Time Machine and The Invisible Man (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (36 page)

And then he subsides into a pensive state, watches you furtively, bustles nervously with glasses, and presently leaves the bar.

He is a bachelor man—his tastes were ever bachelor, and there are no women folk in the house. Outwardly he buttons—it is expected of him—but in his more vital privacies, in the matter of braces for example, he still turns to string. He conducts his house without enterprise, but with eminent decorum. His movements are slow, and he is a great thinker. But he has a reputation for wisdom and for a respectable parsimony in the village, and his knowledge of the roads of the South of England would beat Cobbett.
¹

And on Sunday mornings, every Sunday morning, all the year round, while he is closed to the outer world, and every night after ten, he goes into his bar parlour, bearing a glass of gin faintly tinged with water, and having placed this down, he locks the door and examines the blinds, and even looks under the table. And then, being satisfied of his solitude, he unlocks the cupboard and a box in the cupboard and a drawer in that box, and produces three volumes bound in brown leather, and places them solemnly in the middle of the table. The covers are weather-worn and tinged with an algal
^mk
‘ green—for once they sojourned in a ditch and some of the pages have been washed blank by dirty water. The landlord sits down in an armchair, fills a long clay pipe slowly—gloating over the books the while. Then he pulls one towards him and opens it, and begins to study it—turning over the leaves backwards and forwards.

His brows are knit and his lips move painfully. “Hex, little two up in the air, cross and a fiddle-de-dee.
²
Lord! what a one he was for intellect!”

Presently he relaxes and leans back, and blinks through his smoke across the room at things invisible to other eyes. “Full of secrets,” he says. “Wonderful secrets!

“Once I get the haul of them
^ml
—
Lord
!

“I wouldn’t do what he did; I’d just—well!” He pulls at his pipe.

So he lapses into a dream, the undying wonderful dream of his life. And though Kemp has fished unceasingly, and Adye
³
has questioned closely, no human being save the landlord knows those books are there, with the subtle secret of invisibility and a dozen other strange secrets written therein. And none other will know of them until he dies.

1
(p. 3)
Our
chairs, being his patents: The Time Traveller has invented and patented furniture in addition to his secret time-travel device, another kind of chair.

2
(p. 3)
the Psychologist:
Wells reduces his characters to disciplines or social roles; see also the Provincial Mayor, who speaks a few paragraphs down. Wells is concerned with character not as personality but as idea. The Provincial Mayor, for example, is not especially bright, and Wells mocks politicians for not being scientists.

3
(p. 4)
Can a cube that does not last for any time at, all, have a real existence?:
The Time Traveller says that in addition to “Length, Breadth, Thickness” (noted just below) an object must exist in time. Therefore time is the fourth dimension.

4
(p. 5)
his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing:
Wells must include this idea; otherwise, logic would suggest that the Time Traveller would age as he traveled ahead in time. In the world Wells has created, when traveling in time the individual neither ages nor grows younger.

5
(p. 6)
Our mental existences... are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave:
The Time Traveller asserts that thought is able to move back and forth in time. This statement, together with his reference to the balloon as a means to overcome gravity, indicates what his machine will accomplish: It will allow him to move backward and forward in time.

6
(p. 7)
plough you for the Little-go. The German Scholars have improved Greek so much:
Wells mocks contemporary classical scholarship, especially in Germany, where ancient Greek was regularized and systematized to the point that if a student were to use the Greek actually spoken by Homer or Plato he would probably fail (be ploughed) his examinations (the Little-go).

7
(p. 7) said 1: The “I” here is one of Wells’s witness-narrators, who provides a point of view not located within the protagonist, the Time Traveller, and is therefore seemingly objective.

8
(p. 9)
Into the future or the past—I don‘t, for certain, know which:
The point is that an object traveling through time is invisible to those whose time it passes through. This is the concept of “diluted presentation” noted a few paragraphs down.

1
(p. 15) anecdotes
of Hettie Potter
: Wells makes often snide allusions to his contemporaries. This may be a reference to Beatrice Webb (née Potter, 1858-1943); she and her husband Sidney Webb ( 1859-1947) were key figures in the Fabian Society, a Marxist socialist group founded in 1883—1884 to foster socialism without violent revolution. For a time, Wells himself was a member. The Silent Man may be the great artist, craftsman, and poet William Morris ( 1834-1896), another Marxist socialist, whose thinking was antithetical to that of Wells. The red-haired Filby may be the dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856—1950), yet another Fabian. Wells did not want the “workers’ paradise” envisioned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the
Communist Manifesto
(1848)—a utopia of leisure represented in this novel by the feckless Eloi—but an anthill society of disciplined laborers pushing humanity further and further into the technological conquest of the universe.

2
(p. 16)
In writing it down... I feel . . . the inadequacy of pen and ink... to express its quality:
The narrator (Hillyer) points out the disparity between the Time Traveller’s dramatic account and his own written words.

1
(p. 18)
What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization:
The Time Traveller expects the future to be a golden age. This reflects nineteenth-century optimism, especially the age’s faith in technology. He is disappointed to find instead a two-class society: the indolent, pleasure-loving Eloi, the degenerate remnants of an aristocratic class; and the subterranean Morlocks, the equally degenerate remnants of the proletariat, who feed and clothe the Eloi in order to eat them.

2
(p. 19)
But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself... into whatever lay in my way:
The Time Traveller fears that if he stops his passage through time in the wrong place he may materialize within an object and kill himself.

3
(p. 20)
a winged sphinx:
The Time Traveller, greeted by a hailstorm, identifies first a rhododendron, a decorative shrub with flowers, and a huge, weathered statue of a hovering sphinx. The frail flowers are pounded by the hail and may represent the relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks. The sphinx here symbolizes mystery or enigma: Is its smile one of mockery—because the Time Traveller’s expectations about the future are turned upside down? Is its condition, suggestive “of disease” (a few lines down), an image of the diseased state of humanity?

4
(p. 21)
very beautiful . . . but indescribably frail:
This is the Time Traveller’s first encounter with the Eloi: small, weak, seemingly diseased, but beautiful in the style of nineteenth-century English art, like the figures in Pre-Raphaelite paintings or in the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley (1872—1898)—the kind of art for art’s sake that Wells despised.

1
(p. 22)
their Dresden-china type of prettiness:
Dresden-china figurines, often of shepherds and shepherdesses, were purely decorative and of no practical use. The Eloi, though sexually active, are androgynous figures; for example, the male lacks a beard, a feature common to most men in the late-nineteenth century. The Time Traveller quickly concludes that the Eloi are of extremely limited intelligence, friendly but with no interests but sensual pleasure. Their language sounds like music but lacks real content. Like the inhabitants of the South Sea islands, they deck out the visitor with flowers by way of greeting, but they have no curiosity about him.

2
(p. 25)
strict vegetarians:
The Eloi eat only fruit, but whether this is by choice or by breeding is unclear; all other animals are extinct.

3
(p. 26)
there were no small houses to be seen:
The Eloi have only communal buildings, and the family no longer exists. Wells would approve of this society under other circumstances because it makes everyone children of society, and identity derives from community, not family or nation. The Eloi all dress alike, so the sexes are not dif ferentiated by costume. The children are simply copies of the adults, and grow up quickly, at least in sexual terms. A few lines down, the Time Traveller concludes that they live a communistic life, but he cannot at this point determine its nature.

4
(p. 28)
the whole earth had become a garden:
Here “garden” means a park with plants and trees, rather than a place where food plants are cultivated—that is, there is no wilderness left. In the paragraphs that follow, Wells suggests that the new golden age he has entered, despite the fact that there is no private property, is a nightmare. In depicting the classless society of the future, Wells parodies the relationship between humans and the animals they eat.

5
(p. 29)
The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating.
This is Wells’s idea of what will result if his notions of industrial socialism and the unification of labor and production take effect. There will be no families, no nations, no patriotism, no religion.

6
(p. 30)
the fate of energy in security:
Wells shows his contempt for the golden age promised by the Marxists. Unless humanity continues to work (see, a few lines down, “the grindstone of pain and necessity”) it will degenerate. These ideas are not unique to Wells and reflect one of the major currents of late-nineteenth-century thought: the need to return to nature; this is the message to be found in W. H. Hudson’s
The Purple Land
(1885).

1
(p. 36)
their language was excessively simple.... few, if any, abstract
terms: The Eloi communicate using nouns (concrete substantives) and verbs. Their minds produce almost no abstract thoughts or metaphors.

2
(p. 37)
sanitary apparatus:
The Time Traveller is fascinated by what he takes to be a sewage system, a novelty in England at the time the novel appeared.

3
(p. 37)
Utopias:
The word “utopia” derives from the Greek for “no place,” and signifies an imaginary community, perfect in laws and social relationships. Sir Thomas More coined the term in 1516, but Edward Bellamy
(Looking Backward,
1888) and William Morris
(News from Nowhere,
1891 ) had written about new utopias in the nineteenth century. Here Wells criticizes Morris, a Marxist.

4
(p. 37)
gap between a negro and a white man:
Wells’s racist attitude toward blacks, typical of his time, also reflects the attitude of the Time Traveller to the Eloi—he considers them inferior.

5
(p. 38)
the poor mite:
The phrase means “poor little thing.” Weena is not a person for the Time Traveller but a kind of pet. Her name may be a decayed form of Rowena, a mythological figure in English history. Rowena is alluring, while Weena is not. Two paragraphs down, the Time Traveller says he hasn’t come into the future to engage in “a miniature flirtation.”

6
(p. 41 )
Grant Allen’s:
A member of the Fabian Society, Grant Allen was the author of
Strange Stories
(1884).

7
(p. 41)
the younger Darwin:
George Howard Darwin (1845—1912), son of Charles Darwin, speculated that the orbit of the earth around the sun would eventually decay—the earth would fall back into the sun. The Time Traveller finds the weather hot and wonders if the sun is hotter or if the earth is closer to the sun. The theory that the sun will someday die is brought to narrative life toward the end of the novel (chapter XI) when the Time Traveller visits the last age of planetary life.

8
(p. 42)
little ape-like figure:
The Time Traveller sees a Morlock. Their similarities to the Yahoos in
Gulliver’s Travels
reflects Wells’s admiration for Swift. The Time Traveller is disgusted at the sight of them, much preferring the Eloi, harmless, pretty, but inferior human types. If the Eloi are degenerate aristocrats, the Morlocks are degenerate factory workers.

9
(p. 43)
the economic problem:
The Time Traveller until now had been unable to see how the Eloi were fed and clothed. In the pages that follow, he links the Morlocks to the poor workers of his own day; gradually the workers have adapted to underground life. But the Time Traveller still thinks the Eloi are the masters and the Morlocks their slaves, not realizing the Eloi are nothing more than food for the Morlocks.