I have just posted a new Web edition of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. This story (at around 33,000 words, it would be considered a long novella today), was originally published in 1895. Wells continued to revise it over the years, with the final version published in 1935. My edition is based upon that text. I originally posted a Web edition in 2002. This revision updates the documents to current Web standards (XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS3) and improves typography, formatting, and navigation.
The story can be read in one or two sittings, and is much better and more interesting than the two Hollywood movies loosely based upon it. Given Wells’s attraction to socialism and communism, it is an interesting view of the ultimately pernicious consequences of eliminating risks and challenges and providing for all the material needs of a population without demanding anything of them except—well, you’ll see. There is also a very 19th century glimpse into the gloomy perspective of the heat death of the universe.
Please don’t complain about the quote marks. The 1935 edition was published in Britain. British publishers use ‘single quotes’ for the outer level of quotations and “double quotes” for quotations nested within them, while U.S. publishers use exactly the opposite convention. In this edition, I have used quote marks as the author wrote them and his publisher printed them. Because of the story’s unusual narrative structure, the main long quotation is carried over from chapter to chapter without a closing quote until the Time Traveller pauses his story in chapter 7 and concludes it in chapter 12: this is as it was in the original.
I caught this typo, ‘civilised’. (Thanks for the posting, John.)
Is the rumor true true that the first Time machine was made out of Luce-ite?
Thanks, John.
Does anyone know how popular H G Wells was in his day? Who could we compare him to today?
Wells was pretty popular. His “scientific romances” sold reasonably well, and remained popular. He made a fortune with his Outline of History, a popular history book; dismissed by some professional historians, but devoured by the public. (There is a book out somewhere about a Canadian woman who claimed that he had plagiarized her work, and she at least had the beginning of a reasonable case). Later in his career he started spouting all kinds of political positions and there wasn’t as much of his previous output.
Stephen King, maybe.
Thanks, Percy. Wells was a product of his times. There was great hope that things were going to go better till they didn’t.
Wells imagined it would take something like 80 millennia to produce the Eloi and Morlocks. Yet barely 70 years after his death, the citizens of the UK are disarmed and unmanned. Defenseless, indeed many seem unable to conceive of defending themselves, they are the Eloi come early. And the same political class that brought them to this pass has invited the Morlocks over for dinner, apparently not realizing this will mean significant additions to the menu.
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Good take, Vald. It takes little time to destroy what others have built up.
Interesting timing. Mark Steyn just started a nightly audio reading of this in 20 minute segments. Segment 3 is tomorrow picking up with the time traveller beginning his narrative of his trip to the future.
Exhibit A in why we’re all doomed but at least we get to watch the UK spiral down the rat hole of oblivion first:
Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, spoke on Saturday about the victims of the June 3 London terror attacks, “It’s desperately sad and poignant but among those who died is someone who’s British, there are French, Australian, Canadian, Spanish … We believe of course that that’s what makes our city so great,” Dick said. “It’s a place where the vast majority of time it’s incredibly integrated and that diversity gives us strength.” [Except in this particular case, where diversity gave us a veritable cultural smorgasbord of … death.]
Rule Britannia my dainty dimpled derrière. Eloi, marching along to the siren song of the Morlocks and humming ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ as they go.