The Time Machine

Summary

In a house in Richmond, after dinner, a scientist known only as the Time Traveller explains to his guests (the red-haired Filby, a Psychologist, a Medical Man, a Provincial Mayor, a Very Young Man and the unnamed narrator) that time is a fourth dimension along which a body might move. He sends a small model machine vanishing from the table and shows them the full-sized machine in his laboratory. A week later he arrives late to dinner, dusty, limping and pale, eats ravenously, and tells his story while the guests, now including an Editor, a Journalist and a Silent Man, listen in the smoking-room. He had travelled to the year 802,701 and found the Thames valley turned into a vast neglected garden under a colossal White Sphinx. Its inhabitants, the Eloi, are small, graceful, childlike people who eat fruit, play, sleep together in ruined halls and fear the dark. He guesses at first that humanity has conquered nature and grown feeble through ease. Then his machine disappears into the pedestal of the Sphinx, and he discovers a second race: the pale, ape-like Morlocks, who live in shafts and tunnels below ground, tend machinery, and come up on moonless nights. He rescues an Eloi girl, Weena, from drowning, and she follows him with touching devotion. Descending a well, he learns that the Morlocks feed on the Eloi. He revises his theory: the division between capitalist and labourer of his own day has, over ages, split mankind into two species, the idle surface-dwellers and the toilers below, until the old servants have become the masters and the predators. With Weena he walks to the Palace of Green Porcelain, a ruined museum, where he finds matches, camphor and an iron lever. On the way back a forest fire he has started and a night attack by Morlocks scatter them, and Weena is lost. When the bronze panels of the Sphinx open, he finds the machine, fights off the Morlocks inside, and escapes forward in time. He sees the earth stop turning, a huge red sun over a dead sea shore with giant crabs, and, more than thirty million years on, an eclipse, snow, and a black, tentacled thing flopping on a shoal. Sick and faint, he returns to his own evening. The guests mostly disbelieve him; he shows two strange white flowers that Weena put in his pocket. The next day he departs again with a camera and knapsack, and three years later the narrator reports that he has never returned. The novella was serialized in The New Review from January to May 1895 and published in book form by Henry Holt in New York and William Heinemann in London that May; it grew out of Wells's earlier story The Chronic Argonauts (1888).

Plot or Argument

• Chapters I-II: The dinner-party and the model

  The Time Traveller argues that time is a fourth dimension, answers his guests' objections, and sends a model machine into time; then he shows them the full-sized machine in his laboratory.

• Chapters III-IV: The return and the journey

  At the next week's dinner he arrives dishevelled and, after eating, tells how the laboratory blurred around him as days and years raced past until he stopped in a hailstorm beside the White Sphinx.

• Chapters V-VI: The golden age and the sunset of mankind

  He meets the gentle, incurious Eloi, explores ruined palaces and the garden landscape, and concludes that humanity, having secured itself against all need, has grown weak in body and mind.

• Chapters VII-VIII: Shock and explanation

  The machine is taken into the Sphinx's pedestal; he saves Weena from the river, glimpses white creatures in the dark, notices the wells and towers, and frames his theory that the two classes of his own time have become two species.

• Chapters IX-X: The Morlocks and the dark nights

  He climbs down a well into the Morlocks' world of machines and darkness, escapes with his last matches, and realizes that the Morlocks raise the Eloi for food.

• Chapters XI-XII: The Palace of Green Porcelain and the darkness

  In a ruined museum he finds rusted machines, decayed books, camphor and matches and arms himself with a lever; a forest fire and a Morlock attack in the night separate him from Weena, who is lost.

• Chapter XIII: The trap of the White Sphinx

  Reflecting that intelligence withers where there is no danger, he finds the Sphinx open, enters, is trapped by the Morlocks, and escapes on the machine.

• Chapters XIV-XV: The further vision and the return

  He travels to a dying earth under a vast red sun, sees giant crabs and then, in the final darkness of an eclipse, a lone tentacled creature, and returns sick to his laboratory in the present.

• Chapter XVI and Epilogue: After the story

  The guests doubt him; he shows Weena's flowers, sets out again the next day, and never returns, leaving the narrator to wonder where he went and to take comfort in the flowers.

Characters

• The Time Traveller, inventor and principal narrator

  Unnamed scientist of Richmond who builds the machine, journeys to 802,701 and beyond, and tells the tale to his guests.

• The narrator, frame narrator

  Unnamed dinner guest who records the story and waits in vain for the Traveller's second return.

• Weena, Eloi girl

  Small Eloi woman whom the Traveller saves from drowning and who follows him until she is lost in the burning forest.

• The Eloi, surface people of 802,701

  Gentle, childlike descendants of humanity who live in idleness, fear the dark, and serve as the Morlocks' food.

• The Morlocks, underground people of 802,701

  Pale, nocturnal descendants of humanity who tend machines below ground and hunt the Eloi on moonless nights.

