Time Machine and The Invisible Man (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

So in the last third of the nineteenth century, when Wells was beginning his career, thinking people had begun to question the biological, social, and industrial optimism of the century’s first seventy-five years. At the same time, those final decades could not shake themselves free of a dynamic concept of human and natural history—that is, that change may be for the better or it may be for the worse, but the entire universe is subject to change of some kind, in contradistinction to the Judaic or Christian idea of a stable universe created by God (which He will one day destroy).

Humans, Wells thinks, have it within them to take charge of their history but refuse to do so because of ignorance, fear, or self-interest. Why have a monarchy in Great Britain, when no king or queen could hope to govern a modern nation? There is no rational answer to this question since the idea that someone is “naturally” born to lead a people flies in the face of common sense.

Wells would find himself at odds with traditional society over the course of his entire life. He would be a tireless promoter of educational reform: Why study Latin or Greek, he would argue, when British society, especially at the start of the twentieth century, was so desperately in need of people with scientific training? He would eventually envisage a non-Marxist socialism as the best kind of society. He conceived the ideal social system as a single, globalized nation in which all peoples participate, in which all individuals work within industries governed by boards of directors that regulate production and protect the well-being of workers.

Wells wanted to abolish the notion of class conflict by eliminating class distinctions, an idea that certainly put him at odds with British conservatives and with Marxists as well. What current society needed, Wells felt, was a jolt that would startle people into realizing just how haphazard and disorganized their societies were and stimulate them to create a rational and universal society. Such is the thinking behind his 1898 novel
The War of the Worlds,
in which the invading Martians destroy society and thereby open the way for a new world organization. In real history, Wells hoped that the wholesale destruction of World War I would produce a system of world government so that nation-states would no longer have any reason to be at one another’s throats. It was, he thought, our primitive taste for violence that prevented a better world. In this, as World War II would confirm, he was only too right.

But the H. G. Wells of 1895 was still a young man of twenty-nine struggling to find a way out of poverty and insecurity. He’d recently married for the second time, his first marriage in 1891 to his cousin Isabel Wells having lasted barely two years. Though he and Catherine Robbins (nicknamed Jane) as yet had no children (they would eventually have two sons), Wells was obliged to work nonstop to generate enough income to keep two people alive. As he would say in a 1919 letter to his friend E. S. P Haynes:

“Anxious journalism” meant writing an article on any subject whatever—from cricket, to swearing, to head colds—and hoping someone would publish it.

It was W.E. Henley, an editor Wells had met in 1893, who gave Wells his big chance. Henley was just about to inaugurate a new magazine,
The New Review,
and offered to publish
The Time Machine,
whose earlier, cruder version he’d already seen, as a serial. It was Henley who told Wells to stop talking
about
time travel and instead take his readers on a voyage through time. He also convinced the book publisher William Heinemann to publish the serial as a volume, securing a contract for Wells that gave him a much-needed £50 advance, a first edition of 10,000 copies, and a 15 percent royalty rate. The serial was a wild success, and the novel a bestseller. H. G. Wells overnight found himself transformed from a hack writer one step ahead of starvation and bill collectors into a prominent author.

But success did not tempt Wells into inactivity. In 1896 his most Swift-inspired novel,
The Island of Dr. Moreau,
appeared, and in 1897 he published his third science fantasy,
The Invisible Man.
But these major works are merely the tip of the iceberg: Wells also published a comic novel about the bicycling craze in which he enthusiastically participated,
The Wheels of Chance
(1896), along with two collections of short stories and a slew of miscellaneous articles.

How could this unhealthy man (he suffered from tuberculosis and became seriously ill in 1887 and once again in 1893), totally untrained in “creative writing,” plying the journalist’s trade just to make ends meet, have both the imagination and the will to write—with no typewriter—so many words, compose so many tales? (True enough, he did have help: His second wife made clean copies of his manuscripts.) But the fact is Wells probably wrote much as he had spoken when he addressed his classes as a young teacher. Just as his lectures would have to be pitched to the level of his students, with a vocabulary they could readily fathom and a sentence structure that would elucidate rather than obfuscate the points he wanted to communicate, his fictions are exercises in clarity, and no less didactic than his lectures. In his satiric essay on Henry James (in his 1915 novel
Boon
)
,
Wells castigated James for his notoriously convoluted style, comparing it to a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea, and in a letter to James Joyce, whose work he admired but found overly complex, he stated simply, “I want language and statement as simple and clear as possible” (quoted in Michael Foot,
The History of Mr. Wells,
p. 215). Wells could never espouse the “art-for-art’s -sake” ideal: For him, art—all writing, in fact—had a single purpose, to communicate ideas and provoke change.

Wells was a self-made man: His literary talent earned him immortality. His social thought, expressed in countless fictions and essays, made him a kind of prophet. His views on history, as expressed in his
Outline of History
(1920), an international bestseller, fostered the very idea of universal history. But while his presence in the twenty-first century imagination remains huge thanks to works like
The Time Machine
and
The Invisible Man,
his presence in the social and political discourse of the new century is practically nonexistent.

