1895 H.G. Wells’s career took its distinctive turn when, aged eighteen, he won a government scholarship to the Normal School of Science in Kensington, and was released from the dreary prospect of working as a counter-jumper in a drapery emporium (a period of his life commemorated in his cockney comedy, Kipps).
At the NSC, young Wells (‘Bertie’) came under the influence of T.H. Huxley – ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. The Origin of Species (published seven years before Wells was born) became the young Wells’s bible. Wells did not, however, excel in his classes. He was too preoccupied with writing in the student journal: notably an early version of The Time Machine called, unsexily, The Chronic Argonauts.
Had he worked at his lessons, Wells would probably have become a middlingly successful scientist. But where his genius (as opposed to his talent) lay was in absorbing the scientific discoveries currently being thrown up and imaginatively repackaging them for the unscientific masses.
What form should that package take? Wells was initially unsure. The Time Machine began as a series of plodding explanatory essays. But he soon realised that audiences prefer stories to lectures. Thus his career, and its hundred books, began.
Time travel had been a favourite motif of imaginative literature long before the youthful Wells’s chronic fantasies. The weak point in the scenario, however, was how you actually get into the future, or the past. A favourite technique was that of Bunyan, in The Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘I dreamed a Dream’. Two imaginative works that influenced The Time Machine use this device: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Both have protagonists who fall asleep and, like Rip van Winkle, mysteriously wake up in the far future.
Morris and Bellamy were proto-socialists, and congenial to young Wells. But there was something fundamentally lame in the dream-vision gimmick. Another early title for his story was ‘The Time Traveller’. But finally he settled on The Time Machine. The mechanics of the story were all-important.
What, precisely, is the machine? Wells does not give a detailed description, other than that it has a saddle and a triangular frame, and some mysterious crystals propelling it. Clearly it is a version of the bicycle.
A bicycle capable of whizzing along the fourth dimension is as implausible as Doc Brown’s flux-capacitor-boosted De Lorean DMC-12 in the Back to the Future movie series (one of the innumerable offspring of The Time Machine). But Wells’s bejewelled roadster makes the point that, if we ever do cross the time-barrier, technology – not slumber – will get us there. On his journey into the future, the traveller has adventures in 702581, at which point in time humanity has bifurcated (as some feared it had in the 1890s) into ultra-aesthetic, Wildean-decadent Eloi, and fearsomely proletarian Morlocks. The traveller makes two trips even further into the future, and witnesses the imminent heat death of the solar system.
The two direct inspirations for The Time Machine were, firstly, an article by Simon Newcomb (which the traveller mentions in his initial exposition to his friends) published in Nature, 1894. Newcomb, one of the country’s leading mathematicians, argued that, ‘as a perfectly legitimate exercise of thought’, we should admit the possibility of objects existing in a fourth dimension – time. Wells undertook just such an exercise.
The other scientific validation of his story for Wells was a lecture by T.H. Huxley in the same year, 1894, in which the author’s mentor made the supremely pessimistic point that ‘our globe has been in a state of fusion, and, like the sun, is gradually cooling down … the time will come when evolution will mean an adaptation to universal winter, and all forms of life will die out … if for millions of years our globe has taken the upward road, yet some time the summit will be reached and the downward road will be commenced.’
After serialisation, The Time Machine was published by Heinemann on 29 May 1895 (around the period that Wilde was being martyrised by the Morlock-philistines). The book has been in print ever since.