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The Time Machine; or, the Fourth Dimension as Prophecy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
Most of the early science fantasies of H. G. Wells are, as he defines the term, prophetic: the myths that they develop to a logical conclusion represent a critique of some historical or essential aspect of the human condition. The Time Machine, his first scientific romance, explores the premises of prophetic fantasy at the same time that it embodies a myth of its own. In it Wells envisions the future devolution of man, already outlined in previous essays of his, as the ultimate consequence of what he perceived as a present attitude of complacent optimism, an attitude he dramatizes in the reaction of the Active audience to the Time Traveller's account of the world of 802,701 and beyond. Although the Time Traveller accepts this vision as literally true, his own theories about that world make it clear that its significance pertains to it only as a metaphoric projection of tendencies existing in the present. Thus the structure of The Time Machine reveals the Time Traveller's point of view, like that of his audience, to be limited: his final disappearance into the fantasied world of the future vindicates the rigorous integrity of Wells s prophecy.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969
References
1 The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells (London, 1933), p. ix.
2 Bergonzi, “The Time Machine: An Ironic Myth,” Critical Quarterly, n (1960), 293–305, and The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Toronto, 1961), pp. 42–61; Hillegas, “Cosmic Pessimism in H. G. Wells' Scientific Romances,” Papers of the Mich. Acad, of Sci., Arts, and Letters, Xlvi (1961), 657–658, and The Future as Nightmare: B. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (New York, 1967), pp. 24–34.
3 All published drafts of The Time Machine share these components, though the serialized versions appearing in the National Ohsener (1894) and the New Review (1895) differ from the first English edition, published by Heinemann, in many respects—not all of them minor. Sometimes these differences give insight into the meaning of Wells's fantasy, though the serialized versions of course count only as outside evidence for any interpretation. Otherwise they are of interest solely to a study of Wells's progress as a literary artist, a subject it is not my intention to discuss explicitly here.
Some evaluation of the merits of the Heinemann version of The Time Machine relative to the various previously published drafts, including the first American edition, can be found in Bergonzi's “The Publication of The Time Machine 1894–5,” RES, N.S., ix (1960), 42–51.
4 The fact that Wells was familiar with the notion of degeneration at this early date would seem to reduce the possible extent of any influence on him of Max Nordau's Degeneration (1894), which Bergonzi adduces as a source for the vision of the future in The Time Machine.
5 “Zoological Retrogression,” The Gentleman's Magazine, 7 Sept. 1891, p. 246.
6 All quotations from The Time Machine refer to the first English edition (London, 189S).
7 As Bergonzi observes of The Time Machine, “its central narrative is polarised between opposed groups of imagery, the paradisal ... and the demonic” (“An Ironic Myth,” p. 300).
8 The Time Machine in the New Review, xii (1895), 578–579.
9 The Time Machine is part of a reaction on the part of many writers of the late eighties and nineties to the strident optimism that permeated the official rhetoric of the Victorian age. See Bergonzi's discussion of thtfin du globe in his Early E. G. Wells, pp. 3–14, et passim. Some material may also be found in Hillegas' Future as Nightmare (see n. 2 above), relevant to attitudes towards evolution during the period in which Wells was writing The Time Machine.
10 “On Extinction,” Chambers's Journal, x (30 Sept. 1893), 623.
11 In “Evolution and Ethics” and other essays, Huxley declares that ethical man can exist only if he modifies the “cosmic process.”
12 “The Refinement of Humanity,” National Observer, N.S., xi (21 Apr. 1894), 581–582.
13 Hillegas, “Cosmic Pessimism,” p. 658,
14 As late as Men Like Gods (1923), the Utopian fantasy that takes place in the “F dimension,” Wells has one of his characters say of another (neither has yet been initiated into Utopia): “He has always had too much imagination. He thinks that things that don't exist can exist. And now he imagines himself in some sort of scientific romance and out of our world altogether” (Men Like Gods, New York, 1923, pp. 21–22).
15 “The Extinction of Man,” Certain Personal Matters (London, 1898 [1897]), p. 172. This essay first appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette for 23 Sept. 1894.
16 The Living Novel (London, 1946), p. 119.
17 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N. J., 1957), pp. 202–203.
18 On 21 Jan. 1900, James wrote to Wells: “It was very graceful of you to send me your book—I mean the particular masterpiece entitled The Time Machine, after I had so ungracefully sought it at your hands” (Henry James and H. G. Wells, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray, Urbana, I11., 1958, p. 63).