The Time Machine was published by William Heinemann in London in May 1895 and is one of the foundational texts of science fiction — the book that established time travel as a literary device and demonstrated that speculative fiction could be simultaneously thrilling adventure and serious social commentary. H.G. Wells was twenty-eight years old, a former biology student of T.H. Huxley, and this was his first novel. It made him famous overnight and established the template for scientific romance that would dominate English-language SF for decades.
The Novel
An unnamed narrator attends a dinner party at the house of the Time Traveller — a Victorian gentleman inventor who demonstrates a small model of his time machine and then, the following week, returns from an actual journey to the year 802,701 AD. His account of what he found there constitutes the novel’s main narrative.
The Eloi — humanity’s distant descendants, or one branch of them: beautiful, childlike, small, living in decaying gardens and palaces, eating fruit, dancing, sleeping in communal halls. They have no technology, no language beyond the simplest, no curiosity. They are descended from the upper classes — evolved, over millennia of leisure, into creatures of pure ornament.
The Morlocks — the underground people: pale, apelike, dwelling in vast subterranean machinery, emerging at night to hunt Eloi for food. They are descended from the working classes — driven underground by industrial capitalism, evolved into something no longer fully human but still mechanically skilled.
The Time Traveller realizes with horror that the class division of Victorian England has become, across geological time, a species division: masters and workers have evolved into prey and predator. The beautiful garden world is a farm.
The Argument
Wells was a Fabian socialist, trained in evolutionary biology. The Time Machine is his argument against the complacent assumption that evolution means progress. Given certain social conditions (extreme inequality, the separation of labor from leisure), evolution could produce not improvement but degradation — the degeneration of both classes into something less than human.
The novel also deploys the “heat death of the universe” — the Time Traveller’s further journey to Earth’s dying days, when the sun is red and huge, the atmosphere thin, and the last living things are tentacled creatures crawling on a freezing beach. This cosmic pessimism goes beyond social criticism into pure metaphysical despair.
Collecting The Time Machine
True first edition (William Heinemann, London, 1895): Grey-green cloth binding with gilt lettering and purple decorations. No dust jacket issued (jackets were not standard in 1895).
Identification points:
- William Heinemann imprint
- 16 pages of publisher’s advertisements at rear
- “1895” on title page
- Bound in grey-green cloth with elaborate gilt and purple design
Market values:
- Fine copies: $20,000–$50,000
- Very good: $8,000–$20,000
- Good (spine faded, hinges starting): $3,000–$8,000
First American edition (Henry Holt, New York, 1895): Published the same year with different binding. $5,000–$15,000 in fine condition.
Colonial edition (Heinemann, with different binding): Less valuable ($1,000–$3,000).
As one of the founding texts of science fiction, the first novel by one of the most important English writers of the twentieth century, and a book that has been continuously in print for 130 years, The Time Machine is one of the most sought-after first editions in the Victorian fiction market.