For a while, Wells believed this quiet, secluded existence was to be his life, but once again he was mistaken, as this was an imaginary truce. Apparently chance considered him a most amusing toy, for it decided to change the course of his life again, although this time the new twist involved the pleasant, popular veneer of fated love.
In the classroom Wells had established friendly relations with a pupil of his, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he nicknamed Jane.
During the walk they happened to share to Charing Cross Station to catch their respective trains, Wells could not help mesmerizing the girl with his eloquent banter, which he indulged in with no other purpose than to allow himself to swell with pride at being able to impress such a beautiful, adorable girl with his words.
However, those friendly, innocent conversations ended up bearing unexpected fruit. His own wife, Isabel, alerted him to it on their return from a weekend in Putney, where they had been invited by Jane and her mother. It was she who assured him that whether or not he had intended it, the girl had fallen head over heels in love with him. Wells could only raise an eyebrow when his wife demanded he stop seeing his ex-pupil if he wanted their marriage to survive. The choice between the woman who refused his caresses and the cheerful and apparently uninhibited Jane was not difficult. And so Wells packed up his books, his furniture, and the wicker basket, and moved into a miserable hovel in Mornington Place in a run-down area of north London between Euston and Camden Town. He wished he could have abandoned the marital home spurred on by a violent passion, but he had to leave that to Jane. His real reasons for leaving were the playful curiosity he felt when he glimpsed her little body beneath her dress, and above all the chance to escape monotony and discover a new life, given that he could predict how the old one would turn out.
However, his first impression was that love had caused him to make a serious mistake: not only had he moved to the worst possible place for his tormented lungs—a neighborhood where the air was polluted by soot borne on the wind, fatally mixed with smoke from the locomotives passing through on their way north—but Jane’s mother, convinced her poor daughter had fallen into the clutches of a degenerate because Wells was still married to Isabel, had moved in with the couple. She seemed determined to undermine their patience with her endless, vociferous reproaches.
These unforeseen events, together with the additional worrying certainty that it would be impossible for him to run no less than three homes on the proceeds of his articles, compelled Wells to take the basket ,and shut himself in one of the cupboards in the house, the only place safe from Mrs. Robbins’s intrusive presence.
Hidden in amongst the coats and hats, he stroked the wicker for hours on end, like Aladdin trying to bring back the power of his magic lamp.
This may have seemed an absurd, desperate, or even pathetic strategy, but the fact is that the day after he performed this rubbing of the basket, Lewis Hind, the literary editor of the weekly supplement at the Gazette sent for him. He needed someone capable of writing stories with a scientific slant, short stories reflecting on and even predicting where the relentless onslaught of inventions bent on changing the face of that century would lead. Hind was convinced Wells was the ideal man for the job.
What he was proposing, in fact, was that he resurrect his childhood dream and have another stab at seeing whether he could become a writer. Wells accepted, and in a few days drafted a story entitled “The Stolen Bacillus,” which Hind was delighted with, and which earned Wells five guineas. The story also drew the attention of William Ernest Henley, editor of the National Observer, who promptly invited him to contribute to the pages of his journal, convinced the young man would be capable of producing far more ambitious stories if he had more room to experiment. Wells was delighted and terrified in equal measure at being given the chance to write for such a prestigious magazine, which at that time was publishing a serialized version of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” by his idol, Conrad. This was no longer writing news items, articles, or short stories. He was being offered the space for his imagination to run wild, the freedom to be a real writer of fiction.
Wells awaited his meeting with Henley in a state of nervous tension bordering on collapse. Since the editor of The National Observer had asked to see him, Wells had been rummaging through his large mental stockpile of ideas in search of a story original and striking enough to impress the veteran publisher, but none of them seemed to live up to his offer. The rendezvous was drawing near, and Wells still did not have a good story to show Henley. It was then that he turned to the basket and saw that, although it looked empty, it was actually brimming with novels, a cornucopia that only needed a gentle nudge in order to pour forth its torrent of ideas. This extravagant image was of course Wells’s way of wrapping up in poetic language what really happened when he saw the basket: inevitably he remembered his conversation with Merrick, and to his amazement, he discovered, like a nugget of gold lying at the bottom of a muddy stream, another idea that could be made into a novel. Whether deliberately or by accident, it was as though Merrick had supplied him with enough ideas and plots to last several years while they pretended they were only having tea. He recalled Merrick’s disappointment at Dr. Nebogipfel being so uninterested in traveling into the future, in venturing into the unknown world of tomorrow, and this omission appeared worth rectifying now that he had the experience of writing all those articles.
