44 pages • 1 hour read
H. G. WellsThe Time Machine
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1895A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The narrator is among the guests who are gathered at the home of a brilliant inventor, whom the narrator calls only the Time Traveller. Most of the other guests are referred to by their professions, again without proper names. These include the Provincial Mayor, a Medical Man, and a Psychologist. Rounding out the guests are a young man and a man named Filby, “an argumentative person with red hair” (2). Over after-dinner drinks, the host regales them with his ideas about manipulating the dimension of time so that travel in time might become as easy as travel in the three dimensions of space.
The Time Traveller’s chief argument is that no three-dimensional object can exist for only an instant; instead, all things must travel continuously through time. By way of illustration, he says that humans can travel freely in two dimensions, but we struggle against gravity to rise vertically. Perhaps someone might discover a way to free people from the ever-evolving present so they can move much further forward or backward in time.
His audience is skeptical, but the Time Traveller insists that he has “experimental verification” for his ideas. He brings into the salon “a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made” (8). He sets the device on a table, and explains that it is a miniature model—complete with a seat and levers—of a machine that he claims can carry a person through time. He tells them that the intricately constructed model took him two years to build. The Time Traveller tells his guests that the device is functional and will travel through time when he presses one of the levers.
He takes the Psychologist’s hand and presses one of his fingers onto the lever. The tiny machine swivels, becomes “indistinct” and “ghostly,” then vanishes. Stunned, the guests peer at the table and around the room. The Time Traveller tells them that the device may have gone into the future or the past—he’s not sure which. The Psychologist reasons that the thing must still be in the room, traveling forward in time much faster than the guests or the room itself, and this why it cannot be seen. He likens this to the way a spoke on a wheel seems to disappear when the wheel turns rapidly.
The Time Traveller reveals that he has a full-sized time machine nearly finished in his laboratory down the hall. He leads his guests into the lab, where they see the device, built from nickel, ivory, and rock crystal. The Medical Man asks the Time Traveller to prove that none of this is a trick. The Time Traveller insists that he is completely serious, and he intends to use the machine as soon as it is finished.
Chapter 2 Summary
Over the next week, the guests ponder what they have seen. They are generally suspicious of the Time Traveller, for whom many intellectual difficulties are child’s play and who always seems to be withholding information from them. They feel that he might be deceiving them.
The following Thursday the group meets again. This time, they are joined by a newspaper editor, a journalist, and a quiet bearded man. The Time Traveller has left a note announcing that he will be late and that the guests should start dinner without him.
During the meal, the Time Traveller suddenly walks in—pale, disheveled, shoeless, a gash on his chin. He gulps down two glasses of wine, then assures the gathering that he will clean himself up and be right back before limping out of the room. The narrator explains the time machine to the new guests, and the editor and journalist mock the idea. The Time Traveller reappears in fresh clothes and begins to eat a piece of mutton, saying, “What a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!” (17). The narrator asks if he has been time-traveling. The host answers “Yes,” and then he remains silent until he has finished eating.
After dinner, the men move to the smoking room. The Time Traveller wants to tell them the story of his past eight days—he says it will sound like lies—but only if the guests refrain from interruptions. They agree, and he begins his tale, at first wearily, then with increasing animation.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The first two chapters introduce the Time Traveller, his invention of a time machine, and the skepticism of the men at his weekly salon. These chapters comprise the frame story, setting up the occasion for the Time Traveller to tell his tale of adventure—a tale nested inside another tale.
The Time Traveller’s theory that time can be navigated like space anticipates early 20th-century popular interest in theories about time. The philosopher Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, first published in French in 1889, became a surprise smash hit among the educated classes, and Einstein’s celebrated Theory of Relativity, which appeared only ten years after The Time Machine, was popularized in a book for lay readers by Einstein himself.
Einstein showed that space and time are inseparably interconnected; they affect each other. Wells’s Time Traveller seems to intuit this, at least partially: “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it” (3). This may not be precisely correct, but it shows an interest in time as part of the universe’s shape and motion, the details of which would be worked out by Einstein. In this, as in so many other subjects, Wells had a knack bot for tapping the zeitgeist and for making predictions that at least come close to the truth of the matter.
Wells, along with Jules Verne—author of the books Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, and Journey to the Center of the Earth—are often considered the first great science fiction writers. Beginning in 1895, Wells had an extended period of creativity that resulted in over 50 novels and more than 100 shorts stories that paved the way for speculative fiction authors to come. The years 1895 to 1901 remain the most important: This period includes his most famous novels: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The First Men in the Moon. Their themes—time travel, alien invasion, mad scientists, and space travel—have been popular among sci-fi creators ever since.
The Time Traveller’s speeches to his guests contain small but telling inconsistencies that serve to illustrate his personality and justify the suspicions of the guests. The Time Traveller declares that “this lever, being pressed over, sends the machine gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion” (9). Yet, once the deed is done and the miniature time machine disappears, Filby asks whether it has gone into the future, and the Time Traveller replies, “Into the future or the past—I don’t, for certain, know which” (10). Here, the Time Traveller seems to have asserted more than he knows in the first declaration, and he admits his lack of knowledge only in the excitement of the moment when the machine has disappeared.
Alternatively, a man of genius, he may at times know more than he’s prepared to say, so that any inconsistencies are only apparent. The presence of an audience of disbelieving skeptics in the frame story makes room for the reader to enter the tale. These audience members stand in for the reader. They set aside their skepticism long enough to entertain the Time Traveller’s story, and the reader is encouraged to do the same.
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