The Time Machine - An Invention
First British edition, 1895
The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells is a landmark in science fiction and the author's first published novel. This is the definitive work of time-travel fiction, laying the foundation for an entire subgenre. Wells’s tale of a Victorian scientist who journeys into the dying light of the future, witnessing the rise and fall of civilizations, remains one of the most influential speculative works ever written.
This copy is a first British edition, first issue (first binding), retaining the earliest publisher’s catalogue with The Manxman listed as the first title. Published by William Heinemann in 1895, this edition appeared shortly after the American Holt edition but is textually distinct. While the American edition was based on an earlier version of the text, the Heinemann edition represents Wells's final, revised text and is widely considered the superior, definitive version of the novel.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Binding. Small octavo, pp. [1-8] 1-151 [152] + [16]-page publisher’s catalogue inserted at the rear. Bound in original decorated tan buckram, with front and spine panels stamped in purple and the publisher’s monogram in purple on the rear panel. Top and fore edges untrimmed, with a rough-trimmed bottom edge. London: William Heinemann, 1895. Anatomy of Wonder (1976) 2-161; (1981) 1-171; (1987) 1-103; (1995) 1-103; and (2004) II-1232. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 2325. Clareson 800. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 21. Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 207. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 227. Negley 1175. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, p. 107. Survey of Science Fiction Literature V, pp. 2287-92. Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK, pp. 62-3. Bleiler (1978), p. 205. Reginald 15085. Currey, p. 525 (binding B, catalogue 1). Hammond B1. Wells 4. Wolff 7107. #11374.
A very attractive copy with a clean, well-preserved binding. Previous owner’s name label affixed to the front paste-down. Mild foxing to endpapers, otherwise a just about fine copy.
This copy is a first British edition, first issue (first binding), retaining the earliest publisher’s catalogue with The Manxman listed as the first title. Published by William Heinemann in 1895, this edition appeared shortly after the American Holt edition but is textually distinct. While the American edition was based on an earlier version of the text, the Heinemann edition represents Wells's final, revised text and is widely considered the superior, definitive version of the novel.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Binding. Small octavo, pp. [1-8] 1-151 [152] + [16]-page publisher’s catalogue inserted at the rear. Bound in original decorated tan buckram, with front and spine panels stamped in purple and the publisher’s monogram in purple on the rear panel. Top and fore edges untrimmed, with a rough-trimmed bottom edge. London: William Heinemann, 1895. Anatomy of Wonder (1976) 2-161; (1981) 1-171; (1987) 1-103; (1995) 1-103; and (2004) II-1232. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 2325. Clareson 800. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 21. Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 207. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 227. Negley 1175. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, p. 107. Survey of Science Fiction Literature V, pp. 2287-92. Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK, pp. 62-3. Bleiler (1978), p. 205. Reginald 15085. Currey, p. 525 (binding B, catalogue 1). Hammond B1. Wells 4. Wolff 7107. #11374.
A very attractive copy with a clean, well-preserved binding. Previous owner’s name label affixed to the front paste-down. Mild foxing to endpapers, otherwise a just about fine copy.
Additional Details
The Time Machine (1895) is H. G. Wells's first published novel and one of the founding texts of modern science fiction. Its premise is deceptively simple: a Victorian scientist builds a machine that travels through time and journeys to the year 802,701 A.D. What he finds there is not progress but its long reversal.
Humanity has divided into two species. The Eloi live aboveground in crumbling palaces, beautiful and passive, incapable of sustained thought or effort, living on fruit and apparently afraid of the dark. The Morlocks live underground, running the machinery that keeps the surface habitable, emerging at night to prey on the Eloi they feed and clothe during the day. The Time Traveller's first instinct is sympathy for the Eloi and revulsion at the Morlocks. He revises this quickly. The Eloi are not an oppressed class. They are the descendants of an oppressing one, bred over ages into helplessness by the very comfort their ancestors secured at others' expense. The Morlocks are the descendants of the laboring class, driven underground by industrial civilization and evolved, over the same ages, into something that has reversed the old arrangement entirely.
Wells's allegory is pointed. He was writing in 1895, when the London underground was less than thirty years old, when the division between the laboring poor and the comfortable classes was a daily visible fact of urban life, and when Darwinian evolution had made it conceivable that present social arrangements might produce, over geological time, actual biological divergence. The Eloi and Morlocks are not fantasy. They are a projection of Victorian class structure run to its logical conclusion across eight hundred thousand years.
The novel does not stop there. Fleeing the Morlocks, the Time Traveller pushes the machine further into the future, past the point where human civilization has any trace, to a dying Earth where the Sun hangs huge and red over a still sea, the only movement a sluggish thing flopping in the shallows. The shift from social allegory to cosmic desolation is abrupt and deliberately so. Wells is not only arguing about class. He is arguing about entropy, about the indifference of the universe to human arrangements, about the fact that the Sun will eventually go out regardless of what social order prevails in the interim.
The story reaches us secondhand, through a narrator who attended the dinner where the Time Traveller gave his account, and Wells deliberately leaves open whether it should be believed at all. The Time Traveller returns from his second journey and disappears, and the flowers Weena gave him remain on the table as the only physical evidence that any of it happened.
Humanity has divided into two species. The Eloi live aboveground in crumbling palaces, beautiful and passive, incapable of sustained thought or effort, living on fruit and apparently afraid of the dark. The Morlocks live underground, running the machinery that keeps the surface habitable, emerging at night to prey on the Eloi they feed and clothe during the day. The Time Traveller's first instinct is sympathy for the Eloi and revulsion at the Morlocks. He revises this quickly. The Eloi are not an oppressed class. They are the descendants of an oppressing one, bred over ages into helplessness by the very comfort their ancestors secured at others' expense. The Morlocks are the descendants of the laboring class, driven underground by industrial civilization and evolved, over the same ages, into something that has reversed the old arrangement entirely.
Wells's allegory is pointed. He was writing in 1895, when the London underground was less than thirty years old, when the division between the laboring poor and the comfortable classes was a daily visible fact of urban life, and when Darwinian evolution had made it conceivable that present social arrangements might produce, over geological time, actual biological divergence. The Eloi and Morlocks are not fantasy. They are a projection of Victorian class structure run to its logical conclusion across eight hundred thousand years.
The novel does not stop there. Fleeing the Morlocks, the Time Traveller pushes the machine further into the future, past the point where human civilization has any trace, to a dying Earth where the Sun hangs huge and red over a still sea, the only movement a sluggish thing flopping in the shallows. The shift from social allegory to cosmic desolation is abrupt and deliberately so. Wells is not only arguing about class. He is arguing about entropy, about the indifference of the universe to human arrangements, about the fact that the Sun will eventually go out regardless of what social order prevails in the interim.
The story reaches us secondhand, through a narrator who attended the dinner where the Time Traveller gave his account, and Wells deliberately leaves open whether it should be believed at all. The Time Traveller returns from his second journey and disappears, and the flowers Weena gave him remain on the table as the only physical evidence that any of it happened.
Related items
