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).

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Chapter VIII, Explanation

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

• Chapter II, The Machine

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