And so, without a second thought, he got rid of the unsavory Nebogipfel, replacing him with a respectable, anonymous scientist in whom any inventor could see himself portrayed, and who even embodied the archetypal scientist of the dawning new century. Endeavoring to create something more than just a naïve fantasy out of his idea of time travel, Wells gave it the same scientific veneer he had given the stories he wrote for Hind, making use of a theory he had developed in his earlier essays published in the Fortnightly Review: the idea that time was the fourth dimension in a universe that only appeared to be three-dimensional. The idea would be far more impressive if he used it to explain the workings of the contraption his character would use to travel through the time continuum. A few years earlier, an American medium called Henry Slade had been tried for criminal deception. Besides bragging of his ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead, he would drop knots, conches and snails” shells into his magician’s hat and then pull out identical versions, only with the spirals going in the other direction, as if he had plucked them out of a mirror. Slade maintained that hidden in his hat was a secret passageway to the fourth dimension, which explained the strange reversal the objects underwent. To many people’s astonishment, the magician was defended by a handful of eminent physicists, including Johann Zöllner, professor of physics and astronomy, all of whom argued that what might appear to be a fraud from a three-dimensional point of view was perfectly feasible in a four-dimensional universe. The whole of London was on tenterhooks during the trial. And this, together with the work of Charles Hinton, a mathematician who had come up with the idea of a hypercube, a cube out of phase with time that contained every single instant of its existence, all occurring at the same time—something that, naturally, man’s current obsolete three-dimensional vision prevented him from seeing—made Wells realize that the idea of the fourth dimension was in the air. No one was sure what it involved, but the words sounded so mysterious and evocative that society longed for, positively demanded it to be real. For most people, the known world was a tiresome, hostile place, but that was because they could only see part of it. Now, people were consoled by the notion that, just as a bland roast of meat is made tastier by seasoning, the universe improved if they imagined it was no longer reduced to what they were able to see, but contained a secret hidden component that could somehow make it bigger. The fourth dimension gave their dull planet a magical feel; it conjured up the existence of a different world, where desires that were impossible in the three-dimensional world might be realized. And these suspicions were backed up by concrete actions such as the recent foundi
ng of the Society for Psychic Research in London.
Wells was also forced to endure becoming embroiled almost every day in tiresome debates on the nature of time with his colleagues at the Faculty of Science. One thing led to another, as they say, and as every thinker was turning the fourth dimension into his private playground, Wells had no difficulty combining both ideas in order to develop his theory of time as another spatial dimension through which it was possible to travel in exactly the same way as the other three.
By the time he entered Henley’s office, he could visualize his novel with startling clarity, enabling him to relay it with a preacher’s conviction and zeal. The time traveler’s story would be divided into two parts. In the first he would explain the workings of his machine to a gathering of skeptical guests, to whom he had chosen to present his invention, and whom he must try to convince. This group would consist of a doctor, a mayor, a psychologist, and some other representative of the middle classes.
Unlike Jules Verne, who took up whole chapters with detailed explanations of how his contraptions worked—as though he himself doubted their credibility—Wells’s explanations would be straightforward and concise, using simple examples that would enable the reader to assimilate an idea that might otherwise seem too abstract. As you are aware, his inventor would observe, the three spatial dimensions (length, breadth, and thickness) are defined in reference to three planes, each of which is at right angles to the other. However, under normal circumstances, man’s movement through his three-dimensional universe was incomplete. He had no difficulty moving along its length and breadth, but was unable to overcome the laws of gravity in order to move up and down freely, except by using a hot-air balloon. Man was similarly trapped in the timeline, and could only move in time mentally— summoning up the past through memory, or visualizing the future by means of his imagination. However, he could free himself from this constraint if he had a machine, which, like the hot-air balloon, enabled him to triumph over the impossible, that is to say, to project himself physically into the future by speeding up time, or going back into the past by slowing it down. In order to help his guests understand the idea of this fourth dimension, the inventor used the example of mercury in a barometer: this moved up and down over a period of days, yet the line represented by its movement was drawn not in any recognized spatial dimension, but in the time dimension.
