that the laborers, the apelike Morlocks, use the pretty but brainless Eloi as food.

Wells was certain that Marxist class struggle would produce a working class that was perfectly organized but concerned only with promoting its own interests. Once a kind of harmonious balance was struck between capitalists and proletarians—once the workers got all they wanted and could somehow manage to tolerate the existence of an idle class of owners—both classes would slowly degenerate into subhumans because their intelligence would no longer be challenged.

Wells clearly had Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) in mind as he wrote and rewrote The Time Machine, which began in 1888 as a series of sketches called The Chronic Argonauts. In his romance, Bellamy (1850-1898) has his hero fall asleep in 1887 and wake up in the year 2000. State ownership has replaced capitalism, and all citizens work for the state. The transformation of society also brings about the transformation of the people, with the result that morality and culture reach new heights. H. G. Wells was simply not convinced that a communism offering a work-free utopia was the best thing for humanity. In fact, his own puritanical work ethic taught him that such a scheme would result in a society of drones living in a mediocre world kept barely functioning by a well-organized but self-interested working class—Marx’s proletariat. Without a spur to force humanity into making new discoveries and expanding its physical or mental frontiers, Wells felt, we would be content with whatever satisfied our basic needs, but nothing more.

The Time Machine, then, stands as a pessimistic response to the optimism animating nineteenth-century thought and locates Wells squarely in his historical context. Three thinkers—Hegel, Marx, and Darwin—define the optimistic mind-set of the nineteenth century, itself a logical response to the great strides being made by technology and to the lessons if not the realities of the two great revolutions of the late-eighteenth century, that of the United States in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770—1831) established the predominant concept of how history was thought to be shaped in the nineteenth century. His idea that there is a discernible pattern in history, one in which more and more people enjoy freedom, reflects the European movement away from autocratic, monarchic government to constitutional monarchies in which ordinary citizens are given at least a limited voice in their own governance. Hegel looks back to a past when there is only one free person in society, the autocrat who holds all power, and forward to a time when freedom is shared by many.

How this takes place, Hegel says, is through conflict, the other idea he establishes as a fact of historical thought in the nineteenth century. Hegel’s notion of conflict does not reflect a chaos in which myriad forces strike out at one another but a clash of opposed ideas that crystallize at a certain moment in history, ideas embodied in individuals, parties, and nations. Out of conflict arises a new order, one that combines or synthesizes principles found in both of the opposing forces.

Karl Marx (1818—1883) translated Hegel’s principles into a concrete projection about the future. Observing that technology has acquired a history of its own, that its development is independent of ideology or past history, Marx announced a new era. The nineteenth century, Marx says, is the age of industrialization, in which entrepreneurs and capitalists use industrial technology to organize production for profit. The result of that organization, which, according to Marx, had taken place with astonishing speed, is the creation of a two-class society: those who own the means of production (the capitalist owners of industry) and those who work in their factories (the proletariat). These classes are fundamentally opposed to each other, and their clash will inevitably result in the annihilation of the capitalist class and the triumph of the proletariat, who will seize the means of production and use it for their own benefit. This victory will see the birth of a new world order in which industry and most property will be owned by a state whose only reason for existing will be the well-being of its citizens, a state that will eventually wither away.

Charles Darwin (1809—1882) revolutionized nineteenth-century science with his theory of evolution. Darwin’s idea, that organisms, man included, change over time from one state or condition to another, challenged the theological view that human beings were created by God in His image. Darwin’s principle—that, for example, modern horses began in small animals like eohippus