The Time Machine was written by H.G. Wells and first appeared in New Review (Jan-May 1895). Although Wells (1866-1946) is known today primarily for his science fiction, during his lifetime he was one of the most prolific, versatile, and popular writers in the English language. The Time Machine is a neat little classic, Wells' first great novel and still a major work in the science fiction canon.

The Time Machine is about an unnamed Time Traveller, a scientist who invents a machine for traveling through time. His friends disagree with his theory that time travel is possible, but he ignores them and goes ahead with his planned trip. He travels ahead in time, to the year 802,701, and finds the Earth inhabited by two species, both descendants of homo sapiens. The first species is the Eloi, a race of innocent naïfs. They are childlike in appearance, personality, and intellectual capabilities. The Eloi live above ground, are frugivorous and fear the dark. The second species is the Morlocks. They appear to be degenerate apes and live underground. They are cruel cannibals, feeding on the Eloi, but the Morlocks also operate the machinery which makes the Eloi's clothing and shoes. The Traveller stays with the Eloi for eight days, during which time he saves the life of Weena, one of the Eloi, who becomes devoted to him. Unfortunately, the seventh night is the dark of the moon. The Morlocks, who are sensitive to the light and avoid venturing above ground during the day and while the moon shines, attack the Eloi and the Traveller. Weena is among the captured by the Morlocks. The Traveller sadly goes forward in time after recovering the Time Machine; it had been taken by the Morlocks, but after he kills several they return it to him. The Traveller goes to a time many hundreds of thousands of years in the future, when all human life is gone and only creepy huge crab things remain. Then the Traveller leaps forward thirty million years, to an Earth on which life has almost completely died out. Sick with what he has seen, the Time Traveller returns home, tells his friends his story (they disbelieve him, but he has proof: the flowers which Weena gave him), then packs for a longer expedition and leaves. The story ends with the Traveller having been gone for three years.

As with all of Wells' best work, The Time Machine is a combination of great entertainment, interesting ideas, and ideology. As entertainment the novel works well, and if the Traveller's relationship with Weena is hardly the love story later movie versions of the book have made it, the novel has enough other interesting and enjoyable moments. Wells' ideas are quite satisfying. Although they are clichéd now, the concepts of traveling through time, of future humanity developing into separate species, and of traveling to the earth's final days are developed simply, clearly, and effectively in this, one of their first fictional renditions. Wells’ style–straightforward narration coupled with apt description–grounds the novel well, so that the fantastic elements becomes easier for the reader to accept. And Wells' ideology, while offensive to the conservative Victorians of Wells’ day, who objected to his conclusions, is logical (if not agreeable) to the modern reader. Wells ignores Judeo-Christian ideology and portrays humanity not as the end result of evolution but as just another point on the evolutionary line. Wells shows an earth which is not just post-homo sapiens (the 802,701 section), but which is post-life itself (30 million C.E.). Wells' essentially entropic message–things fall apart, the center cannot hold, life degenerates and does not find a way–is, like his evolutionary message, logical if not pleasant to our vanity, and is a Wellsian response to the end-of-the-world/apocalyptic fad in 1890s British fiction. And Wells adroitly gives examples of three different kinds of time–historical (the absurdly specific date of 802,701), evolutionary (the section with the crab creatures), and astronomic (30 million C.E.)–without being clumsy about it.

Finally, there are the Eloi and the Morlocks. Certain aspects of the Eloi and the Morlocks are usually overlooked or not commented upon. Both the Eloi and the Morlocks are smaller than the Traveller himself. Although readers are conditioned by film and comic book versions of The Time Machine to think of the Morlocks as hulking brutes, the Traveller describes them in this way:

a queer little ape-like figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner...it was a dull white, and had strange large greyish red eyes; also that there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back. But, as I say, it went too fast for me to see distinctly. I cannot even say whether it ran on all fours, or only with its forearms held very low.¹

The diminished size of both the Eloi and the Morlocks is another sign of their degeneration, like the Eloi's lack of intellectual capacity and the Morlocks' cannibalism. As for the Eloi, while the usual description of them is “childlike,” “animal-like” is perhaps closer to the mark. When Weena almost drowns, the Eloi do not react in a human way: "It will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange want of ideas of these people, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly, crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes."²

That is not the behavior of children or the child-like. That is the behavior of animals, and not all animals, either, since there are a number of examples of animals of various species rescuing drowning members of their own species. The Eloi have a limited vocabulary and attention span and seem to have no conception of the past or future–they live perpetually in the present. Weena is pathetically devoted to the Traveller after he rescues her. These are the traits of animals as well as children, and “animal-like” is more apt than “childlike” when describing the Eloi.

The Time Traveller himself is a standard Victorian scientist/adventurer. He has contributed “seventeen papers on physical optics” to the Philosophical Transactions and kills several of the Morlocks in hand-to-hand combat. But emotionally he is something of a weak reed, running around “in a passion of fear,”³ hysterical and in a frenzy when he thinks the Time Machine has disappeared. Still, the Traveller, through his physical vitality and attitude toward manliness, represents an attempt to renew the flagging masculinity of the men of the British Empire (see: Fin-de-Siècle Unease):

Several critics have identified the closing decades of the nineteenth century as a period which witnessed a crisis of masculinity. This ‘crisis,’ however, occurred at a time when male authored fictions, in particular those under the broad heading of Romance, were undergoing something of a revival…it has been variously suggested that the rise of the romance genre was a reaction against high Victorian Realism, a response to fears surrounding the ‘feminization’ of the literary market place, or distaste for an emerging modernist trend towards a literature characterised by introspective analysis. What is important, however, is that Romance fiction became one of the primary vehicles for the expression of bourgeois masculinity at the fin de siècle. As two of the genre’s most famous proponents, H.G. Wells and R.L. Stevenson belong to a collection of late nineteenth century novelists, including Stoker, Haggard, Doyle, and Kipling, identified by Arata as writers who consistently ‘situate questions of “degeneration” […] within the context of fin de siècle imperial politics’ (Fictions, p. 80).12 Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of late Victorian male Romance is its dual engagement with imperial discourse and issues surrounding the redefinition of middle-class masculinity, for, as Andrew Smith has suggested, ‘in order to revitalise the nation it [first] becomes necessary to revitalise masculinity.’⁴

The Traveller, accomplished professionally and as mentioned physically, is intended to perform this revitalization, although the Eloi are so hapless—they do not even work for this food—that such a feat is ultimately not possible.

¹ H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1895), 108-109.

² Wells, The Time Machine, 99.

³ Wells, The Time Machine, 79.

⁴ Theresa Jamieson, “Working for the Empire: Professions of Masculinity in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Victorian Networks 1, no. 1 (Summer, 2009): 74-75.