Notes 1 Introduction 1. H. G. Wells, Interview with the Weekly Sun Literary Supplement, 1 December 1895; reprinted in ‘A Chat with the Author of The Time Machine, Mr H. G. Wells’, edited with comment by David C. Smith, The Wellsian, n.s. 20 (1997), 3–9 (p. 8). 2. Wells himself labelled his early scientific fantasies as ‘scientific romances’ when he published a collection with Victor Gollancz entitled The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells in 1933, thus ensuring the adoption of the term in subsequent critical discussions of his work. The term appears to have origi- nated with the publication of Charles Howard Hinton’s Scientific Romances (1886), a collection of speculative scientific essays and short stories. 3. It should be noted, however, that Wells’s controversial second scientific romance, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), did not appear in a serialised form. However, The Invisible Man was published in Pearson’s Weekly in June and July 1897, When the Sleeper Wakes was published in The Graphic between January and May 1899, The First Men in the Moon was published in the Strand Magazine between December 1900 and August 1901 and A Modern Utopia was serialised in the Fortnightly Review between October 1904 and April 1905. 4. A number of Wells’s most significant scientific essays have been available for some time in an anthology, H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. by Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (London: University of California Press, 1975). 5. ‘A Chat with the Author of The Time Machine’, p. 6. 6. In an appreciative review of T. H. Huxley – who had lectured him as a student at the Normal School of Science (now part of Imperial College, London) – Wells himself indicates that he had begun reading the periodicals during his days as a student: ‘we borrowed the books he [Huxley] wrote, we clubbed out of our weekly guineas to buy the Nineteenth Century whenever he rat- tled Gladstone or pounded the Duke of Argyle’. H. G. Wells, ‘Huxley’, Royal College of Science Magazine, 13 (1901), 209–11 (p. 211). 7. For a partly dissenting view, see Leon Stover, ‘Applied Natural History: Wells vs. Huxley’, in H. G. Wells Under Revision, ed. by Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986), pp. 125–33. 8. Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890–1950 (London: Fourth Estate, 1985), pp. 11–17. 9. In his Experiment in Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Gollancz, 1934), Wells himself acknowledged the role of earlier Education Acts in his success as a writer: ‘The Education Act of 1871 had not only enlarged the reading public very greatly but it had stimulated the middle class by a sense of possible com- petition from below’, II, 507. 193 194 Notes 10. For a more detailed discussion of the precursors of the scientific romance, see Stableford’s Scientific Romance in Britain, especially chapter 2, ‘Scientific Romance and Its Literary Ancestors’, pp. 18–43. 11. Roslynn D. Haynes, H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future, The Influence of Science on His Thought (London: New York University Press, 1980). 12. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 2 Heart of Darkness: The Time Machine and Retrogression 1. V. S. Pritchett, The Living Novel (1946) (London: Arrow: 1960), p. 127. 2. Unsigned Notice, Daily Chronicle, 27 July 1895, p. 3; reprinted in H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Patrick Parrinder (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 38–9 (p. 38). 3. What distinguished Wells was his use of a technological device which allowed its user to control their journey through time. Previous time travel narratives had used more simplistic means of transporting the protagonist in time. Edward Bellamy, for example, used a hypnotic sleep in his Looking Backward (1888) in order to transfer his protagonist forward to the year 2000. Mark Twain, in con- trast, used a bang on the head as a means of moving his central character back in time in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Of course, Wells himself would use a hypnotic sleep in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), in which the protagonist, Graham, awakens in the year 2100 to discover a nightmarish version of the industrialised socialist Utopia envisaged by Bellamy. On time travel narratives before and after The Time Machine, see W. M. S. Russell, ‘Time Before and After The Time Machine’, Foundation, 65 (1995), 24–40. 4. Daily Chronicle, p. 38. 5. Unsigned Notice, Review of Reviews, 11 (1895), 263. 