The Time Machine.2: Traveller's Tale

“The man who cannot wonder is but a pair of spectacles behind which there is no eye.”
Thomas Carlyle

In an era attuned to the new, it blurted out its originality with a terse and daring title: The Time Machine.

There had been other tales of people traveling in time, but the means were mystical, accidental, inexplicable or unexplained. In the 1890s age of miraculous machines, this was the first widely read story to employ a device to take a character through time.

And with the telephone sending voices across space, the steamship and railroad moving bodies with unprecedented speed, and now the wonders of moving pictures and sound recording preserving the living past—why not a machine to transport someone to another time?

Yet as wondrous as such a machine would be, it would still be a machine—something solid and familiar.  A crucial quality of a machine is that it will do what it does repeatedly, for anyone who can operate it. It requires no special status or gift. So with a machine it becomes possible to imagine time travel as intentional, and accessible.

A new type of story was born with this novel: exploring not only other times but features of time itself—of time and causality paradoxes, timelines and loops. The Terminator, two of the most popular Star Trek feature films, and the long-running Doctor Who television series plus dozens of other stories that employ time travel technologies—all began with this one.

But being the first such story, there were no conventions of time travel that readers understood and accepted. A case had to be made, good enough to let the wonder take hold.

The Time Machine begins in the middle of a conversation. A group of upper middle class men are gathered after dinner in the comfortable London home of a scientist-inventor, who describes his theory of time as the fourth dimension, equal to the dimensions of space.

Speculations on a fourth dimension and what it might be were in the air in the late 19th century, as were debates over the nature of time. But these speculations were discussed among physicists and philosophers—this was a first presentation to the general reading public. (Einstein’s concept of the space-time continuum was still years in the future, though Wells’ story presages some features of it.)

This group of men has a few notable features. Three are identified only by profession: a Psychologist, a Medical Man and a Provincial Mayor. One is identified only by his name (Filby), one as the Very Young Man, and one—the narrator—is not yet identified at all. The inventor who is talking is called only—in the first words of the novel-- the Time Traveller (with the British double-l spelling.)

Why are the professional or important men not named? A necessary secrecy is perhaps implied, because of the controversial nature of the events to be described. There’s a subtle air of mystery. But it also creates an effect of these men as anonymous representatives of the reader.

These are sensible, upright and conventional men of their Victorian times. They like their host but seem to fear his unorthodox ways may lead him to do something rash, unseemly or disreputable, and taint them in the process.

So even in the relaxed context of after-dinner speculations they are skeptical. It’s notable as well that the group doesn’t include a physicist or philosopher more familiar with the ideas of the fourth dimension than the general reader, so their objections just sound stuffy.

Their host proposes that according to this theory, travel through time as well as space is possible. Moreover, he has invented a machine for that purpose.

He shows them a small model of it. He pushes a level forward, which he says will send the little machine into the future, or perhaps the past. It disappears. But his witnesses mostly don’t believe it. Several say it’s a trick.

It is a trick. The story employs a series of literary tricks to bring the reader along. For instance, the conversation is reported not by the Traveller directly, but by a guest, a so far anonymous but sympathetic witness and occasional participant. (His name, we learn later, is Hillyer.)

A singular story featuring a larger-than-life protagonist but reported by a witness is a frequent literary device, from Ismael in Moby Dick to Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby and beyond. These witness characters are also the reader’s representatives within the story.

Both Hillyer’s narrative voice and the nondescript dinner guests keep the conversation from becoming too technical. When the Traveller shows them the full-size time machine, Hillyer can report only a general impression of what it looks like, without a word concerning how it works.

But most people don’t much care how machines work—just that they do. The mystery of the time machine’s function is mirrored in its exotic appearance. It’s all just plausible enough to nudge the reader to suspend disbelief, at least long enough to follow the wonder forward.

The following week another group of men gather for dinner at the same place (Hillyer and the Medical Man are joined by a Journalist, an Editor and one or two others.) Hillyer arrives late, but the Traveller has not yet appeared. They begin dinner, joking about where their unconventional host may be—they even speculate he may be off committing crimes.

They are laughing over champagne when the door bursts open and the disheveled Traveller appears, dirty and bleeding. He has just returned from the future, and he is about to tell his tale.

von Humboldt in South America

That he is called the Traveller already conjures up familiar tales of voyages, from the adventures of Robinson Crusoe (or long before that, of Ulysses) to popular accounts of expeditions to China, Africa and the North Pole, including Humboldt’s explorations in South America that fascinated the young H.G. Wells. The traveler suffers travails (the words are directly related) but discovers astonishing new places.

Returning home and recounting his adventures to others is another familiar storytelling technique. Wells himself mentions Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson as models, and this technique is also found in his contemporaries and friends, Henry James and James Conrad.

But there’s a fascinating difference (although something like it does occur in Conrad.) Though the story of his voyage is told in the Traveller’s voice, it is still being reported to us by Hillyer. We’ll eventually discover a plot reason for this, but in story terms it adds to the mystery. We’re being asked to believe that Hillyer remembers the Traveller’s words exactly.

However this is done so skillfully that the question may not even arise in the reader’s mind, at least until much later. For now, we are transported by the Traveller’s tale.

...to be continued.  For earlier posts in this series, click the "Soul of the Future" label below.