The Time Machine

Did You Know?

• The deleted text was published elsewhere as 'The Final Men' (1940) and 'The Grey Man'.
• The scholarly journal The Wellsian has published around twenty articles on The Time Machine.

History

Wells first explored time travel in his college newspaper story "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888), which later became the basis for The Time Machine. He often mentioned planning to adapt this material for a Pall Mall Gazette article series, but instead, at editor W. E. Henley's request, he turned it into seven fictionalized essays for the National Observer, published anonymously from March to June 1894. The series stopped when Henley left the paper. Encouraged by Henley, Wells kept working on the story, and when Henley became editor of Heinemann's The New Review, he arranged for serialization from January to May 1895, paying Wells £100. The first book edition came from Henry Holt and Company on 7 May 1895, followed by Heinemann's British edition on 29 May. These two versions, known as the "Holt text" and "Heinemann text," differ textually, and nearly all modern reprints use the Heinemann text. The story reflects Wells's socialist politics, his views on abundance and life, and contemporary anxieties about industrial relations. It was influenced by Ray Lankester's theories on social degeneration and shares elements with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Vril, the Power of the Coming Race (1871). The Eloi race also resembles characters in works by other English socialists, especially William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), where money is irrelevant and work is done for pleasure. Similar themes appear in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and the film Metropolis (1927). In a 1931 preface, Wells noted the book has "lasted as long as the diamond-framed safety bicycle" and predicted it would outlive him.

Plot

A Victorian Englishman, known only as the Time Traveller, informs his weekly dinner guests that he has built a machine capable of traveling through time and has proven it experimentally. He demonstrates a small model, which vanishes before their eyes, and mentions that a full-sized version for a person is nearly complete in his lab. The next week, a disheveled and exhausted Traveller describes his journey into the future. He travels forward, watching the world blur past, and lands in the year 802,701. There he finds the Eloi, a race of small, childlike humanoids living in small groups inside grand but decaying buildings, surviving on fruit. They are happy and carefree but terrified of the dark, especially moonless nights and the empty wells scattered across the land. The Traveller struggles to communicate with them due to their lack of curiosity and discipline. All contagious diseases, weeds, fungi, birds, and land animals have vanished. Society has no possessions, family structures, or economy, which the Traveller concludes is the ultimate achievement of communism. He theorizes that intelligence arises from necessity; with no challenges, the Eloi have become weak and naive. When he returns to his landing spot, his machine is gone, though he is sure it has not traveled through time since he removed its levers. He later meets the Morlocks, ape-like creatures living underground who come out only at night. Suspecting they took his machine, he descends a well into their domain and finds them operating the machinery that sustains the Eloi's paradise. He realizes the Morlocks capture Eloi at night to eat them. The Traveller speculates that humanity has split into two species: the pampered aristocracy became the Eloi, and their working-class servants became the Morlocks.

Adaptations

The CBS radio program Escape produced two adaptations of The Time Machine. The first aired in 1948 with Jeff Corey, and the second in 1950 with Lawrence Dobkin as the traveller. Both episodes used a script by Irving Ravetch, in which the Time Traveller was named Dudley and travelled to the year 100,080 with his skeptical friend Fowler. In 1994, Alien Voices released an audio drama on cassette and CD. Leonard Nimoy played the Time Traveller, here called John, and John de Lancie played David Filby. John de Lancie’s children, Owen and Keegan de Lancie, voiced the Eloi. This two-hour drama is more faithful to the original story than several film versions, though it updates language and scientific concepts. In 1999, Winnie Waldron adapted the novel in two parts for NPR’s Generations Radio Theater series, with narration and music by Winifred Phillips. For the 120th anniversary of H.G. Wells’s novella in 2016, Alan Young performed a reading for 7th Voyage Productions. A 100-minute radio dramatisation by Philip Osment, directed by Jeremy Mortimer, aired on BBC Radio 3 on 22 February 2009 as part of a science fiction season. This was the first British radio adaptation of the novella. Robert Glenister played the Time Traveller, and William Gaunt played H.G. Wells. The cast also included Donnla Hughes as Martha, Gunnar Cauthery as young Wells, Stephen Critchlow as Filby, Chris Pavlo as Bennett, Manjeet Mann as Mrs. Watchett, Jill Crado as Weena, and Robert Lonsdale, Inam Mirza, and Dan Starkey in other roles. This version kept the Time Traveller nameless and framed the story as a true account told to the young Wells, who later retells it as an older man to American journalist Martha while firewatching on the roof of Broadcasting House during the Blitz. It also restored the novella’s deleted ending, presented as a recorded message sent back to Wells from the future, in which the traveller escapes the anthropoid creatures to 30 million AD at the end of the universe, where he disappears or dies.

Sequels by other authors

Wells's novella is a foundational work of science fiction, and it has inspired numerous follow-ups. One early expansion is La Belle Valence from 1923, written by Théo Varlet and André Blandin, where a group of World War I soldiers stumble upon the Time Machine and end up in 14th-century Valencia, Spain. The first direct sequel, Die Rückkehr der Zeitmaschine, appeared in 1946 by Egon Friedell. This story focuses heavily on the machine's technical workings and the paradoxes of traveling to the past. The time traveler, here named James MacMorton, visits a futuristic 1995 where London hovers in the sky and weather is manufactured by corporations, and later the year 2123, where he meets two Egyptians who study history through intuition rather than science. When he travels to the past, he arrives weeks before the machine was built, causing it to vanish. He then uses a miniature version of the machine, already existing at that earlier time, to send telegraph messages to a friend (the author), asking for supplies to construct a new device. After returning to his own time, he recounts the adventure. The original German text, about 24,000 words, was translated into English by Eddy C. Bertin in the 1940s and later released in paperback as The Return of the Time Machine. Another sequel, The Hertford Manuscript by Richard Cowper, came out in 1976. It presents a discovered manuscript detailing what happened to the Time Traveller after the original story. According to this account, the Morlocks damaged the machine without his knowledge, and it broke down during his next journey, stranding him on 27 August 1665 in London during the Great Plague. He works to repair the machine and avoid infection, meets Robert Hooke, but ultimately dies of the plague on 20 September 1665. The manuscript also names the Time Traveller as Robert James Pensley, born in 1850 to James and Martha Pensley, who vanished without a trace on 18 June 1894.