The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells
Summary
An unnamed Victorian inventor known only as the Time Traveller builds a machine that carries him forward to the year 802,701, where he finds humanity split into two descendant species living out the far end of an evolutionary story he only gradually pieces together. Above ground live the Eloi, small, beautiful, and utterly incurious people who spend their days in idle comfort; below live the pale, light shy Morlocks, who tend ancient machinery in darkness and, the Traveller discovers with real horror, feed on the Eloi they nominally serve. He rescues an Eloi woman named Weena from drowning and grows genuinely attached to her, but she dies in a forest fire the Traveller sets to fend off a Morlock ambush, and grief and the immediate danger together drive him back to his machine before he can properly mourn her. Rather than returning home at once, he pushes the machine millions of years further forward still, past the end of humanity entirely, to a dying beach beneath a swollen red sun where the last crawling life on Earth waits out the planet's final hours. He returns to his own time just three hours after he left, tells his skeptical dinner guests the whole story, and sets out again with the machine to gather proof; the narrator, a guest at that dinner, waits three years for his return and closes the book still not knowing what became of him.
Wells builds the whole novel as an argument disguised as an adventure, extending the class divide of his own late Victorian England, the idle wealthy above and the laboring poor kept out of sight below, forward into an evolutionary destiny neither group chose or can escape. It reads short and fast, more scientific romance than conventional novel, but the bleakness underneath the adventure trappings is entirely deliberate rather than incidental to the plot.
Wells received one hundred pounds for the magazine serialization rights, and both 1895 book editions dropped a passage of roughly a thousand words that had opened one chapter of the New Review serial, later published separately as The Grey Man and as The Final Men.
Historical Context & Significance
The New Review serialized The Time Machine from January to May 1895 after an earlier partial version had run in the National Observer the previous year, and Henry Holt and Company published the American book edition on 7 May 1895, with William Heinemann's British edition following three weeks later, Wells's first novel. The writer Israel Zangwill complained in 1895 that the novel dwelt too much on present day discontents rather than pure invention, a charge Wells later accepted outright, calling the book consciously grim and an assault on human self satisfaction.
The novel effectively founded the modern time travel story and coined the very term time machine, now universal shorthand for the device regardless of who invents it in a given story. It has drawn two feature film adaptations, in 1960 and 2002, along with television versions, radio dramas, and a long line of sequels written by other authors, Stephen Baxter's authorized The Time Ships among them, and critics including Marina Warner have noted how far its portrait of repressed, divided psychology anticipated ideas Sigmund Freud would only later make famous.