the workings of the human mind. Both of these individuals gave rise to institutions larger than themselves. This Wells could never do, probably because like his own protagonists he was and would always remain a Romantic, an isolated voice demanding that others follow his ideas but unwilling to roll up his sleeves and dirty his hands in the practical application of his own concepts.

And the triumph and tragedy enacted in the two fictions under discussion here, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, are parallel.

The narrative structure of The Time Machine reflects and enacts Wells’s lifelong dilemma. We have on the one hand the man of science who acts alone, the nameless Time Traveller, and on the other the man who writes for others, the sentimental Hillyer. Why Wells decided to leave his Time Traveller anonymous may reflect the various versions the story passed through, first in 1888, then in 1889, and again in 1892. There the Time Traveller has the allegoric name Dr. Moses Nebogipfel: Moses the Hebrew prophet who leads the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery; Nebo, the mountain from which Moses sees the Promised Land, and “gipfel,” derived from the German for mountaintop. He is, in other words, one of Wells’s many representations of the man of science as prophet, or as Nebogipfel himself puts it:

I discovered that I was ... a man born out of my time—a man thinking the thoughts of a wiser age, doing things and believing things that men now cannot understand, and that in the years ordained to me there was nothing but silence and suffering for my soul—unbroken solitude, man’s bitterest pain. I knew I was an Anachronic Man; my age was still to come (H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention, edited by Leon Stover, p.192).

This sentimental, melodramatic portrait is certainly that of its author Herbert George Wells, here in his guise as visionary.

But the rewriting and reworking, together with W. E. Henley’s editorial intervention, convinced Wells to shift emphasis away from the Time Traveller per se and to focus instead on what the Time Traveller experiences. And what he experiences combines Wells’s hyperbolic vision of Marxist history with the ideas he gleaned from T. H. Huxley and others on the entropy that would eventually extinguish the sun and bring about the end of the world. Thus Wells is pessimistic on two fronts: The “workers paradise” generates a two-class society, idle drones fed and clothed by worker-beasts who feed on them, and the end of the world looms large as the sun dims and the earth freezes to death.

In a 1931 preface to a deluxe edition of The Time Machine, the sixty-five-year-old Wells casts a scornful eye over the novel he published when he was thirty-six:

The story of the Time Machine as distinguished from the idea, “dates” not only in its treatment but in its conception. It seems a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks it over once more. But it goes as far as his philosophy about human evolution went in those days. The idea of a social differentiation of mankind into Eloi and Morlocks, strikes him now as more than a little crude. In his adolescence Swift had exercised a tremendous fascination upon him and the naive pessimism of this picture of the human future is, like the kindred Island of Doctor Moreau, a clumsy tribute to a master to whom he owes an enormous debt. Moreover, the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the “inevitable” freezing up of the world—and of life and mankind with it. There was no escape it seemed. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less (H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1931, pp. ix-x).

Once again, Wells fudges the details. He can dismiss the entropy theory as “dreadful lies,” but he does not explain that his view of the cute, stupid Eloi and the apelike, cannibalistic Morlocks is his extrapolation of what would happen under Marxism. At the same time, his tribute to Swift is genuine, yet another link between Wells and the great tradition of moralizing satirists.

Wells’s casual irony when mocking the fact that science in 1895 promised that the world would be over “in a million years or less” clashes with the Time Traveller’s precise date of his arrival in the future, “the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One A.D.” (p. 26). When the Time Traveller escapes from the Morlocks