SOURCE: Parrinder, Patrick. “Possibilities of Space and Time (The Time Machine).” In Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, pp. 34-48. Liverpool, United Kingdom: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Parrinder explores the significance of time travel in Wells's fiction, particularly The Time Machine.]

I

Towards the end of The Time Machine, the Traveller finishes the story of his adventures, pauses, and looks around at his listeners. He is like a lecturer waiting for the first question after his talk, and like many nervous lecturers he tries to start the ball rolling by interrogating the audience himself. ‘“No. I cannot expect you to believe it”’, he begins. ‘“Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. … 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?”’ (§12). There is another awkward silence, while the Time Traveller fiddles with his pipe, and the audience shift uneasily in their chairs. Then the newspaper editor says that their host ought to be a writer of stories. The narrator, who is not sure what to think, returns to the Traveller's house in Richmond the next day, just in time to speak with him before he departs on the second voyage, from which he never returns. As Robert Philmus has observed, within the narrative framework it is the Traveller's second disappearance and failure to return that proves the reality of time travel, establishing him as a prophet rather than a liar.¹

For the narrator in the ‘Epilogue’, the Time Traveller's tale appears as a brief moment of enlightenment, like the flaring of the match in ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, amid the vast ignorance and darkness of the future. The light of prophecy is also the light of science—but it is the extent of the blackness that terrifies. Wells says something very similar in The Future in America, when he speaks of the loss of his belief in the imminence of the Christian apocalypse during his adolescence. The study of biology revealed to him an ‘endless vista of years ahead’ (p. 10). Space, too, appeared as an endless vista, and it is notable that in his early works Wells often uses the word figuratively to indicate a measure of time, as in the phrase ‘a space of time’.² The complementarity of space and time in the Wellsian universe is summed up in the title of his 1899 volume of stories, Tales of Space and Time.

But travel in time with its prophetic associations engages Wells's imagination more intensely than journeys into space. Despite his reputation as the founder of modern science fiction, he took little or no interest in the fiction of spaceships and stellar travel. His rhetorical vision in The Discovery of the Future of beings who ‘shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars’ (p. 36) was to inspire other writers, though it corresponds to very little in Wells's own output. Apart from the mystical dream-narrative of his short story ‘Under the Knife’, The First Men in the Moon is his only narrative of a journey beyond the earth's atmosphere; and it is notable that Bedford, the narrator, experiences the dissolution of identity in ‘infinite space’ during the comparatively short return journey from the moon. He recounts this phase of his adventures in a detached, almost serene way, very different from the Time Traveller's ‘hysterical exhilaration’ (§3) as he rushes into the future. There is fear and trembling in Wells's imagination of time travel; in The First Men in the Moon, however, the experience of thrilling revelation is reserved not for the journey but for the discoveries that the two explorers make on the moon.

What, then, was the source of the exhilaration of time travel? It reflects the bias of Wells's scientific interests, in evolutionary biology and palaeontology rather than astronomy and physics, but it also has a more personal appeal, reflecting his imaginative ‘impatience’. We can hardly avoid relating it both to the religious millennialism of his upbringing,³ and to his intimations of an early death. The fundamental commonsense objection to time travel is the one put forward by Wells's fellow-novelist Israel Zangwill, writing about The Time Machine in his Pall Mall Magazine column in September 1895. To travel forward more than a few years in time, Zangwill argued, is to travel through one's own death.⁴ (It is also, one might add, to travel through the death of the machine: metal fatigue and corrosion are often swifter processes than the decay of the human body.) Admittedly, the idea of ‘travelling through’ death is misleading, since what the time machine achieves for its rider is the circumvention and bypassing of the ravages of time. Since he is still alive and has only aged by a few hours when he reaches 802,701, his journey takes place in a different time-frame from the one that he leaves behind and later re-enters.⁵ Wells is aware of some at least of the paradoxes that beset all time-travel narratives. These are most obtrusive at the end of the story, when the narrator returns to Richmond the day after the Traveller's return and sees the Time Machine in the empty laboratory before meeting its inventor in the smoking-room. The Traveller has already passed through this moment in the empty laboratory twice, once on his journey forwards and once on his return journey; on the latter occasion he ‘“seemed to see Hillyer … but he passed like a flash”’ (§12). If Hillyer is the narrator (as Geduld suggests),⁶ the Traveller is seeing him either at this moment or on the occasion, somewhat later, when the narrator re-enters the laboratory. On that second occasion, the narrator catches sight of the ghostly figure of the Traveller on the machine, in the act of departure—or arrival—or both. There are further complications that could be teased out from the story's opening-up of such paradoxes.⁷