• Filby, dinner guest

  Argumentative red-haired man who objects that time travel is against reason.

• The Psychologist, dinner guest

  Sceptical guest who is made to press the lever that sends the model into time.

• The Medical Man, dinner guest

  Guest who raises objections to the fourth dimension and suspects a conjuring trick.

• The Editor, dinner guest

  Journalistic visitor at the second dinner who treats the story as a joke and thinks in headlines.

Lessons

• Comfort can unmake a people

  The Time Traveller first reads the Eloi as the result of a world made perfectly safe: once there was nothing to struggle against, strength and intellect faded. Wells turns the period's confidence in progress around and asks whether ease, pursued as the highest good, might weaken the very people it was meant to bless. The point is not that comfort is wicked but that effort and difficulty train the mind.

  • What does the Time Traveller first conclude about why the Eloi are so weak?
  • Do you agree that people need danger or difficulty to stay intelligent?
  • Which things in your own life are easy now that once took hard work, and what has been gained or lost?

• A theory must change when the facts change

  The Traveller builds a theory of the future three times: first a golden age, then an aristocracy served by workers, then two species in which the servants feed on the masters. Each time a new discovery overturns what he thought. The book shows scientific reasoning at work, including the humility of admitting that one's first hypothesis was wrong.

  • List the Traveller's three explanations of the world of 802,701. What fact overturns each one?
  • Why does he say his explanations may still be only a half truth?
  • How can a reader tell a guess from a conclusion in his story?

• Kindness at the end of the world

  Among the frightened, forgetful Eloi, Weena alone attaches herself to the Traveller, and the two shrivelled flowers she gave him are his only proof that the journey happened. The narrator ends by finding comfort in them: even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and tenderness survived. In a story about decline, the smallest act of affection outlasts every machine.

  • What does Weena do for the Traveller, and what does he do for her?
  • Why does the narrator, not the Traveller, have the last word about the flowers?
  • Is the ending of the book hopeful, despairing or both?

• The long view of time

  In the further vision the Traveller watches the sun swell and redden, life dwindle to crabs and lichens, and finally the sounds of every living thing fall silent. Wells draws on the physics of a cooling sun and the long timescales of geology to show a universe far older and longer than human history. The narrator's answer is practical: even if that is our end, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.

  • What signs of life remain on the beach thirty million years in the future?
  • How does the narrator respond to the Traveller's gloomy view of progress?

Context

Wells wrote in the decade when evolutionary biology, popularized by his teacher T. H. Huxley, invited speculation about humanity's future development and possible decline, and when physicists such as Lord Kelvin had argued that the sun must slowly cool. Late Victorian debates about the gap between rich and poor, the growth of London's underground railways and factories, and fears of social degeneration all enter the Traveller's theories. The book is often counted among the first stories to imagine a machine that carries a traveller through time at will.

Composition

Wells had sketched the idea in The Chronic Argonauts, a serial in the Science Schools Journal in 1888, and returned to it in unsigned pieces for the National Observer in 1894. The finished story ran in The New Review, under W. E. Henley, from January to May 1895. Henry Holt published an American edition on 7 May 1895 and William Heinemann an English edition on 29 May; the two texts differ, and most later reprints follow Heinemann. The library text, from Project Gutenberg #35, is divided into sixteen numbered chapters and an epilogue.

Reception

The book made Wells's name almost at once and has never been out of print. The words Eloi and Morlock entered common speech, and the time machine became a fixture of science fiction. George Pal's 1960 film is the best-known screen version, and many later writers have written sequels or replies.

Comparisons

• gullivers-travels

  Swift's Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, like the Eloi and Morlocks, split the human image into two races, one graceful and one brutish, and both travellers come home unable to see their own society in the same way again.

• the-war-of-the-worlds

  Three years later Wells again set an evolved, technically advanced species preying on a weaker one, but moved the encounter from the far future to the Surrey of his own day.

• the-invisible-man

  Both romances let a gifted scientist narrate his own impossible experiment to a listener, but the Time Traveller seeks to understand humanity's fate, while Griffin seeks power over his neighbours.

• on-the-origin-of-species

  Darwin's account of natural selection over immense spans of time is the scientific background for the Traveller's guesses about how comfort and labour could split one species into two.

• utopia

  More's traveller Raphael Hythloday also describes a far-off society with no poverty and no struggle; Wells's traveller finds such a society in the future and discovers what it costs.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The objections the dinner guests raise in Chapter I, and how the Traveller answers each.
• The White Sphinx, which appears when the Traveller arrives and hides his machine for most of the story.
• Each time the Traveller changes his theory about the Eloi and the Morlocks, and what new fact makes him change it.
• Weena's fear of the dark and the flowers she puts in the Traveller's pocket.
• The silence of the last beach in Chapter XIV, and the Epilogue's answer to it.

Key terms and names

Fourth dimension

The Traveller's name for time, which he argues is a direction like length, breadth and thickness along which a body might move.

