SOURCE: Niederland, William G. “The Birth of H. G. Wells's Time Machine.” American Imago 35, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1978): 106-12.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a speech in 1976, Niederland considers the influence of Wells's childhood and personal experiences on The Time Machine.]

One of the most influential writers in English of the early twentieth century, H. G. Wells's prodigious output—more than 150 books, as well as countless articles, reviews, and short stories—has remained psychologically unexplored. Many of Wells's works repeat certain themes of his own life and development and often project his personal experiences and tribulations onto mankind and its prognosticated future. The study of these themes in one of his most famous novels has led me to certain inferential conclusions.

Born in 1866, the year following the end of the American Civil War, he grew up at the height of the Victorian era, and lived through two world wars and the beginning of the atomic age. He died in 1946, one year after the bombing of Hiroshima.

His artistic career, which started in late adolescence, began with the writing of The Time Machine, a literary masterpiece that propelled him—a one-time apprentice in a cramped drapery store, and the son of poor parents, members of the British servant class—to world fame. The Time Machine was a most unusual tale, a pioneering venture into the realm of what is now termed science fiction.

In this brief communication, I shall attempt to present an outline of the main themes, influences, and fantasies which went into the creation of The Time Machine.

The machine is an ingenious device which enables its inventor, “the Time Traveler,” to leave the present and travel in a few moments into the future. During the course of the trip, he witnesses the rise and fall of civilizations through various ages of human development. The Time Traveler and his machine finally come to rest in the year 802,701 A.D., when he encounters the humans of that period and finds them divided into two groups, the “Elois” and the “Morlocks.”

Before going into this neatly split stage of humanity in the year 802,701, I wish to acquaint you with the Time Traveler's discussion, prior to his departure, with a number of invited guests, among them a medical man and a psychologist. This discussion forms the introduction to the story: “Clearly,” the Time Traveler explains, “any real body must have extension in four directions; it must have length, breadth, thickness, and duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh … we are inclined to overlook this. … There are really four dimensions, three which we call planes of space, and the fourth, time” (italics added). Shortly thereafter, the Time Traveler takes off on his journey into the future.

A closer look at Wells's physical and mental condition at the time he began work on The Time Machine is required in order to understand his emphasis on “body” and “infirmity of the flesh,” and the dimension of time. The first draft of The Time Machine goes back to 1886-87. Then titled “The Chronic Argonauts,” it gives the Time Traveler's name as “Nebo-gipfel,” i. e., the man on the top of Mount Nebo. After numerous revisions prior to its publication in 1895, the final version omits the name and the Time Traveler becomes nameless. Yet his original, first-draft name is not without significance. Mount Nebo is part of the mountain range overlooking the land of Moab, northeast of the Dead Sea. It was from this summit that Moses, unable to enter the Promised Land, was allowed to see it before his death. The pertinent text in the Bible, a book which Wells's mother, a strictly religious and puritanical woman, was fond of quoting regularly, reads in part: “And Moses went up to Mount Nebo … and the Lord showed him all the land … there, in the land of Moab, Moses, the servant of the Lord, died …”, in full view of the Promised Land.

The Bible was the most important treasure in the early Wells's household. In 1939, Wells wrote a personal letter of congratulation to Freud on the appearance of Moses and Monotheism, which he described as “so fascinating that I did not get to bed until one” in the morning. In his note to Freud, he added pertinent comments on Moses which reveal his thorough knowledge of the biblical text (Jones, Life of Freud, Vol. III).

A few months before he began work on The Time Machine, Wells fell ill with pulmonary tuberculosis—frequently a fatal disease in those days—from which he suffered for approximately ten years. In his autobiography (1934), he writes about the early stages of the illness, during which he composed (or should I say, invented?) the essential parts of The Time Machine:

Apart from general fear of disease, disappointment and frustration which weighed so heavily upon my imagination during my consumptive phase, there were unpleasant minor fears and anxieties which I still recall acutely. Every time I coughed and particularly if I had a bout of coughing, there was the dread of tasting the peculiar tang of blood. And I remember as though it happened only last night, the little tickle and trickle of blood in the lungs that precede a real hemorrhage. Don't cough too soon? Don't cough too much? There was always the question how big the flow was to be, how long would it go on, and what was to be the end of it this time … dreading even to breathe. …

(Italics added)

I leave open the question whether a patient suffering from tuberculosis can actually perceive the “tickle and trickle of blood” in a pulmonary cavity, as Wells records. Perhaps we have here the familiar oversensitivity to internal stimuli which Greenacre (1957)¹ mentions as an important component of a creative individual's heightened perceptivity.

Wells's medical history preceding the outbreak of tuberculosis includes a ruptured kidney, likewise accompanied by massive hemorrhage, and a fractured leg at age seven, i. e., bodily injuries which had immobilized him for varying periods of time. Throughout childhood, puberty, and postpuberty, he had suffered from serious undernourishment, frequent periods of starvation, and lack of maternal care. He remained an underfed, undersized, sickly looking individual until his thirties, later becoming a somewhat plump, short man of “commonplace appearance.” He was a “replacement child,” to use Pollock's apt wording. Two years before his birth, a sister, Fanny, had died of acute appendicitis. This sister had been mother's favorite, “a very bright, precocious, and fragile little girl … that had delighted mother's heart,” according to Wells's description.

After the death of her only daughter Fanny, the mother had been in a state of serious depression not alleviated by the birth of H. G., the youngest, now, of three brothers. She remained pious, somber, and depressed throughout the rest of her life. Hence, apparently, the inadequate mothering that Wells experienced as a child (his early years were almost completely solitary [Dickson, 1969]²); and this may have led to his later difficulties with women (broken marriages, unsatisfactory sexual experiences, etc.).

As for leg fracture at age seven, he consciously, if somewhat facetiously, later attributed his literary career to “two broken legs” which, in his words, altered the course of his life: the first, his own, introduced him to the delights of reading and studying, and the second, his father's, who became permanently lame after a leg fracture, when H. G. was eleven, caused the bankruptcy of the unsuccessful paternal crockery business. The father's partial crippling and debasement, his role as a mutilated (castrated) father figure, can be followed through many pages of Wells's autobiography and other works, including the final paragraph of The Time Machine, where the medical man is declared dead, the psychologist is paralyzed, and the remaining dramatis personae, originally present in the Time Traveler's home, “have as completely dropped out of existence as if they, too, had travelled off. …”

To return to the Time Traveler's experiences during his journey into the future, he encounters a strange type of mankind: the Elois and the Morlocks. The former are gentle, infantile, indescribably happy yet frail people who know nothing about art, literature, or work; they are four feet high, graceful and apparently sexless, that is, infants who live a playful existence during the day, though preyed upon by the beastly Morlocks as soon as daylight vanishes. The latter emerge from subterranean wells at night, chase after the sleeping Elois, and feed on them. The world is peopled by cannibalistic devourers, the Morlocks, and those who are devoured, the Elois. In other words, the Time Traveler finds in the year 802,701 A.D. a world of pregenital regression to oral and oral-sadistic levels. Apart from fossils of bygone civilizations, nothing else exists. “In thousands of generations,” Wells writes, man has undergone a process of “human decay” and has regressed to “the childish simplicity of the little people” who are “mere fatted cattle” for cannibalistic, inhuman brutes.

There is a touching interlude in the story when the Time Traveler rescues a helpless young Eloi woman from drowning, and the rescued girl, Weena, clings to him in gratitude, as if she wished to offer herself to him in womanly love and affection. But this also ends soon, when they are surrounded by murderous Morlocks in a dark forest. She succumbs helplessly to the onslaught of the brutal creatures during a night filled with tenderness on the one hand, and relentless attack by the voracious Morlocks on the other. It is a nocturnal scene of utter distress, desolation, and fear. The girl Weena and the Elois in general appear to be modeled on the description of Wells's mother forever lamenting the loss of his fragile little sister Fanny.