The second part of the novel would describe the journey that his main character would undertake in order to put his machine to the test once his guests had left. As a tribute to Merrick’s memory, he would set off towards the unfathomable oceans of the future, a future Wells outlined briefly but eloquently to the editor of the National Observer. Henley, an enormous fellow, virtually a giant, condemned to walk with a crutch because of a botched childhood operation, and on whom Stevenson claimed to have based his idea for Long John Silver, pulled an incredulous face. Talking about the future was dangerous. It was rumored in literary circles that Verne himself had portrayed tomorrow’s world in a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century, but that his editor, Jules Hetzel, had refused to publish it, considering naïve and pessimistic his vision of 1960, when criminals were executed by electric shock and a system of “photographic telegraphs” made it possible to send copies of documents anywhere in the world. And it seemed Verne had not been the only author to envisage the future. Many others had tried and failed in the same way. But Wells did not let Henley’s words discourage him. Leaning forwards in his seat, he stood up for himself, assuring Henley that people were eager to read about the future, and that someone should take the risk and publish the first novel about it.
And so it was that, in 1893, The Time Machine came out in serial form in the prestigious National Observer. However, to Wells’s understandable despair, before the novel could be published in its entirety, the owners of the magazine sold it. The new board of directors carried out the usual purges, putting an end to Henley and his publishing projects. Happily, Wells scarcely had time to wallow in his misfortune, for Henley, like his Stevensonian alter ego, was a hard nut to crack, and immediately took over at the helm of the New Review, where he offered to continue serializing the story of the time traveler, and even convincing the stubborn William Heinemann to publish the novel.
Encouraged by Henley’s doggedness, Wells resolved to complete his unfinished novel. However, as was becoming the custom, this turned out to be a difficult undertaking, hampered by the usual impediments, although this time of a far more humiliating nature. At the insistence of his doctors, Wells had once again moved to the country with Jane, to a modest boardinghouse in Sevenoaks. But along with the wicker basket and a stream of boxes and trunks, came Mrs. Robbins, like a piece of junk no one dared throw out. By this time, Jane’s mother had gone to unspeakable lengths in her role of leech, reducing her daughter to little more than a pale worn-out shell with her constant complaints. Mrs. Robbins had no need of reinforcements in her war of attrition against Wells but found an unexpected ally in the boardinghouse landlady once she discovered that it was not a marriage being consummated each night in her house, but the sinful cohabitation of a shy young girl and a depraved defendant in a divorce suit. Battling on two fronts, Wells was scarcely able to concentrate sufficiently to make any headway with his novel.
His only consolation was that the section of the plot—the time traveler’s journey—to which he was doing his best to give shape, interested him far more than the part he had already written, as it enabled him to steer the novel towards the domain of social allegory, where he could deal with the political questions simmering inside him.
Convinced that in the distant future mankind would have succeeded in evolving fully on a scientific as well as a spiritual level, the time traveler rode across the plains of time on his machine until he reached the year 802,701, a date chosen at random, and sufficiently far off in the future for him to be able to verify his predictions in situ. By the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, terrorized by the landlady’s threats filtering through his window on the August breeze, Wells related, in fits and starts, his inventor’s foray into a world that resembled a huge enchanted garden.