Before receiving his ‘death warrant’ after his footballing accident in 1887, Wells had written ‘A Vision of the Past’. Immediately after it, he wrote ‘The Chronic Argonauts,’ the first version of The Time Machine, which is set in present time. At the end of ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ the Reverend Elijah Cook returns from an involuntary voyage into the future, but we never hear his tale of what happened there. Wells's friends complained about the abrupt ending, but it was many years before he was able to write the promised sequel to his own satisfaction. When it eventually appeared in book form, it had been revised at least half a dozen times.⁸ For six years (1888-94), we may say, Wells had hesitated on the brink of a genuinely prophetic narrative. His exultation once he had succeeded in giving the future a body and shape is perhaps mirrored in the pun (supposing it is a pun) in Section 4 of The Time Machine, when the Traveller reflects on the ‘oddness of wells still existing’.

In ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ there are two narratives, which Wells calls ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’. The exoteric or external story is told by ‘the author’ (that is, Wells himself), while the esoteric or internal one is told, in an incomplete and fragmentary form, by the Reverend Elijah Cook. The figure who never tells his story is Nebogipfel, the inventor of the time machine or ‘Chronic Argo’ himself. He only expounds the principles of time-travelling, in conversation with Elijah Cook. In the National Observer version of Wells's tale, published between March and June 1894, Nebogipfel, now rechristened or relabelled the Time Traveller, is constantly interrupted by his hearers. His mixture of philosophical argument and adventure narrative is punctuated by commentaries and outbursts of scepticism. The sheer imaginative power of his tale is never given full rein, as if some inhibition still curbed its author. As storytelling, this version is bungled just as ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ is bungled.⁹ But in the final version Wells's inhibitions are overcome, and, once we are with the Traveller on his voyage, the smoking-room setting of the tale is forgotten for very long stretches. The Delphic voice pours forth at last. The Traveller is now more than a mere narrative device. He is a heroic figure within the confines of the story, as well as an avatar of the visionary personality that Wells was discovering, with growing confidence, within himself.

II

When Dr Nebogipfel's unwilling passenger, the Rev. Elijah Cook, arrives back from his journey in ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ he announces that he has several depositions to make. These concern a murder in the year 1862 (indicating that, unlike the Time Traveller, the Argonauts have gone both ways in time), an abduction in 4003 and a series of ‘“assaults on public officials in the years 17,901 and 2”’.¹⁰ In the National Observer ‘Time Machine’, the world of the Eloi and Morlocks is set in AD 12,203. In the final version, the date, conveniently registered on the Time Machine's instrument panel, is 802,701. There follows the ‘Further Vision’, in which the Traveller journeys forward another twenty-nine million years. The reader of the different versions of The Time Machine succumbs to the spell of these mysterious numbers themselves—above all, the puzzling figure 802,701—but, beyond that, the meaning of such vast expanses of imaginary time calls out for explanation.

When the Time Traveller's guests encounter the idea of visiting the future, it is plain how limited their (and, by extension, our) horizons are. The Journalist dubs their host ‘Our Special Correspondent in the Day after To-morrow’ (§2). The Editor wants a tip for next week's horse-racing. The Very Young Man suggests investing some money and travelling forward to collect the profits. Yet even the relatively modest National Observer voyage crossed a timespan of more than twice as long as recorded history. Wells's familiarity with the prehistoric vistas opened up by nineteenth-century geology and archaeology had shaped his vision of time travel. As a South Kensington student, he belonged to the first generation of young people to learn as a matter of course about the Stone Age, the era of the dinosaurs, and the formation of the earth. This marvellous new field of knowledge, which rapidly became a staple of popular culture, is evoked in the Epilogue to The Time Machine where the narrator imagines the Traveller voyaging into Palaeolithic, Jurassic and Triassic times.

Humanity emerged at a relatively late point in the evolutionary chain, yet our race is still almost unimaginably old. In Wells's next scientific romance, Dr Moreau reminds the narrator that ‘“Man has been a hundred thousand [years] in the making”’ (Ch. 14). Actually, Moreau's figure is a gross underestimate, as the chronological horizon of The Time Machine hints. In The Outline of History, Wells was to put the emergence of the subhuman pithecanthropus erectus at six hundred thousand years ago, though since the advent of radio-carbon dating this has been increased to 1.8 million years.¹¹ In September 1994 reports appeared of the discovery of a fruit-eating humanoid creature (possibly analogous to the Eloi on the evolutionary scale) said to be 4.4 million years old.

Before The Time Machine Wells had implied a possible chronology for future evolution in ‘The Man of the Year Million’. Then, in a discussion of ‘The Rate of Change in Species’ (December 1894), he outlined the considerations that may have led him to lengthen the Time Traveller's journey from the ten thousand years of the National Observer version to eighty times as long. Wells claimed it was a little-noticed biological fact that the rate of possible change was governed by the gap between generations, and hence by the average age of maturity in a species. Evolution by natural selection—the strictly Darwinian model to which Wells and Huxley adhered—could not have brought about significant changes within the human species within recorded history, so that any such changes must be cultural, not natural in origin. Wells was determined to show the results of hypothetical natural evolution, not of artificial or eugenic processes in The Time Machine. The Traveller's voyage through the best part of a million years thus reflects both the probable age of the human species, in the understanding of Wells's contemporaries, and the minimum time needed for natural selection to produce new degenerate beings descended from present-day humanity.

The time-horizon of Wells's story is also affected by contemporary physical predictions of the future of the solar system. The Traveller reaches a point where not only humanity, but the sun's heat itself is manifestly on the wane. If the story of evolution pointed to the plasticity of biological species, Lord Kelvin's Laws of Thermodynamics portrayed the universe as a finite enclosure in which energy was limited. As a student, Wells had once engaged in a spoof demonstration of a perpetual motion machine (powered by a concealed electromagnet)¹²—a thermodynamic impossibility not unlike a time machine, since both depend on the ability to bypass the normal framework of what, in a lost article, he had called the ‘Universe Rigid’.¹³ The Second Law of Thermodynamics with its statement that energy always tends to disperse made it clear that the sun and other stars must eventually cool and burn out. The Time Machine reflects this entropic process, as well as Sir George Darwin's calculations of the effects of tidal drag on the earth's motion. Later in his life, however, Wells readily admitted that his astronomical predictions had been too gloomy.¹⁴ The study of radioactivity had revealed that the source of the sun's heat was thermonuclear fusion rather than combustion; the sun was not a coal fire, so to speak, but a nuclear reactor. The predicted life of the solar system increased from the implied timescale of the ‘Further Vision’ to ten thousand million years, or perhaps a million million years.¹⁵

These are unimaginable and almost meaningless expanses of time, yet paradoxically The Time Machine renders a thirty million-year future thinkable. That is the ‘virtual reality’ effect of the story's mythical, apocalyptic hold over the reader. To ask how Wells manages it is to come up against the truism that our only models for imagining the future derive from our knowledge and understanding of the past. He could write of travelling one million or thirty million years ahead only in the light of the geologists' consensus that the earth was already much older than that, though precisely how much older was a matter of conjecture. Kelvin had estimated that the age of the oldest rocks was as little as twenty-five million years, while T. H. Huxley guessed at four hundred million. Summing up the controversy in The Outline of History, Wells is unable to arbitrate between these two. Reusing one of his favourite metaphors, he adds that ‘Not only is Space from the point of view of life and humanity empty, but Time is empty also. Life is like a little glow, scarcely kindled yet, in these void immensities’ (p. 8). In The Time Machine he had slightly prolonged that little glow.

III

Wells's use of geological chronology does not explain how he was able to depict the sub-civilisation of the Eloi and Morlocks at a precise date in the future, given in the final version as 802,701. Readers have often wondered why he settled on this curious figure. We may approach an answer by looking more closely at the sensations of time-travelling described in the story. Riding into the future, the Traveller observes the speeding-up of natural phenomena: the alternation of night and day until the two are indistinguishable, the flickering change of the seasons, the swift growth and disappearance of trees. This part of his narrative, which has the vertiginous effect of a constantly accelerating film, may make us wonder how fast he is travelling and how ‘long’ his journey takes. At one point he mentions a speed of more than a year a minute, but if this were his average velocity it would take nearly eighteen months to reach 802,701. Travelling more rapidly later in the story, he approaches the ‘Further Vision’ at a speed of something like fifty years per second; but, in fact, five hundred years per second would be a more plausible average speed.¹⁶ At that rate he could have reached the age of the Eloi and Morlocks in less than half an hour.

During his voyage he sees signs of changing civilisations as well as changing natural phenomena. ‘“I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams”’, he reports (§3). How often did this happen? ‘“I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist”’. There would have been no need to go forward three-quarters of a million years in order to see the architecture of successive human civilisations. Our knowledge of past history suggests that 800 years might have been enough. Even given vastly more durable building materials, 8000 years would have been amply sufficient. Assuming some degree of continuity in human civilisation, changes in architecture would normally take place far more frequently than the natural climatic changes that the Traveller also observes—‘“I saw a richer green flow up the hillside, and remain there without any wintry intermission”’ (§3)—let alone the species modifications that have produced the Eloi and Morlocks.

The order of the figures in 802,701 suggests a suitably entropic and cyclical ‘running-down’ number.¹⁷ We can explain how Wells may have arrived at it, however, by the supposition that The Time Machine embodies not one future timescale but two. The two scales, those of historical time measured by the rise and fall of cultures and civilisations, and of biological time measured by the evolution and devolution of the species, are superimposed upon one another. To begin with, I suggest that Wells must have projected the invention of the Time Machine forward to the beginning of the twentieth century, so that the dinner party at Richmond may be imagined as taking place in 1901. (Analogously, the events of The War of the Worlds—which Wells began writing immediately after The Time Machine was published—also take place ‘early in the twentieth century’ (I,1).) He had already used the early twentieth century as baseline in ‘The Chronic Argonauts,’ where the furthest point that we know to have been reached is the years 17,901-02: that is, a voyage of 16,000 years. In The Time Machine the world of the Eloi and Morlocks is located not 16,000 but 800,800 years after 1901—a significantly bifurcated number. The 800 years, enough to allow for the rise and fall of a civilisation or two in historical time, take us to 2701. To this figure Wells added a further 800,000 (that is, the best part of a million years) of evolutionary time. Supposing the number 802,701 to have been determined by a process such as this, its poetic appeal as a symbol of entropy would have ensured its adoption. Its significance—to be further explored in Chapter Five below—is that The Time Machine is plotted with both timescales, the evolutionary and the historiographic, in mind, though these are incompatible in certain respects. Without the 800-year timescale we cannot easily explain such crucial details as the survival of unmistakably classical forms of architecture into the far future, creating an essentially familiar landscape dominated by the Sphinx and surrounded by ruined palaces and gardens.

IV

The Sphinx and the decaying palaces are central to the symbolism of the story. The Sphinx is the symbol of foreboding and prophecy. The palaces and gardens suggest the landscape of neoclassical paintings and country houses, while alluding to a line of English utopian romances which would have been fresh in the minds of Wells's first readers: Richard Jefferies' After London (1885), W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age (1887), and, above all, William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890). Morris's death in 1896 drew an affectionate if patronising acknowledgment from Wells in the Saturday Review—‘His dreamland was no futurity, but an illuminated past’, Wells wrote¹⁸—but a more wholehearted tribute, and one which hints at the strong connections between News from Nowhere and The Time Machine, appears at the beginning of A Modern Utopia:

Were we free to have our untrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to his Nowhere, we should change the nature of man and the nature of things together; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble, perfect … in a world as good in its essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as the world before the Fall. But that golden age, that perfect world, comes out into the possibilities of space and time. In space and time the pervading Will to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions.¹⁹

Chapter Five of The Time Machine in the first edition is titled ‘In the Golden Age’. In Wells's vision, the ‘possibilities of space and time’ are not unlimited. In space and time what appears to be a Morrisian utopia can only be fatally flawed; no earthly paradise of this sort is possible. The words Eloi and Morlocks signify angels and devils, and the two races, the products of natural selection, are held together in a predatory and symbiotic relationship—a ‘perpetuity of aggressions’ without which neither could flourish.

The Time Machine is both an explicitly anti-utopian text, and one which deliberately recalls News from Nowhere at a number of points. Morris's pastoral, idyllic society is centred on Hammersmith in West London, while the society of the Eloi is centred two or three miles upstream at Richmond. Both are placed in a lush parkland replacing the nineteenth-century industrial and suburban sprawl beside the River Thames. The Eloi, like the inhabitants of Nowhere and of most other contemporary socialist utopias, eat together in communal dining halls. William Guest, Morris's ‘time traveller’, learns about the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century England from an old man at the British Museum, while Wells's Traveller journeys to the Palace of Green Porcelain, an abandoned museum of the arts and sciences modelled on the Crystal Palace and the South Kensington Museum.²⁰ On the evening of his first day with the Eloi, the Traveller climbs to a hilltop, surveys the countryside and exclaims ‘“Communism”’ (§4) to himself. The Communism he has in mind must be the pastoral utopia of Morris and Thomas More, rather than the revolutionary industrial society of Marx and Saint-Simon.

On two occasions the Time Traveller mocks at the artificiality of utopian narratives, as if to establish the superior authenticity of his own story. A ‘“real traveller”’, he protests, has no access to the vast amount of detail about buildings and social arrangements to be found in these books (§5). He has ‘“no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books”’ (§5); instead, he has to work everything out for himself by trial and error. The emphasis is not on the exposition of a superior utopian philosophy but on the Traveller's own powers of observation and his habits of deductive and inductive reasoning. In terms of narrative structure as well as of evolutionary possibility, Wells claims to present a less self-indulgent, more realistic vision than Morris and his tradition could offer—as if the world of 802,701 were somehow less of a wish-fulfilment fantasy than Morris's Nowhere. The Time Traveller shows himself in the opening chapters to be a master of several sciences. He is a brilliant inventor and engineer, who is able by his own efforts to test the practical consequences of his theoretical discoveries in four-dimensional geometry.²¹ He understands the principles of biology and psychology, and in studying the Eloi and Morlocks without the benefit of a guide he finds himself in the position of an anthropologist and ethnographer. Like an enthnographer in the field, he learns the language of his hosts and attempts to question them about ‘taboo’ topics such as the mysterious wells dotted across the countryside. At each stage, but always aware that he may lack some crucial information, he attempts to theorise his findings.²² In a characteristic Wellsian touch, he reverses the usual relations between a nineteenth-century anthropologist and his subject-matter, comparing his account of the Eloi to the ‘“tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe”’—though he adds that the negro would find plenty of willing informants, and in any case, ‘“think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age!”’ (§5).

Admittedly, the Traveller often fails to live up to his ideal of scientific detachment. Unlike the utopias against which he is reacting, Wells's tale is a violent adventure story as well as something resembling a fieldwork report. The Traveller's behaviour in moments of crisis is typically hysterical, panic-stricken, negligent and, when he confronts the Morlocks, ruthless and desperate. In all this he embodies what Wells in A Modern Utopia was to call the Will to Live. Equally, the bloodthirstiness of Wells's anti-utopian realism invites the rejoinder that William Morris made in his review of Edward Bellamy's urban, collectivist utopia Looking Backward: ‘The only safe way of reading a utopia is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author’.²³The Time Machine debunks the utopian dream (a dream that would be reinstated in many of Wells's later works) en route to the discovery that the human species is engaged in a brutal struggle for survival which, in the long run, it cannot win—since all terrestrial life is doomed to extinction. Wells enables his Time Traveller to circumvent his own natural death—to cheat death, so to speak—only to inflict violent death on some of humanity's remote descendants, before going on to witness the collective death of the species and the environment that has sustained it.

In speaking of authorial temperament, Morris was invoking one of the principal categories of late nineteenth-century literary theory. He would have been aware of the widespread reaction against the claims to scientific objectivity made by the realist and naturalist movements; every work of art, it was argued, betrayed the imprint of its maker's personality.²⁴ To modern readers, once we have acknowledged the complexity and uniqueness of a text like The Time Machine, such appeals to personality and temperament have come to seem tautologous rather than illuminating. Nevertheless, we may say that when Wells's artistic imagination was at its most vivid, in the early scientific romances, it was also at its most violent. Ten years after the searing anti-utopianism of these books, he was ready to present his own, comparatively pacific vision of A Modern Utopia. As it happens, this apparent change of heart runs parallel with a dramatic improvement in his medical condition.

