[In the following essay, originally published in French in 1971, Vernier describes the variations of The Time Machine and discusses its universal appeal at the time of its publication.]

The Time Machine has remained one of Wells's most popular books, and one of the most often reprinted. The circumstances of its publication are, in general, well enough known that here we need only recall them briefly. The Time Traveller appeared for the first time in the Science Schools Journal, in a story entitled “The Chronic Argonauts”; following are the principal transformations undergone by that original tale:¹

• A. “The Chronic Argonauts,” published in the Science Schools Journal, 1881.
• B. Two different versions of the same story, written in 1889 and 1892. The texts were never published, and Geoffrey West is the only authority attesting to their existence.
• C. In 1893, another version was written by Wells and published in series form in The National Observer during the spring of 1894. This is actually the earliest form of The Time Machine.
• D. In 1894 Wells took up the story again, producing a new version serialized in The New Review beginning in January 1895. Except for a few details, this is the version Heinemann published in book form in June 1895. Preparing it for book form, Wells contented himself with rewriting the opening, making it more dramatic and less didactic, and excising a few episodes that unnecessarily slowed the plot development. But one highly interesting variation appears between the 1893 text and the 1894. In The National Observer, the last vision of a world where life has gradually disappeared due to the cooling of the sun is introduced only as a brief speculation within the final episode, while in The New Review this vision has been enlarged to the dimensions of the definitive version. We are dealing, then, with a slowly elaborated work, and one upon which Wells placed high hopes. In December 1894 he wrote to Miss Healey:

You may be interested to know that our ancient “Chronic Argonauts” of the Science Schools Journal has at last become a complete story and will appear as a serial in the New Review for January. It's my trump card and if it does not come off very much I shall know my place for the rest of my career.²

To be sure, there is some exaggeration in this. We can hardly imagine Wells abandoning his writing career because of the failure of one book. On those rare occasions when an editor did reject his work, he simply revised, often restating the same ideas in altered form. But no such problem arose with The Time Machine, which was accorded a reception that must have surpassed even Wells's own hopes. In the Review of Reviews, W. T. Stead called him “a man of genius.”³ The sentiment was echoed by a number of reviewers, and indicates quite well the quality of praise lavished on Wells at the time. Unknown till then, he rapidly became one of the foremost literary figures of his age—an age when young talent was relatively rare. We may ask what allowed him to achieve such success. Should we assume that Wells, in 1894, expressed the preoccupations of his age so clearly that his readers saw in his work an illustration of their own confusing problems? Or should we, on the other hand, assume that The Time Machine offered them an escape from those problems?

Many critics have claimed to find in the adventures of the Time Traveller a satire against the age, a warning from Wells to his contemporaries. … Indeed, it is possible—though not certain—that Wells meant to apprise his contemporaries of the dangers of science and show them the faults inherent in their social organization. But this does not appear to have been the essential motive of the work. Wells himself, of course, came to subscribe to this reading and, in hindsight, located The Time Machine in the line of his propagandistic works which provided the ideological basis of the Open Conspiracy.⁴ In All Aboard for Ararat (1940) Noah Lammock—one of Wells's numerous incarnations—is arguing with the Lord:

“I never wrote The Time Machine,” said Noah.

“Why pretend?” said the Lord. “The same idea is the framework of your Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. It is World Brain. It crops up more and more frequently in your books as you get older and repeat yourself more and more—”⁵

But this is merely one of Wells's constant attempts to impose upon his lifework a unity which is not, in fact, there. In 1894 the realm of pure ideas scarcely attracted him. And like most of his stories from the same period, The Time Machine rests upon a fundamental ambiguity—an ambiguity, moreover, as fecund as the ambiguity of poetry, revealing meaning upon meaning at levels at once parallel to each other and superimposed upon one another. As Bernard Bergonzi brilliantly indicates, the book's central episode is a metaphor for an extremely complex reality:

The opposition of Eloi and Morlocks can be interpreted in terms of the late nineteenth-century class-struggle, but it also reflects an opposition between aestheticism and utilitarianism, pastoralism and technology, contemplation and action, and ultimately, and least specifically, between beauty and ugliness, and light and darkness. The book not only embodies the tensions and dilemmas of its time, but others peculiar to Wells himself, which a few years later were to make him cease to be an artist and become a propagandist.⁶

Certainly, despite Wells's own simplistic explanation of them, the Eloi and the Morlocks awaken archetypal responses in the reader. But that is not their only function.

The theme itself of time travel is called into play in a manner very characteristic of the period. Long before the book appeared, people had been discussing the plausibility of the hypothesis; and serious physicists had demonstrated that time travel is physically impossible. But that is a different problem from Wells's. Insofar as the reader is induced, by the narrative technique, to believe in the reality of the voyage, we have to admit that the writer has achieved his goal. What is significant—and what Paul Valéry saw splendidly—is that the “time” through which Wells's hero travels is wholly different from “time” as conceived by contemporary physics:

Even Wells, in his famous story The Time Machine, employs and explores time as it was, old time, the time which was believed in before him. …⁷

It is no surprise, then, that the reader finds in the book characters who, fantastic as they may be, nevertheless betray familiar traits.

