The Time Traveller begins his story wearily explaining how the he had finished the time machine and how it felt the same as a suicidal person feels when pointing a gun at their own head when about to travel the machine and how time travelling was excessively painful.
`I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant.”
Time Travelling is like a car accelerating. He says that it begins slow and picks up velocity. At first the only difference you notice is a snail going much faster than usual and before you know it the moon is spinning fast through her quarters.
H.G. Wells was a socialist thinker and this is seen clearly when he shows how the Morlocks and the Eloi are separated. He believed that all humans should be treated the same and should be equal and that one day the working people would rise up against the rich and take over. H.G. Wells expressed his fears that if the rich became richer and the poor became poorer, and there were two groups, instead of all being treated the same then the human race would split in two. The working class would strike back. This is shown in the book when the Morlocks harvest the Eloi.
H.G. Wells was very interested in the idea of evolution and Darwin’s theory. Scientists in his day believed that the human race could evolve in unexpected ways, one of them being backwards. H.G. Wells has used this idea in his book and expresses another concern. If we keep developing machinery and technology that does things for us, we won’t need a brain to work things out for us because we have a device which can do it for us. Over time the human race become less and less clever until finally we can’t even string a sentence together. But this would be the upper-class people who can afford this machinery. The working class people would grow stronger and poorer and will eventually have power over the rich.
Many Christian believers are against The Time Machine because all the scientific discoveries show that there is no Adam and Eve and that evolution is how we came about and people start to doubt the Christian faith. H.G. Wells is very interested in science and it is clearly shown in his writing that he does not believe in the Christian faith and he believes in evolution. Another criticism people made was how the book ended. H.G. Wells ended the story by saying that eventually the human race would cease to exist. Many millions of years into the future there was little life in the world and it was quiet, still.
“At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky, and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.”
In H.G. Wells’ time, it was an age of travel, discovery and exploration. People came back from tropical countries with amazing stories of the things they had seen and experienced. People often found this hard to believe and this is what the H.G. Wells has done in The Time Machine. He has made the Time Traveller go ahead in time and witness new changes in environment and the human race and see things like new types of flowers and many changes from the 19th century in general. He comes back from his extraordinary adventure back to disbelieving people.
`What a pity it is you're not a writer of stories!' he said, putting his hand on the Time Traveller's shoulder.
`You don't believe it?'
`Well--'
`I thought not.'
Having experienced so different it must be frustrating and hard to explain to people how amazing the future really is because really you need to show someone for them really to understand. People were celebrated like heroes because of their discoveries or experiences and stories and in Livingstone’s case, who went to Africa to explore and vanished mysteriously.