The cannibalistic Morlocks, the bloodsucking Martians and the bath of pain in which the vivisectionist Dr Moreau transforms wild animals into sham human beings were all conceived during the years in which Wells himself was often bedridden and spitting blood. Since tuberculosis had been (wrongly) diagnosed, it is significant that the first of the Eloi whom the Time Traveller meets face to face has the ‘“hectic beauty”’ of a ‘“consumptive”’ (§3). The Traveller feels intensely for this society of doomed consumptives, and, once he is armed with a rusty iron bar, he does his best to wreak havoc among the species that lives off them. Wells suffered a final serious relapse in 1898, after the completion of his early romances. He moved to the south coast and commissioned the architect Charles Voysey to build him a house on the cliffs at Sandgate, designed to accommodate the wheelchair to which he soon expected to be confined. But this soon became irrelevant to the needs of its resilient and indeed hyperactive owner.

As his self-identification with the consumptive Eloi came to seem groundless, so did the calculations of planetary cooling reflected in both The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds lose their sway over contemporary scientific opinion. In The Interpretation of Radium (1908)—the book which led Wells to envisage the possibility of atomic warfare—Frederick Soddy wrote that ‘Our outlook on the physical universe has been permanently altered. We are no longer the inhabitants of a universe slowly dying from the physical exhaustion of its energy, but of a universe which has in the internal energy of its material components the means to rejuvenate itself perennially over immense periods of time’.²⁵ Wells's switch shortly before the First World War from entropic pessimism to a position much closer to Soddy's thermonuclear optimism followed his discovery of the internal energy and potential for self-renewal of his own body, so that he was doubly removed from the outlook of the author of The Time Machine.

V

However anti-utopian its outcome, the Time Traveller's voyage confirms that a kind of utopia had been achieved in the ‘nearer ages’, when, for example, disease had been stamped out, the processes of natural decay slowed if not halted, and population growth brought under control. Nature had been subjugated—for a time (§4). There emerged the monumental civilisation whose buildings and landscapes still dominated the age of the Eloi and Morlocks. It is the Traveller's fate to chart the seemingly inevitable decline that followed once the human species had reached its zenith, or what the narrator terms the ‘manhood of the race’ (Epilogue). Pursuing Wells's deterministic hypothesis of a necessary downward curve in human fortunes, he is a symbolic figure embarking on the central quest of the scientific romance, the journey towards, and beyond, the ‘last man’.²⁶

The Time Traveller is a variant on the heroes of nineteenth-century Gothic and romantic melodrama. He arrives in the future in the midst of a thunderstorm, but when he discovers that the Morlocks have removed his machine his elation gives way to a frenzy of despair. His violent emotionalism is reminiscent of Frankenstein—a literary model which Wells acknowledged²⁷—and, since Mary Shelley's romance is subtitled The Modern Prometheus in allusion to Prometheus's legendary role as the creator of humanity, it is interesting that the Time Traveller has a still better claim to Promethean ancestry. The name Prometheus means ‘forethought’.²⁸ Just as Prometheus was one of the Titans, the Traveller is identified with the race of ‘giants’ who preceded the Eloi and Morlocks and built the great palaces. The Eloi recognise his semi-divine status when they ask, at the moment of his arrival, if he has come from the sun (p. 39). He brings a box of matches with him, and when they run out he steals another box from the Palace of Green Porcelain. Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and brought it down to earth as a gift concealed in a stalk of fennel, to show his friendship for suffering humanity. But neither the frugivorous Eloi nor the half-blind Morlocks are fit recipients for the gift of fire. Future humanity has degenerated so much that the Traveller's matches are used only as purposeless toys, or in self-defence against the Morlocks. In the end his playing with fire causes reckless destruction including, it would seem, the death of Weena who is the one friend he has made in the new world.

Pursuing the imaginative logic of the Time Traveller's identification with Prometheus, we can come to a possible solution to the mystery of his disappearance on his second voyage. Can it be that—punished for his daring in setting out to discover the future in defiance of the gods—his fate is to remain bound to his machine, condemned to perpetual time-travelling just as Prometheus was bound to a rock and condemned to perpetual torture? All that we know is that the narrator's question, ‘Will he ever return?’, must be answered in the negative. A life of torture, too, was the fate of another famous figure of Greek legend, with whom the Traveller must also be identified: Oedipus, who answered the riddle of the Sphinx, which was the riddle of human life. What the Traveller instinctively fears as he looks into the Sphinx's sightless eyes is the death of humanity and his own inability to survive in a post-human world: ‘“I might seem some old-world savage animal … a foul creature to be incontinently slain”’ (§3). But he does not flinch from his self-appointed mission of traversing the valley of the shadow of death and reporting the Shape of Things to Come to the people of his own time: ‘“It is how the thing shaped itself to me, and as that I give it to you”’ (§10).

