The Time Machine, H G Wells

While reading other posts on the H, G Wells The Time Machine and reading the confusion from some people about the story line, i would like to just mention that if you read up about the author H G Wells, how he grew up during the English Victorian Industrial Revolution era, the Novella of the Time Machine will make more sense. there is significance to issues such as disease, social status, and distinction between different classes of people. in the Novella this is shown between the Morlocks and the Eloi's. if you compare the living conditions and standards of family life, social status, working conditions and so on, you will have a deeper understanding of the Novella, this short story is not just about time travel and the things seen along the way. the story represents living conditions, social status and so on, during the period in time when H G Wells wrote this Novella.

HG Wells was expressing worries about the British class system of his day. The multitude of people struggled in poverty. They were over-worked when they had work and destitute when unemployed. They frequently lived in overcrowded conditions, ate a poor diet, possibly drank too much, and suffered from air pollution. As a result, they were often rather unhealthy looking, undersized and pale. Read Jack London's The People of the Abyss, which was a piece of reportage on London's East End in 1902. On the other hand, the well-to-do may not have to work at all. They could live off their investments. They were better fed, better clothed, breathed cleaner air, had more refined leisure pursuits. The two groups of people kept apart, I suppose it is likely that many of the wealthier class secretly feared the working class masses. They dreaded poverty.


It is also interesting from a science point of view. Charles Darwin has published On the Origin of Species about 40 years earlier. Other thinkers, for example Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer, were thinking how the theory applied to human evolution. About this time, the concept of Eugenics started to gain ground, which was theory that proposed that the human race could be improved by selective breeding, or by preventing who they considered defective from having children. Two other results from the Origin of Species were that a) many people's religious faith was shaken, and b) people had become that the earth was much older than had previously been thought.

I thought it was interesting from the time travel point of view too. The book was written about ten years before Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, which raised the possibility of time travel of a sort. There was obviously something in the air.

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Originally Posted by kev67

I thought it was interesting from the time travel point of view too. The book was written about ten years before Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, which raised the possibility of time travel of a sort. There was obviously something in the air.

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There are so many good novels talking about social, psychological, economical and other aspects of human life, but there are not so many good novels talking about time travel, as this one. Has the peak of this kind of novels been reached by the Wells' novel, I wonder.