The Time Machine: H.G. Wells’s Journey to the Year 802,701, the Eloi and the Morlocks
When Herbert George Wells created his ingenious time machine in 1895, he did not simply send its inventor to the year 802,701 to gaze at a completely changed London, a degenerate human race and a civilisation in ruins, the product of uncontrolled scientific progress. He also wrote one of the sharpest social satires of his age.
Author: H.G. Wells (1866–1946)
Title: The Time Machine (1895)
Format: English paperback (Alma Classics Evergreens, annotated edition), 133 pages
Scope: Novella; a founding work of science fiction
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/184749627X (ASIN 184749627X)
The Eloi and the Morlocks
The scientist who invents the machine makes an experimental journey and visits the Earth in the distant future, finding it inhabited by the Eloi, peaceful and idle. The Time Traveller deduces that they are so advanced that machines must be working for them. Later he meets the sinister, predatory Morlocks, and has to flee to save his life. When he returns to the present, his story is met with scepticism.
A Satire of Its Time
Influenced by utopian socialism, Wells writes a lucid satire of the capitalist society of his day, while also expressing his scientific concerns and raising a question that is still fully relevant: humanity’s responsibility for the future.
A Story Told After Dinner
Wells frames the novel as an account told by the inventor, known only as the Time Traveller, to a group of sceptical guests at his house in Richmond: a doctor, a psychologist, a journalist, a provincial mayor and the narrator. He has arrived late for dinner, dishevelled and limping, and over the evening he describes what he saw. The device lets Wells mix scientific explanation with a growing sense of horror, and leaves the reader, like the guests, to decide whether to believe him.
Weena and the Sphinx
In the year 802,701 the Traveller finds a world of crumbling palaces and gardens, watched over by a great white sphinx. He befriends Weena, a small Eloi woman he saves from drowning, whose innocent affection gives the story its tenderness. When his machine disappears, apparently dragged inside the sphinx’s pedestal, he must descend into the Morlocks’ underground world to recover it. Later he travels much further forward, to a dying Earth under a swollen red sun, where the last forms of life crawl along a silent shore, one of the most haunting passages in early science fiction.
Wells the Scientist
Wells had studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s great champion, and the novel is shaped by evolutionary theory. The division of humanity into two species is the result of social class hardened over hundreds of thousands of years: the idle rich have become the feeble Eloi, the labouring poor the Morlocks, who now prey on them. It is evolution used as social prophecy. The book was Wells’s first novel, developed from an earlier story and published in 1895, and it launched a career that included The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man.
Legacy
The idea of a machine for travelling in time, which Wells popularised, has fed countless stories since. George Pal’s 1960 film is the best-known adaptation.
Science, Machines and Scepticism
The Time Machine is a synthesis of Wells’s scientific knowledge, of the faith in machines as humanity’s salvation that was all the rage at the time, and of his sceptical view of the direction his society was taking. It describes a disturbing future in which two semi-bestial races, the Eloi and the Morlocks, share a strange, desolate planet in a peculiar symbiosis, a world scarred by catastrophe and change, yet where a faint breath of humanity still shines like a fragile hope.
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