As I have shown in previous papers concerning the effect of physical conditions (and their mental representations) on the creative process (1965, 1967, 1973)³, the regression in the service of the ego (Kris, 1952)⁴ should be extended—in my opinion—to the problem of ego survival. Under the spur of dreaded dissolution, the ego's ability to achieve what had previously been impossible appears to acquire a creative momentum of great intensity in gifted individuals. After a massive pulmonary hemorrhage, Wells wrote: “I must say this for chest diseases … they clear the mind like strong tea”; and again: “I have been dying for nearly two-thirds of a year … and I have died enough. I stopped dying then and there … my real writing began” (italics mine). In a letter of a much later date, Wells spoke of his creativeness as “a race against death,” alluding to the antinomy between creativity and death, viewing the former as an effort to “stave off” the latter.

More specifically, for Wells, tuberculosis—a matter of life and death in his day—involved the issue of time, as the Time Traveler so clearly expounded at the beginning of the tale. What had seemed an imminent threat of death became for Wells the start of a new life (rebirth). Thus, with respect to the creation of The Time Machine, the following restitutional steps can be discerned:

1. A forward leap in time, which denies the present and carries the author into a fantasied futuristic world, away from illness and the threat of death.
2. What purports to be a flight into future is, in reality, an unconscious regression to the fantasied perfect state prior to the multiple disabilities of the past and present (tuberculosis, ruptured kidney, early leg fracture, etc.).
3. The regression leads to narcissistic and oral levels as personified on the one hand by the narcissistically tinged lives of the Elois and the oral-sadistic, overtly cannibalistic Morlocks; it is they who raise the Elois like sheep, feed them, clothe them, and each night take some away and devour them. The dangers of the night had for the tubercular Wells a special meaning, as can be found in other writings by him, for instance: “Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me … suddenly the night became terrible. I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. …”
4. As a consequence, the defensive-regressive mechanisms—once set in motion by the time voyager—take their full course to reach the protective and life-giving, i. e., birth-giving, mother. Fusing and identifying with her, the author is himself able to give birth to a new creation. At the same time the infantile omnipotence, best illustrated by the Time Traveler's capacity to travel forward and backward as and when he wishes, is regained in full in an attempt to master the misery and dread of the present through the control of time and duration.

An analytic inquiry into the symbolic meaning of the Time Traveler's landing time supports the foregoing interpretations. The then desperately ill Wells chose as his landing time the year:

802701 A.D.

Thus he expanded the time and created a feeling of infinite time in the following way—unconsciously, I tentatively suggest:

The first part of the year chosen by the author symbolizes the feeding mother in actu, as it were: the double 0 in the number 8, the central 0 and the 2—all breasts, i. e., mother; and the second part of the figure is likewise characterized, in addition to the phallic numbers 7 and 1 (father), by the maternal 0 in the center. In a letter written much later to a woman then very close to him, Rebecca West, Wells said that much of his life and work was “a race against death,” a statement which in my opinion confirms the foregoing points. But the Time Traveler, in his ingenious vehicle (mother), had all the time in the world, of course, like an infant at mother's breast—in timeless fusion with the early mother.

Thus, Wells wove the story of his disease and early struggle with death into the haunting chapters of the novel which, incidentally, contains several direct references to tuberculosis and illness. The first parts of the book were composed by him at the onset, the later parts and revisions at the end of his disease. Thus the birth of H. G. Wells's first—and, many believe, his most enduring—masterpiece, The Time Machine.

Notes

1. Greenacre, P. (1957): The Childhood of the Artist. Psa. Study of the Child, XII, 9-36.

2. Dickson, L. (1969): H. G. Wells—His Turbulent Life and Times. New York, Atheneum, 1969.

3. Niederland, W. G. (1965): Narcissistic Ego Impairment in Patients with Early Physical Malformations. Psa. Study of the Child, XX, 518-533.

   ———. (1967): Clinical Aspects of Creativity. American Imago, XXIV, 6-34.

   ———. (1973): Psychoanalytic Concepts of Creativity and Aging. J. Geriatric Psychiatry, VI, 160-168.

4. Kris, E. (1952): Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York, Internat. Univ. Press, 1952.