Notes

1. Robert M. Philmus, ‘The Logic of “Prophecy” in The Time Machine’ in Bernard Bergonzi, ed., H. G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 67-68.

2. See, for example, The Time Machine, §§ 3 and 4; ‘How I Died’, p. 182.

3. See Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, The Time Traveller: The Life of H. G. Wells (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), especially pp. 24, 121-24.

4. Israel Zangwill, ‘Without Prejudice’, reprinted in Patrick Parrinder, ed., H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, pp. 40-42.

5. Recent discussions of this question include those by Roslynn D. Haynes in H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), p. 58, and by Harry M. Geduld in The Definitive ‘Time Machine’: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells's Scientific Romance, ed. Geduld (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 96-97.

6. The Definitive ‘Time Machine’, p. 118.

7. See ibid., p. 120, n. 6.

8. Geoffrey West, H. G. Wells: A Sketch for a Portrait, pp. 288-94.

9. ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ and the ‘National Observer Time Machine’ are reprinted in The Definitive ‘Time Machine’, pp. 135-52 and 154-74 respectively.

10. The Definitive ‘Time Machine’, p. 145.

11. Henry Gee, ‘What's our line?’, London Review of Books, 16:2 (27 January 1994), p. 19.

12. Geoffrey West, H. G. Wells: A Sketch for a Portrait, p. 61.

13. See H. G. Wells, ‘Preface’, The Time Machine (New York: Random House, 1931), p. ix.

14. Ibid., pp. ix-x.

15. See H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future, p. 17, n. 6.

16. ‘Fifty years per second’, because the dials of the Time Machine are calibrated in days, thousands of days, millions of days, and thousands of millions, and the Traveler reports that the ‘thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hands of a watch’ (§11). If one complete revolution of the ‘thousands’ dial represents a million days, he is covering a million days a minute, or 46 years per second—but it would still take more than a week to traverse 30 million years. We may, of course, find the references to the dials highly implausible, especially as the time to be measured is not linear. If the dials measure terrestrial days, one must wonder how they cope with or allow for the slowing down of the terrestrial day to the point where a single solar revolution ‘seemed to stretch through centuries’ (§11)!

17. Cf. William Bellamy, The Novels of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy 1890-1910 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 221.

18. H. G. Wells, ‘The Well at the World's End’, in H. G. Wells's Literary Criticism, p. 112.

19. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), p. 7. Subsequent page references in text.

20. This was the nineteenth-century name for what are now four separate museums clustered together in South Kensington: the Geological Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is to this Museum (not the district of London in which it is located) to which the Time Traveller refers when he describes the Palace of Green Porcelain as a ‘“latter-day South Kensington”’ (§8).

21. The Time Traveller's discovery is that the fourth dimension is Time. In this he anticipates Einstein. The widespread popular view of the fourth dimension in the late nineteenth century was of an extra dimension of space, corresponding to the ‘spirit world’ and frequented by ghosts. See Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and The Tenth Dimension (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), especially p. 84.

22. On two occasions his explanations make use of the contemporary anthropological concept of ‘“savage survivals”’ (§4).

23. William Morris, ‘Looking Backward’, Commonweal (22 June 1889), p. 194.

24. One influential expression of this view was Henry James's essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884). See Henry James, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Morris Shapira (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 66.

25. Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium: Being the Substance of Six Free Popular Experimental Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 3rd edn. (London: Murray, 1912), p. 248.

26. On ‘last man’ fictions see Patrick Parrinder, ‘From Mary Shelley to The War of the Worlds; The Thames Valley Catastrophe’, in David Seed, ed., Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), pp. 58-74.

27. See H. G. Wells, preface to The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells (1933), reprinted in H. G. Wells's Literary Criticism, pp. 240, 241. Subsequent page references in text.

28. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), I, p. 148.