The Time Machine has two major themes: evolution and social class.
Both subjects are ingeniously explored in a voyage of discovery through the invention of a machine, which is central to the book’s concern with the dialectic of evolutionary time. The machine itself symbolises the power of science and reason. The Time Traveller sets out in his machine to navigate and dominate time, only to discover the grim truth: time is lord of all. The real significance of the story’s title becomes clear; Man is trapped by the diabolical mechanism of time, and bound by an inexorable history that leads to his inevitable death and extinction signalled by the new science.
The Traveller’s headlong fall into the future begins at home. The entire voyage through the evolved worlds of Man shows little spatial shift, with the terror of each age unravelling in the vicinity of the Traveller’s laboratory. “It is not what man has been, but what he will be, that should interest us” Wells had written in his essay The Man of the Year Million. And in The Time Machine we had Wells’ answer - a vision calculated to “run counter to the placid assumption … that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind”. Time’s arrow initially thrusts the narrative forward to the year 802701 AD. The Traveller meets the Eloi, a race of effete, virtually androgynous and child-like humans living an apparently peaceful and pastoral life. Man’s total conquest of nature, it seems, has led to decadence. But on discovering the dark subterranean machine world of the albino, ape-like Morlocks, a new theory emerges.
Over time, the gulf between the classes in Victorian society has produced separate species:
“At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seems clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you – and wildly incredible! – and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way”
Initially believing the Eloi to be dominant descendants of the ruling class, the Traveller ultimately discovers that a potentially predatory working class have evolved into the bestial Morlocks, cannibal hominids who man the machinery that keeps the Eloi - their flocks - passive and plentiful:
“The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general cooperation … Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over nature, but a triumph over nature and the fellow-man.”
An Astrobiological Future?
Wells foresaw a bifocal future. One image in the lens, “upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness”, focuses on what Man may become when a vigorous natural selection is eradicated, as with the Eloi. And the lens of the Morlockian future, “the under-world [of] mere mechanical industry” arises when the cultural condition of industrialisation serves as a natural, though chronic, selective environment. Wells’ warning vision is all the more powerful for making the reader feel responsible; it is the inequities of contemporary class society that leads to such monstrous futures.
But Wells took a further momentous leap in the fictional portrayal of evolution; “People unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the younger Darwin, forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body”. For the first time, the evolution of Man was revealed not merely as a biological and social process, but also as an astrobiological development, played out against a backdrop of dying planets and dying Sun; a vision of Man being swept away “into the darkness from which his universe arose”. Rescuing his machine from the Morlocks, the Traveller journeys to the far future. The solar system is in meltdown. The Earth is locked by tidal forces, as the planets spiral toward a red giant Sun, which appears to hang motionless in an endless sunset on a terminal beach upon which the time machine reappears. And in this death, where the strange round black creatures Man has become hop about “against the weltering blood-red water”, Wells ends his terrible account of our progressive devolution, set in the entropic decay of the cosmic machine.”
By Prof Mark Brake and Rev Neil Hook