The Eloi, with their childlike and sexually ambiguous appearance, and their consumptive type of beauty, are clear reflections of fin de siècle visual taste.⁸

Apparently, for the contemporary reader, the identification of these frail creatures with the aesthetes of the Decadent Movement was inevitable. And over against the Eloi, the Morlocks may illustrate the same process of identification even more clearly. They evoke the demons of popular tradition, descended from the Middle Ages through the period of the Gothic Novel. And their origin, as explained by Wells, makes them descendents of the working class of the end of the nineteenth century. And it matters little what kind of workers. Their appearance and habitat inevitably suggest the miners. And the miners, we know, represented for both the upper and the middle classes of the time a barely human species—a species requiring constant surveillance if one did not wish to fall prey to their natural savagery. We may assert that, for the middle class of the late nineteenth century, the existence of the miner represented a constant and ominous annoyance, an image of potential revolution very like the “terrorist with a knife” of the period between the two World Wars.

So that Wells presents to his predominantly middle class audience a society composed of two other classes, with neither of whom they can identify: on the one hand the descendents of the capitalists, a collection of dilettantes at the margin of society; and on the other the Morlocks descended from the proletarians, traditional enemies of the middle class. Furthermore, Wells shows no sympathy for either class: and the reader thus finds himself a pure spectator. This is so much the case, indeed, that the reader feels no indignation when the hero fights the Morlocks with fire: he can regard it only as man's affirmation of his superiority over creatures with whom he has nothing in common. The world from which these creatures come is not the reader's. And, doubtless, this is one reason why The Time Machine has no value as propaganda. The original Chapter Seven was titled, simply, Explanation. We are in the realm of fantasy, and there is no conscious urge to instruct or warn us. As Kingsley Amis correctly observes:

When the Time Traveller finds that mankind will have become separated into two races, the gentle ineffectual Eloi and the savage Morlocks, the idea that these are descended respectively from our own leisured classes and manual workers comes as a mere explanation, a solution to the puzzle; it is not transformed, as it inevitably would be in a modern writer, into a warning about some current trend in society.⁹

The book, rather, is a series of hypotheses based upon the theory of evolution—not as Darwin and Huxley expounded it, but as it was popularized among the reading public. The divorce between the real world and the imaginative universe is total: The Time Machine is above all a work of art, and is typical of its age only to the extent that all art is a re-creation of the world of the moment within the artist's own vision. It appears, besides, that Wells himself is more concerned to make his reader admit the plausibility of his hypothesis—more concerned, that is, with problems of literary technique—than with the actual validity of such hypotheses. As he himself later said:

It was still possible in The Time Machine to imagine humanity on the verge of extinction and differentiated into two decadent species, the Eloi and the Morlocks, without the slightest reflection upon everyday life. Quite a lot of people thought that idea was very clever in its sphere, very clever indeed, and no one minded in the least. It seemed to have no sort of relation whatever to normal existence.¹⁰

Perhaps it is just because The Time Machine seemed to be a game that readers and critics gave it such an enthusiastic welcome. They found there a new, original world, which was, nevertheless, not disturbing since it could not conceivably come into existence. But the game is far from being simply frivolous; and behind the descriptions of fantastic beings and worlds, there is manifested a peculiar disquiet. To be sure, we do not find a concerted attack on this or that aspect of the modern world: but the violence itself, which is such an essential element in all the stories of this period, clearly illustrates Wells's unrest. But The Time Machine, finally, is not one of those numerous works in which he acerbically criticized his society and eventually elaborated a complex social philosophy. It is a youthful work that owes its triumph above all to its literary genius and its exuberance. …

Doubtless, there is a typical fin de siècle attitude in Wells's obvious pleasure in imagining the end of our world, and in the evocative power of his description of the planet dying under a sun that grows more and more cold. But these achievements do not in any way surpass the limitations of an aesthetic game founded upon an intellectual hypothesis. We can scarcely argue that this hypothesis was ahead of its time. For it is only a point of departure, a pretext for a dream which, disturbing as it may be, remains nevertheless a dream.

Notes

1. This information is provided in Geoffrey West, H. G. Wells: A Sketch for a Portrait (London, 1930), pp. 287-296. A more detailed examination of the problem is found in the article of Bernard Bergonzi, “The Publication of The Time Machine, 1894-1895,” Review of English Studies XI, 41 (February 1960): 42-51.

2. West, p. 102. Elizabeth Healey, a friend of Wells's at the Normal School of Science, remained his correspondent for nearly fifty years.

3. Review of Reviews XI (1895): 263. Stead, third editor of the sensationalist and widely-read Pall Mall Gazette, was one of the most important literary sponsors of his time.

4. The phrase for Wells's theory, maintained during his later years, that the intellectuals and scientists of the world should assume a benevolent dictatorship in order to introduce some measure of sanity into the counsels of international politics.

5. All Aboard for Ararat (London, 1940), p. 54.

6. Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester, 1961), p. 61.

7. Paul Valéry, “Literature and Our Destiny,” in Remarks on the Modern World (Paris, 1962), p. 252.

8. Bergonzi, pp. 48-49.

9. Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell (London, 1961), p. 33.

10. The Fate of Man (New York, 1939), p. 67.