The reason, simply put, is that Wells’s strength was also his weakness. The great nineteenth-century thinkers whose ideas are still current are those who created a school, a movement, a political party, something that transcended them as individuals. Karl Marx is more than a political philosopher toiling away in the academic wilderness. Sigmund Freud is more than a Viennese physician with newfangled ideas about the workings of the human mind. Both of these individuals gave rise to institutions larger than themselves. This Wells could never do, probably because like his own protagonists he was and would always remain a Romantic, an isolated voice demanding that others follow his ideas but unwilling to roll up his sleeves and dirty his hands in the practical application of his own concepts.

And the triumph and tragedy enacted in the two fictions under discussion here,
The Time Machine and The Invisible Man,
are parallel.

The narrative structure of
The Time Machine
reflects and enacts Wells’s lifelong dilemma. We have on the one hand the man of science who acts alone, the nameless Time Traveller, and on the other the man who writes for others, the sentimental Hillyer. Why Wells decided to leave his Time Traveller anonymous may reflect the various versions the story passed through, first in 1888, then in 1889, and again in 1892. There the Time Traveller has the allegoric name Dr. Moses Nebogipfel: Moses the Hebrew prophet who leads the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery; Nebo, the mountain from which Moses sees the Promised Land, and “gipfel,” derived from the German for mountaintop. He is, in other words, one of Wells’s many representations of the man of science as prophet, or as Nebogipfel himself puts it:

This sentimental, melodramatic portrait is certainly that of its author Herbert George Wells, here in his guise as visionary.

But the rewriting and reworking, together with W. E. Henley’s editorial intervention, convinced Wells to shift emphasis away from the Time Traveller per se and to focus instead on what the Time Traveller experiences. And what he experiences combines Wells’s hyperbolic vision of Marxist history with the ideas he gleaned from T. H. Huxley and others on the entropy that would eventually extinguish the sun and bring about the end of the world. Thus Wells is pessimistic on two fronts: The “workers paradise” generates a two-class society, idle drones fed and clothed by worker-beasts who feed on them, and the end of the world looms large as the sun dims and the earth freezes to death.

In a 1931 preface to a deluxe edition of
The Time Machine,
the sixty-five-year-old Wells casts a scornful eye over the novel he published when he was thirty-six:

Once again, Wells fudges the details. He can dismiss the entropy theory as “dreadful lies,” but he does not explain that his view of the cute, stupid Eloi and the apelike, cannibalistic Morlocks is his extrapolation of what would happen under Marxism. At the same time, his tribute to Swift is genuine, yet another link between Wells and the great tradition of moralizing satirists.

Wells’s casual irony when mocking the fact that science in 1895 promised that the world would be over “in a million years or less” clashes with the Time Traveller’s precise date of his arrival in the future, “the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One A.D.” (p. 26). When the Time Traveller escapes from the Morlocks at the end of chapter X, he moves forward in time, and in chapter XI, reaches the end of his journey, when “more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens” (p.76). So Wells himself found the “million years or less” assessment too short and brought the number up to thirty million. Even here, life persists, if only in the form of some green slime and a disgusting creature somewhere between an octopus and a spider scuttling along the shore of a freezing sea. The Eloi and Morlocks are by then extinct, and the pitiable life-forms that have adapted to the world’s last days are mercifully unconscious of their imminent doom.

For Wells, the tragedy of human and natural entropic evolution is the loss of human consciousness. It is this fall from awareness that Wells uses to characterize the Eloi and the Morlocks. Wells may have derived his visual idea of this ghastly utopia from Hieronymous Bosch’s painting
Garden of Earthly Delights
(c.1500). In that triptych, the left panel shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, while on the right we see Hell. The strange center panel depicts masses of virtually hairless beings, at least one of which is eating a huge piece of fruit (not unlike the Eloi’s “hypertrophied raspberry” on p.24) and playing (often obscenely) with flowers. Like the Eloi and Morlocks, Bosch’s humanity is locked in a mindless repetition of pleasure—the Eloi dance in the sun, and the Morlocks feast on them in the darkness. Neither group is aware of a before or an after, which is why neither group is even slightly interested in finding out who the Time Traveller is, where he came from, or why he is there. He is an anomaly, but these subhumans have no curiosity about him or anything beyond what satisfies their immediate needs.

Wells sees an ironic parallel between nature and human history in
The Time Machine:
With its needs satisfied, humanity, like the decadents of the fin de siècle will become ever more effeminate, less and less interested in anything whatsoever, until finally its intellect atrophies. So there will have to be a constant goad prodding humanity onward. Wells can only imagine this in terms of cataclysm—war or invasion from another planet—and in his search for a new subject turns his attention back to himself. That is, his Time Traveller is a man obsessed who transforms his obsession—time as the fourth dimension of space—into a fact by inventing a fantastic machine that is capable of moving through time. Wells, following in Mary Shelley’s footsteps, makes not the slightest attempt to explain what energy drives the time machine or even how it is able to traverse time at such amazing speeds.