12.

24. Ibid., Ch. 12, para. 8; Ch. 13, para. 2; Ch. 13, para. 44; passim.