H. G. Wells gives his Time Traveller a future that looks like a holiday. When he arrives in the year 802,701, he finds people who eat fruit, live among gardens and seem to have little work to do. He takes the Eloi’s ease as evidence that humanity has conquered its hardest problems. Then his time machine disappears. Before he can get home, he has to figure out who still does the work in a world that appears to have outgrown it.
This article discusses the plot and ending of The Time Machine.
The Eloi look like the beneficiaries of progress
The Time Traveller initially reads the Eloi’s surroundings as the outcome of a successful civilization. Food seems plentiful, and the people he meets appear to have few demands on their time. He guesses that generations of security have made strength and ingenuity less necessary. The grand buildings are already decaying, though, and he sees little evidence that the Eloi know how to maintain them.
Watch what happens when Weena nearly drowns. The Traveller pulls her from the water while the other Eloi fail to intervene. Their inaction makes his theory about a world free of danger harder to sustain. Weena then seeks him out and shows him affection, giving him a reason to care about someone he has been treating as evidence for a theory. She also fears the dark, a detail that begins to make sense once he learns what lives underground.
The Morlocks expose what the surface conceals
The wells that dot the landscape lead to a second world. Down one shaft, the Traveller hears machinery and encounters the pale, light-sensitive Morlocks. He revises his theory. Perhaps the wealthy once lived above ground while workers were driven below, until the separation became so entrenched that their descendants evolved in different directions. It’s a Victorian class division stretched across hundreds of thousands of years.
The next revision is grimmer. The Traveller comes to believe the Morlocks prey on the Eloi. He had assumed that the people who inherited the gardens also inherited power. Now the people he imagined as servants appear to control what happens after dark. Even the time machine, hidden inside the pedestal of the White Sphinx, becomes part of that reversal. When the Morlocks open the doors and he goes inside to recover it, they shut him in.
Wells lets us see the evidence in the same order the Traveller does. That makes the early scenes worth rereading. The pleasant landscape never showed him how life there was sustained. He supplied that explanation himself.
The dying Earth puts human progress in perspective
After escaping the Morlocks, the Traveller goes farther into the future. He finds giant crablike creatures on a shore beneath a swollen red sun. When he travels farther still, the beach is cold and almost lifeless. The gardens, the machines and the struggle between the Eloi and Morlocks have all slipped out of view.
The change of scale gives the novella’s last pages their force. In 802,701, the Traveller can still ask what human choices produced the world he sees. On the far-future shore, he can barely recognize the world as his own. After he returns to his own century and departs again, the narrator is left with two flowers Weena gave him. That small piece of evidence survives the grand theories. It’s also a reminder of the person whose kindness he might have missed if he’d kept looking at the Eloi from a distance.
The Time Machine book club questions
- Which detail first made you doubt the Traveller’s account of how the Eloi came to live as they do?
- What does Weena’s response to being rescued reveal that the Traveller’s generalizations about the Eloi leave out?
- How much of the Traveller’s explanation for the Morlocks comes from what he observes, and how much comes from what he already believes about class?
- How would the novella feel if Wells had ended the journey with the Traveller’s escape from the White Sphinx?
- Why do you think Wells gives the narrator two flowers as the last physical evidence of the journey?
Read the book. Read The Time Machine free at Project Gutenberg. The paperback includes an introduction by Marina Warner and explanatory notes.
Further reading. For more fiction about what endures when familiar societies collapse, see 7 Post-Apocalyptic Novels for Readers Who Want More Than Survival Stories.
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