The Time Machine by H G Wells,1895

Continuing with my Wells-athon, all of which have been quite short novels, I now turn to the hugely influential ‘The Time Machine’.

Time travel was not a new concept, but Wells’s novel was one of the earliest on this theme, and established some concepts and principles that remain with us. having said that, I found the behaviour of Wells’ s protagonist in many ways puzzling. If you had invented a time machine, what would you do? Where would you go? Would you go back to the nativity, to the Globe in 1605, to assassinate Hitler? Or would you travel 800,000 years into the future, as Wells’ time traveller does, without packing a sandwich, let alone a camera or a weapon? I know that is a ridiculously literal response to a science fiction story, but good science fiction is above all plausible. If I could forward travel in time I would like to know how society reshapes itself in 100 years, what new technology is developed, whether extra-terrestrial life is encountered, so many other things – but 800,000 years?? Given that the existing span of human civilization can be measured in single-figure thousands of years, it seems wildly optimistic to imagine that humans will still be around this far into the future.

I appreciate I am still being too literal – time travel is simply a device to allow Wells to speculate on how human society will evolve, and we need not get too absorbed with the precise date – this is simply the vaguely distant future. In this future humans have evolved into two distinct races, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Morlocks live underground, and predate upon the simple-minded Eloi. Society is decaying terminally. Into this world the time traveller is pitched, loses his machine, and is forced to confront his slowly dawning realisation that this is no Utopia he had hoped man would have built for himself.

Wells’s conception of time travel is quaint. It doesn’t involve Government-led endeavours and vast resources – an independent inventor working in his shed is able to master the feat after a few years of study. He sets off in an extraordinarily blase fashion, making no preparation whatsover – this is a quick jaunt into the future, not an expedition risking life and limb, back in time for a quick bath and dinner at eight. Victorians were of course great explorers, and often quite eccentric into the bargain, but Wells’ s time traveller takes this to the extreme.

One of the most distinctive features of Wells’ writing is his focus on the personal, the everyday, even when his themes are global or astronomical. As I mentioned in my review of ‘War of the Worlds’, the Martian conflict is constrained within the English Home Counties, and described from the limited perspective of two individual observers. The scenes from ‘The Invisible Man’ are all rooted in suburban and rural England. Kipps and Mr Polly follow the same pattern – his protagonists are everymen. It is no coincidence that the central characters in ‘The War of the Worlds’ and ‘The Time Machine’ are both unnamed. This allows them to act as representatives of their class and time.

However, politically, ‘The Time Machine’ is a difficult book. Wells is commonly considered as a socialist, but his portrait of a future in which the working class has become a cannibalistic underground monster, preying on the weak and enfeebled middle classes, is profoundly pessimistic. It not only expresses “Wells’s horror at the realities of 19th-century class relations, but also his fears about what utopian socialism and communism were offering in their place” (Matthew Taunton). It is hard to travel back from the dystopia of 800,000 to 1895 and find a way to avoid this co-evolution and class war.

It’s been interesting to revisit Wells, but I remain ambivalent about his status as a writer. Influential, without question. I think his social comedies have aged less well than his science fiction. But if I ever am at a loss to put into words my thoughts and feelings about a novel or a writer, there is always one reliable solution, and that is to turn to George Orwell. Try it – he almost always has something sensible and interesting to say about any author of his time or before. Reliably, he puts his finger on this sense of unease. In ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, published in Horizon in 1941, he wrote:

“Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation… I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”

But he goes on to say

“the singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now…. Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells….But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world… He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. “

Orwell anatomises with extraordinary precision why Wells’s utilitarian version of socialism had not come to pass, even though the scientific advances he anticipated had been realised and indeed exceeded:

“Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to slay them…Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.”

“Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present“. Wow.

 

 

 

War of the Worlds by H G Wells, 1897

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

I come from the generation that finds it physically impossible to read that opening paragraph without hearing Richard Burton’s magnificent voice, providing the narration for Jeff Wayne’s album.

I really enjoyed ‘War of the Worlds’. I can’t imagine you don’t know the basic premise, but just in case, here goes: aliens attack Woking, and thence Southern England. Not so much war of the worlds therefore as Martians vs the Home Counties. And of course ‘we’ win, in a way that had allowed Europeans to win so many earlier colonial wars.

The Invisible Man, by H G Wells, 1897

The power to transform the human body using advances in scientific understanding. This was the theme that captured the imagination of many nineteenth century writers, including, among others, Mary Shelley in ‘Frankenstein‘, Robert Louis Stevenson in ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde‘, and H.G. Wells in ‘The Invisible Man‘. In this late Victorian novella, Wells explores the idea of what would happen if someone, somehow, managed to make themselves invisible.

The History of Mr Polly by H G Wells, 1910

Most Victorian novels were about prosperous people. Yes, they sometimes had money worries, but they weren’t urban working class. Dickens changed all that, and people from all parts of the class spectrum became suitable subjects. However, the petit bourgouise, the shop keeping class, technically bosses in that they were self employed, but dirt poor nonetheless, were largely ignored. That changed with the Grossmiths’ ‘Diary of a Nobody’ in 1892, and ‘The History of Mr Polly’ is an early entry in this ‘little man and his troubles’ or ‘white collar’ genre.

‘Mr Polly’ opens with him sitting on a stile, grumbling. He hates his life. He doesn’t love or particularly even like his wife, he finds his job as a shopkeeper dull and unfulfilling, and he mourns the absence of any romance or culture in his life. He also suffers horribly from chronic indigestion, representative of his dissatisfaction with life. The first half of the novel is a flash-back from this point, chronicling how he has always felt this way, more or less, and how he reaches this nadir. He settles on suicide as the only logical escape, and having made that decision implements his plan quite calmly. Inevitably he botches the job, and in the process burns half his street down. Ironically this provides him, in the form of insurance money, an escape route, and he runs away. The final section of the novel sees him settled as a handyman at a country pub, living a bucolic but largely culture-free lifestyle that seems to suit him. This life is threatened by uncle Jim, the nephew of the landlady, a thug who menaces her for money. Polly discovers the hero inside himself, stands up to Uncle Jim, and in comic bumbling fashion defeats him.

Polly is quite an engaging anti-hero. He reminded me of Anthony Burgess’s Enderby, one of my comic legends. He has a kind heart, and does his best to avoid causing harm. he takes the hardships in life as they come, and looks for pleasure in small things. He has a way of mangling the language which is intended as humorous, and which just about manages to raise a smile. Despite his ineptitude in most things, somehow he manages to come out on top. Some of the set-piece scenes in the novel, such as his father’s funeral, where remote relatives descend on the wake and have a great day insulting one another, are enjoyable. If one looks hard for more serious themes, such as any traces of Wells’ Fabianism, they can be found, but the novel is not openly political. The main ‘message’ of Mr Polly’s history is that one should be true to oneself:

“when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary”

Mr Polly didn’t have such a terrible life. While slowly going bust in his shop, he didn’t suffer the privations many people experienced, and enjoyed many of the comforts of his Edwardian idyll – an idyll that was to be lost forever just a few years after this novel was published.