6. It should be noted that, while those notices that did appear were favourable, The Time Machine was not widely reviewed. Indeed, an anonymous reviewer in the Review of Reviews remarked: ‘I cannot understand why so little atten- tion has been paid in the Press and elsewhere to the remarkable story which Mr. Wells is contributing to the pages of the New Review.’ Unsigned, ‘Will the Future be to the Cannibals? A Nightmare of Civilisation’ [review of The Time Machine], Review of Reviews, 11 (1895), 346. 7. Letter to Elizabeth Healey, December 1894, The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, ed. by David C. Smith, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), I, 226. 8. Geoffrey West, H. G. Wells: A Sketch for a Portrait (London: Howe, 1930), pp. 291–2. In one of these versions as reported by West the upper and lower world inhabitants are not yet distinct species and the disruptive presence of the time travellers results in the working population of the underworld rising up to massacre the idle surface dwellers. This of course prefigures When the Sleeper Wakes. Interestingly, in his H. G. Wells: Traversing Time (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), W. Warren Wagar argues that When the Sleeper Wakes should be envisioned as a ‘pre- quel’ to The Time Machine: Instead of A.D. 802,701, the year is A.D. 2100, a little more than two cen- turies from the publication date of the novel. The fission of humanity Notes 195 into two separate and degenerate species has not yet occurred, but the warfare between capital and labor that will ultimately lead to it has become acute. (p. 67) 9. The National Oberver version of The Time Machine is reprinted in Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction. Both the National Observer version and ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ are reprinted in The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, ed. by Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987). ‘The Chronic Argounauts’ is also reprinted in Bernard Bergonzi’s The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961). 10. Henry Holt published a slightly earlier version of the novel, with the erro- neous name ‘H. S. Wells’ printed on the title page, on 7 May in New York. However, the Heinemann text published in Britain on 29 May is generally acknowledged as the ‘final’ version. For a more detailed account of the development of The Time Machine, see Bernard Loing, ‘H. G. Wells at Work 1894–1900: A Writer’s Beginnings’, The Wellsian, n.s. 8 (1985), 30–7. Loing investigates the construction of The Time Machine more fully in his H. G. Wells À L’oeuvre: Les débuts d’un écrivain (1894–1900) (Paris: Didier, 1984). See also, Robert M. Philmus, ‘H. G. Wells’s Revisi(tati)ons of The Time Machine’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 41 (1998), 427–52. 11. As Wells’s biographers Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie point out: ‘The new geology, the new astronomy, the new mathematics and the new physics were all sciences vitally concerned with time.’ The Time Traveller: The Life of H. G. Wells (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp. 121–2. 12. Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), pp. 41–2. 13. Parrinder, Shadows of the Future, p. 42. 14. It should be noted, however, that the 1960 George Pal film version of The Time Machine projects the contemporary setting of the novel forward to the beginning of the new century. 15. The Works of H. G. Wells: Atlantic Edition, 28 vols (London: Unwin, 1924– 1927), I, The Time Machine, The Wonderful Visit and Other Stories, p. 5. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited in parenthesis in the text. Wells was probably familiar with ‘Modern Mathematical Thought’, a tran- scription of Newcomb’s address published in Nature, 49 (1894), 325–9. On developments in theories of the fourth-dimension since The Time Machine was published, see Alan Mayne, ‘The Virtual Time Machine: Part II – Some Physicists’ Views of Time Travel’, The Wellsian, n.s. 20 (1997), 20–31. 16. In his H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine: A Reference Guide (London and Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2004), John Hammond acknowledges the reference to Newcomb, but overlooks the Medical Man’s recollections, leading him to conclude: ‘We may infer therefore that the after-dinner con- versation at Richmond takes place in the early months of 1894’ (p. 21). 17. Kathryn Hume, for example, remarks on the way in which the Time Traveller utilises primitive energy in her article, ‘Eat or be Eaten: H. G. Wells’s Time Machine’, Philological Quarterly, 69 (1990), 233–51. 18. See Stephen Derry, ‘The Time Traveller’s Utopian Books and his Reading of the Future’, Foundation, 65 (1995), 16–24; also see Fernando Porta, ‘One 196 Notes Text, Many Utopias: Some Examples of Intertextuality in The Time Machine’, The Wellsian, n.s.