Wells social imagination
Wells social imaginationSocial Imagination
All novels are influenced by the social and cultural background of their authors, and clearly 'The Time Machine' is no exception. In view of this, there is a great deal which can be concluded from the respective ways in which the tale is presented. Wells prefaced his romance by a sketch in the old PALL-MALL GAZETTE, entitled "The Man of the Year Million", a priori study that made one thankful for one's prematurity. After that piece of logic, however, he tried another essay in evolution, published in 1895 in book form under the title of 'The Time Machine' -- the first of his romances.
Wells was writing in 1894-95, and his fantasy reflects the concerns of his day. As a socialist sympathizer, and later a Fabian and reformer, Wells saw all around him the exploitation of the working class in the factories and mills of his time. They worked long hours, for starvation wages, living in appalling housing conditions. At the same time, the wealthy industrialists and leisured classes lived a life of pleasure and ease. It is to expose this division in society, which forms the satirical purpose of his novel, 'The Time Machine'. He extrapolates this situation of social injustice into the far future, the world of 802, 701 AD.
The machine itself is the vaguest of mechanical assumptions, a thing of ivory, quartz, nickel and brass that quite illogically carries its rider into an existing past or future. We accept the machine as a literary device to give an air of probability to the essential thing, the experience; and forget the means in the effect. The criterion of the prophecy in this case is influenced by the theory of "natural selection." Mr. Wells' vision of the "Sunset of Mankind" was of men so nearly adapted to their environment that the need to struggle, with the corollary of the extermination of the unfit, had practically ceased. Humanity had become differentiated into two races, both recessive. The Eloi, the descendants of the leisured classes, have become child-like androgynous creatures, weak and unable to fend for them selves. Their lives of leisure are enjoyed only at the cost of premature death, at the hands of the cannibalistic Morlocks. The Morlocks, the descendants of the working classes long ago driven into subterranean factories, have degenerated into troglodytes, still with some intellectual capacity, but emerging at night to prey on the hapless Eloi. Wells' Time Traveler is filled with despair and a sense of futility. Is it for this that he has striven so long to build his...
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