To complete the enchantment, this Garden of Eden was inhabited by the extremely beautiful slender Eloi, the exquisite result of a human evolution that had not only corrected the weaknesses of the species, but had taken the opportunity of ridding it along the way of ugliness, coarseness, and other unprepossessing features. From what the traveler was able to observe once he was amongst them, these delicate Eloi lived a peaceful life, in harmony with nature, without laws or government, and free from ill health, financial troubles, or any other kind of difficulty that would make survival a struggle. Nor did they appear to have any notion of private property: everything was shared in that almost utopic society which personified the Enlightenment’s most hopeful predictions about the future of civilization. Like a benevolent, somewhat romantic creator, Wells even had his inventor establish a friendly relationship with a female Eloi named Weena, who insisted on following him around everywhere after he saved her from drowning in a river, captivated like a child by the charm the stranger exuded. Whenever the inventor’s back was turned, Weena, fragile and slender as a porcelain doll, would garland him with flowers or fill his pockets with blossoms, gestures that conveyed the gratitude she was unable to express through her language, which although mellow and sweet, remained dishearteningly impenetrable to the inventor’s ear.
Once Wells had painted this idyllic picture, he proceeded to destroy it with merciless, satirical precision. A couple of hours with the Eloi was enough for the traveler to understand that things were not as perfect as they seemed: these were indolent creatures, with no cultural interests or any drive towards self-improvement, incapable of higher feelings, a bunch of idlers imbued with a hedonism bordering on simplemindedness. Freed from the dangers that stir courage in men’s hearts, the human race had culminated in these lazy, sensual creatures, because intelligence could not thrive where there was
no change and no necessity for change. As if that were not enough, the sudden disappearance of his time machine aroused the inventor’s suspicions that the Eloi were not alone in that world. Clearly they shared it with other inhabitants who had the strength to move the machine from where he had left it and hide it inside a gigantic sphinx dominating the landscape. He was not mistaken: beneath the make-believe paradise dwelled the Morlocks, a simian race afraid of daylight, who he would soon discover to his horror had regressed to a state of savage cannibalism. It was the Morlocks who fed the Eloi, fattening their neighbors who lived above ground before gorging on them in their subterranean world.
Their reprehensible eating habits notwithstanding, the traveler was forced to acknowledge that the last vestiges of human intelligence and reason survived in that brutal race, which their need to be able to operate the network of machinery in their underground tunnels helped preserve.
Afraid of remaining trapped in the future, with no means of traveling back to his own time, the inventor had no alternative but to follow in the footsteps of Aeneas, Orpheus, and Hercules and descend into the underworld, into the realm of the Morlocks, to retrieve his machine. Having done so, he made a frenzied escape through time, traveling deep into the future, until he arrived at a strange beach stretching out beneath a shadowy sky. He could see from a swift glance at this new future, whose rarefied air made his lungs smart, that life had divided into two species: a variety of giant, screeching white butterfly, and a terrifying crab with enormous pincers which he was glad to get away from. No longer curious about what had befallen mankind, which had apparently become completely extinct, but about the Earth itself, the inventor continued his journey in great strides of a thousand years. At his next stop, more than thirty million years from his own time, he discovered a desolate planet, an orb that had almost stopped rotating, like a tired spinning top feebly illuminated by a dying sun. A scant snowfall struggled to spread its white veil over a place where there was no sound of life. The twitter of birds, the bleating of sheep, the buzz of insects, and the barking of dogs that made up the music of life were no more than a flicker in the traveler’s memory. Then he noticed a bizarre creature with tentacles splashing around in the reddish sea before him, and his profound grief gave way to a nameless dread that compelled him to clamber back onto his machine. Back in the seat, at the helm of time, he felt a dreadful emptiness. He felt no curiosity about the ominous landscapes awaiting him further into the future, nor did he wish to go back in time, now he knew that all men’s achievements had been futile endeavors. He decided the moment had come for him to go back to his own time, to where he truly belonged. On the way back he ended by closing his eyes, for now that the journey in reverse made extinction into a false resurrection, he could not bear to see the world around him grow verdant, the sun recover its stifled splendor, the houses and buildings spring up again, testaments to the progress and trends in human architecture. He only opened his eyes again when he felt himself surrounded by the familiar four walls of his laboratory. Then he pulled the lever and the world stopped being a nebulous cloud and took on its old consistency again.