Eloi

The small, gentle surface people of 802,701, who play, eat fruit and fear the dark.

Morlocks

The pale underground people of 802,701, who tend machines and feed on the Eloi.

White Sphinx

A huge statue on a bronze pedestal near which the Traveller lands; the Morlocks hide his machine inside it.

Palace of Green Porcelain

A ruined museum where the Traveller finds rusted machines, rotted books, camphor, matches and an iron lever.

Degeneration

The idea, common in the 1890s, that a species or people could decline in body and mind over generations; the Traveller uses it to explain both races.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How does the Time Traveller prove to his guests that his machine is real before he travels himself?
2. Comprehension What does the Traveller discover about the Morlocks when he climbs down the well?
3. Comprehension What does the Traveller see when he goes thirty million years into the future?
4. Interpretation Why does Wells tell the story through a narrator listening at a dinner party instead of letting the Traveller write it himself?
5. Interpretation The Traveller says the two races came from the rich and the workers of his own age. What warning, if any, is Wells giving his first readers?
6. Interpretation Why is it important that Weena is lost and only her flowers come back?
7. Interpretation The Traveller thinks gloomily of progress, but the narrator says we must live as though it were not so. Which view does the book leave stronger?
8. Big Question If human history has an end, does that make our work and our kindness meaningless, or more precious?

Faith Connections

• Psalm 102:25-27 (Scripture)

  The psalmist says the heavens will perish and wear out like a garment, but God remains the same. The Traveller sees the first half of this truth on the dying beach; the psalm adds what his science cannot.

• Ecclesiastes 1:4 (Scripture)

  One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. The Preacher's long view of human striving matches the Traveller's vision of the rise and fall of the human race.

• Genesis 4:9 (Scripture)

  Am I my brother's keeper? The Traveller's line about man thrusting his brother man out of the sunshine echoes the first story of one brother turning on another.

• Augustine, Confessions XI (Great Conversation)

  Augustine asks what time is and concludes that past and future exist for us only in memory and expectation. The Traveller treats time as a road to be driven along; Augustine treats it as a mystery of the soul and of creation.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If human beings make life perfectly secure, the struggle that sharpens strength and intelligence will cease; if class divisions harden over immense spans of time, they may become biological; therefore a society that seeks comfort and ease above all may, in the end, destroy what made it human.

Rhetorical device: frame narrative. The unnamed narrator reports the Traveller's tale as told in the smoking-room, with the guests' doubts and the physical evidence of the flowers, so the reader, like the guests, must decide whether to believe it.

Debate: Resolved: that the Time Traveller's final explanation of the Eloi and the Morlocks is a fair warning about the society of his own day.

Memory Work

Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.

even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace the Time Traveller's three theories about the world of 802,701 and explain what each reveals about how a scientist should reason from evidence.

Comparison with Gulliver's Travels: Compare the Eloi and Morlocks with Swift's Houyhnhnms and Yahoos: what does each author's division of humanity into two races say about human nature?

Medical Lens

Medicine is incidental. A Medical Man and a Psychologist sit among the dinner guests as representatives of scientific scepticism, and the Psychologist is the one who presses the model's lever. The book's real contact with the medical thought of the 1890s is its picture of degeneration: the Eloi's small stature, weak limbs, short attention and childlike minds, and the Morlocks' pallor, large light-sensitive eyes and adaptation to darkness, are offered as the bodily results of many generations of ease or underground labour. This draws on the late-Victorian literature of evolutionary decline and inherited degeneration that Wells knew from Huxley's teaching and the periodical press; it is speculative biology, not clinical description. The Traveller's own exhaustion, ravenous hunger, limp and nausea on return are described plainly.

• Chapters V-VI, In the Golden Age; The Sunset of Mankind

  The Traveller describes the Eloi's frail bodies and childlike minds and attributes them to a world without need.

  Heredity Degeneration
• Chapter VIII, Explanation

  The Traveller explains the Morlocks' bleached skin and large eyes as adaptations to long life underground.

  Heredity Degeneration
• Chapter II, The Machine

  The Medical Man examines the model machine and suspects a trick.

  Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Draw a timeline from the Traveller's laboratory to the year 802,701 and on to the dying earth thirty million years later, marking what he sees at each stop.

• Fiction

  Write the Traveller's second journey, which the narrator never hears: where does he go after leaving with his camera and knapsack?

• Dialogue

  Stage the argument at the first dinner between Filby, the Psychologist and the Medical Man about whether a man could move through time.

• Essay

  Which of the Traveller's three theories about the Eloi and Morlocks is most convincing, and why does Wells let him revise his views on stage rather than giving the answer at once?

Further Reading

• The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells

• The Island of Doctor Moreau, H. G. Wells

  Wells's next romance on evolution and the boundary between human and animal.

• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain

  An earlier comic journey through time, into the past.

• Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift