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In Our Time
The Time Machine (Archive Episode)
00:52:28
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the science and ideas in HG Wells' story of time travel.
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- [00:00]
Melvyn Bragg
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
James (fictional character in ad)
Every now and then I rinse it out and I need Downy rinse tonight and I need it more. My kids wears a bed and the smell never leaves. I don't know what to do. I'm always in the dark. The sweat and dead short smells like a dark car. I'm downy rinsing tonight.
- [00:28]
Melvyn Bragg
Downy rinse fights stubborn odors in just one wash. Impossible odors get stuck in.
- [00:39]
Narrator (Gain ad)
That's the sound of James adding long lasting gain scent boosters to his laundry this morning. Several hours later, James sniffs the irresistible scent of gain on his shirt. Gain. Several hours later, James has even caught the attention of his mother in law and she never gives him attention.
- [00:57]
Asma Khalid
Oh, you smell amazing, James.
- [00:59]
Melvyn Bragg
Oh thanks mom.
- [01:00]
I love you too.
- [01:01]
Amanda Rees
I never said that.
- [01:03]
Narrator (Gain ad)
Add Gain scent boosters to your laundry. Add joy to your day.
- [01:06]
Asma Khalid
America is changing and so is the world.
- [01:10]
Tristan Redman
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [01:18]
Asma Khalid
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington D.C. i'm.
- [01:21]
Tristan Redman
Tristan Redman in London and this is the Global Story.
- [01:25]
Asma Khalid
Every weekday we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [01:31]
Tristan Redman
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:39]
Simon Tillotson
Hello, I'm Simon, producer of In Our Time. Following Melvin's announcement that he stepped down from In Our time after almost 27 years, we're taking the time to celebrate his outstanding work with some favourite episodes from our archive and thanks to everyone who's been in touch. In due course we'll return with new programs and a new presenter, but till then, here's Melvin with the time machine from 2019.
- [02:05]
Melvyn Bragg
Hello. In 1895, H.G. wells wrote the Time Machine, in which the wealthy time traveller goes to the year 82701 AD and is shocked by the future. He meets the Eloi, descended from elite people like himself, but much smaller, weaker and aimless. And and the Morlocks are descendants of factory workers who live underground and farm the Eloy for their meat Wells. Exploration of class struggle, evolution and eugenics was informed by the latest ideas in science and politics and it's been highly influential ever since. With me to discuss the time machine by H.G. wells are Amanda Rees, an historian of science at the University of York, Simon James, professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, and Simon Schaffer, professor of History of Science at Cambridge University. Simon Schaeffer how did HG well start out in life?
- [02:57]
Simon Schaffer
Wells's early life is dominated by the fact that he's poor and he's bright and he's young and he's extremely ill. And the first, what, 20 years of his life are a struggle for existence. His.
- [03:18]
Melvyn Bragg
What was his illness?
- [03:19]
Simon Schaffer
He had lung disease and he'd broken his leg. The advantage of having broken his leg is that he kept some time in bed and read avidly. The disadvantage of the lung disease is that really, for most of his life, he was ill, he was suffering, he was struggling. His parents are remarkable and, I think, important for his early years. His father was an absolutely brilliant fast bowler for Kent. He took four wickets in four balls for the county, which is still something of a record, but he was much worse. Was Wells farther at running a shop in Bromley, a kind of china shop? Wells HG loathed Bromley. He described it as a suburb of the damnedest. His mother, on the other hand, had been a servant and housekeeper in a country house in Sussex. That's where she'd met Welles's father. Wells reminisced that it was from his father that he got his skill, from his mother that he got his imagination. And a lot of Welles's early life is both an attempt to escape that upbringing, but also to reflect on what it meant.
- [04:42]
Melvyn Bragg
How did he get the education that led him to be able to write the Time Machine?
- [04:46]
Simon Schaffer
He had to fight for it. At the age of 18, after an immense struggle, he was admitted as a pupil student at what was then called the Normal School of Science, now part of Imperial College in South Kensington, and he spent three extraordinarily important years there, from the age of 18 to the age of 21. The first year was undoubtedly the most important, 1884, because he was taught by Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was Darwin's bulldog, the one of perhaps the most famous man of science in Victorian London, an expositor of natural selection and of Darwinism, a man of extraordinary charisma, to whom, in fact, Wells eventually sent a copy of the Time Machine as a gift, alleging that it was partly an illustration of Huxley's views.
- [05:42]
Melvyn Bragg
And who else? That's one person who educated him. We're still in his first year. Two to go. Then what happened?
- [05:47]
Simon Schaffer
So he passed his first year with flying colour. And then, perhaps not untypically for a very bright, struggling student, he got into student politics and journalism and sex, and the combination of those three took him perhaps rather away from the sciences. It wasn't helped by the fact that whereas Huxley was a brilliant teacher in zoology and biology. The physics teachers who dominated Wells student career in his second and his third year, Fred Guthrie and Charles Boies, were much less charismatic. And Wells barely passed his second year and completely flunked his final year.
- [06:29]
Melvyn Bragg
So how did he come to be the chap who wrote the book a few years later?
- [06:33]
Simon Schaffer
Just a few years later, having left the normal school with no degree, he then worked as a teacher. He began his extraordinary career initially as a science journalist and a writer of stories. He was writing hundreds of pieces each year. By the time the version that we know of the Time machine appears in 1894 and 1895, he was beginning to earn real money. He was earning in our money something close to 50,000 quid a year, which is a lot as a journalist and writer. He did get a science degree as an external student of the University of London. He was smart enough in his mid-20s to write an entire textbook in biology and zoology, which is an important achievement.
- [07:25]
Melvyn Bragg
So ferocious autodidact, apart from being having some snippets of superior education. Fine Simon James. There were already books about characters being transported to the future when Wells brought out the Time machine. The two most influential seem to have been by Bellamy and Morris. Can you tell us about those two?
- [07:45]
That's right. So Bellamy's Looking Backward was an American publication, tremendously successful on both sides of the Atlantic. Unusually, an American socialist literary text which portrays a future in which there is no private property, in which everybody works, in which the state is a giant corporation, everybody does manual labour from the ages of 18 to 21 and everybody retires at the age of 45. And while this was tremendously popular, this is a vision that William Morris rebels against. When Morris reviewed Looking Backward, he says that every utopia betrays or reveals the. The personality of its, of its author. And as you would imagine that Morris found a kind of highly technological future. A dystopian rather than a utopian vision. So. So William Morris writes news from nowhere, which is a much more pastoral, much more Arcadian version of the future, where people live, simply live in the countryside.
- [08:47]
And things are beautiful and a gentle anarchy prevails.
- [08:51]
Absolutely, yes. Which I think is a part of Welles problem with it.
- [08:54]
And so Wells knew those were his forerunners. There were other forerunners. Mark Twain had written about and Jules Verne had written. But did he come in slightly on the back of Bellamy?
- [09:04]
Yes, I think he did. And of course Simon has mentioned Wells student politics. Wells had heard Morris speak, so I think he was Very much dealing with Morris's ideas as foundational in his politics, but rebelling against Morris's way of writing the future when he comes to the time machine.
- [09:22]
Can you give us a brief outline of the plot of the Time Machine?
- [09:26]
Yes, of course. So we have a first person narrator at the beginning of the story who is invited to dinner by the brilliant inventor, the Time Traveller, as it will be convenient to speak of him. We never know the time Traveller's name. And the Time Traveller shows the narrator and his other upper middle class male friends a time machine. The Time Traveller imagines, asks his audience to imagine that time is a fourth dimension like the other three spatial dimensions dimensions, and then invites them to reflect on what it would be like to be able to move quickly and freely in the fourth dimension. Just as technological innovations in transport allow human beings to move in the three spatial dimensions, so the time Traveller throws himself forward into the future. He travels into the world 802, 701 and he's very surprised. He expects to see a future like Bellamy's future in looking backward, but instead he finds that the society is not at all technological, that it's again, it's peaceful and rural, and that human beings are not what he expects them to be either.
- [10:27]
And there are two sets of human beings, those above ground and those below.
- [10:31]
Ground, and they are the Eloi and the Morlocks.
- [10:35]
Eloi above grounds. They're sort of the degenerated descendants of the aristocracy. And the Morlocks are the emphatic descendants of the proletariat.
- [10:43]
That's right. And he encounters the Eloi first. They are. They're pretty, but they're stupid. They're shorter than the human being of the time traveller's own time. They have a very simple language of only about 500 words. They sit around playing beautifully, eating fruit, and he finds them generally rather useless.
- [11:04]
And the Morlocks.
- [11:05]
The Morlocks are the underground creatures whom he discovers later on in the book. The Morlocks are ape like and he's much more revolted by them. He finds the Eloi beautiful, but the. You know, the Morlocks stir up violence and antipathy in his. In his heart. But it turns out that the Morlocks are the more technically technologically advanced of the two subspecies of humanity in the. In the future, the Morlocks live underground and unlike the Eloi, they have machines.
- [11:34]
And they cannibalize the Eloi. They groom the Eloi for their meat.
- [11:37]
That's right. That's the grisly discovery that the Time traveller makes partway through. So, in a grisly act of class revenge, the Morlocks literally get to eat the rich. So as the. The proletarians have become the. The Morlocks, the aristocracy have become the Eloi. And while the Eloi eat fruit, what the Morlocks eat is Eloy.
- [11:57]
And one way or another, the time traveler notices all this, then manages just to escape and to come back to meet the same gentleman around the same table in Richmond a week in our time later, tells them all this. They only half believe him. And then he goes off again. He goes off again and we never. They never hear of him again. Why does it matter, Amanda Rees, that the traveler has a machine to convey him to where he's going?
- [12:26]
Amanda Rees
Because there have been plenty of time Travel stories before H.G. wells is the time machine, but they all depend on chance or divine intervention. So somebody lies down and goes to sleep and is transported into the future. Somebody goes to visit a God. There's several sort of myths, Hindu myths is what, Indian myths as well, that have basically people going to visit the divine and while they're in heaven, not noticing that in fact time has passed by on earth more swiftly than they'd expected and they are effectively in their own future. So you have all of these tales of traveling forward in time, but there's no control and there's no direction. And what matters for Wells is the fact that this is a machine. This is something that is produced by humans and is under human control. The writer Nala Hopkinson once defined science fiction as that branch of literature which deals with the consequences for humanity of the use of tools. And the machine is a tool for manipulating time and being able to move through time in a controlled fashion and in a controlled way.
- [13:30]
Melvyn Bragg
One of the interesting things, I must have read it when I was a kid, but I read it for this program, obviously, is that the opening is quite stiff. It became an enormous bestseller instantly and enormously influential still is. It is quite simple. Serious scientific discussion goes on in the first two or three chapters. The fourth dimension, that this new idea that. That new idea. He's read it in. In Nature, he's read it here. They all agree, the Doctor, the psychologist and so on and so forth. Does it surprise you, looking back, that this sort of discussion could start a book that would have such an enormous popular success?
- [14:05]
Amanda Rees
No, not at all. I think what's really important about the introduction, the first part of the book, is that it's, you know, science fiction is often criticized for not being realist. Whatever that means. But this is a profoundly realist introduction. You are within the domestic sphere, you are within the lived life of upper middle class, professional Victorian households.
- [14:26]
Melvyn Bragg
Bit like Sherlock Holmes is set up, isn't it?
- [14:29]
Amanda Rees
It's that domestication that makes it possible for Wells to domesticate the impossible later on and to make it real for the readership.
- [14:36]
Melvyn Bragg
Did he use the machine and use his knowledge of sciences, which Simon pointed out at the beginning of the program, because he thought this might really happen, or just as a way to beguile and entrap his readers?
- [14:48]
Amanda Rees
I think that there are two ways of answering that and I think the most important way has to do it depends on what you think. In a sense, science fiction is for that genre or that mode of engagement is for. If you think of it as something that, as a kind of sugar coated way of increasing the public understanding of science. And people are sometimes surprised when they read the Time Machine to find there's actually so little detail on exactly how it happened. You know, how you don't actually get to find out an awful lot about how the Time Machine works. It's, you know, I always read it and think, well, this is basically H.G. wells, the cyclist, the cycling enthusiast, and effectively the handles are the kind of the handlebars and the seat is the saddle kind of thing. But it's less important to think about what the understanding of time travel was, I think, and more to think about the ways in which Wells is using the experiences of the time traveller to reflect essentially on the nature of humanity and on the nature of the human condition and how in essence, we recognise the humanity in each other.
- [15:53]
Melvyn Bragg
There is not a contradiction but a contrast between the limited nature of our knowledge of this machine. He sits in an armchair, presses a few buttons and away he goes. And the not unlimited, but very wide open, given the space, discussion of the ideas of the time. So he's way up with the ideas, the ideas about this dimension, that dimension physics. Well, as you know, but it. In the end it's. You're right, it's a bicycle armchair. What do you have to say to that, Simon?
- [16:18]
Simon Schaffer
Simon Schaffer Wells is pretty explicit about this. Much later in his life he points out that the Diamond Frame bicycle and his story the Time Machine appeared at exactly the same moment. And as Amanda says, the saddle and the seat and the handlebars absolutely speak to this extraordinary revolution in social relations that cheap and affordable bicycling had above all, you might say, on the middle class and the working class's capacity to Travel and on the capacity of the sexes to meet each other away from their parents. Two things that mattered a great deal to Wells, as we know from the fiction that he followed Time Machine with. There's something else, just to expand a little on what Amanda has already said about the domestication of the impossible. Again, that's Wells phrase, which is cinema. A few months after the appearance of Time Machine, he was contacted by an electrical engineer called Robert Paul, who was Thomas Alvar Edison's cinema agent in London. And what Paul wanted to do was to turn the time machine into a movie, an extraordinary vision. Wells and Paul collaborate. Paul wrote a patent, as far as we can tell, on a machine for reproducing the effects of time travel. It wasn't, in other words, just that Wells had evoked a machine, but that the experience of traveling on such a machine began to conform ever more closely with the experience the Victorian audience in London was beginning to have in 1895 and 96 of early cinema.
- [18:15]
Melvyn Bragg
You want to come in, Amanda?
- [18:16]
Amanda Rees
I was just going. There's a proposal for a fairground ride as well, isn't there? So that effectively that people can go to the fair and experience what it would have been like physically for themselves to travel in the time machine.
- [18:27]
Melvyn Bragg
Simon. We come to this, this unnamed planet. Place. Place. Well, he's here, isn't it? I mean, it's time we're talking about, not space. So he ends up near the Thames, where he starts from. There's a description of the Thames Estuary. All of us who came rather by surprise about that, because all of us aren't about Thames history nearly a million years on. Never mind, there he is, we have Eloy and the Morlocks. What does his, the traveler's reaction to them tell us about the time and about him?
- [19:01]
I suppose that the time traveller says at the end that invites his audience to take his story when they don't believe him, as a prophecy or a warning. And I think Wells sees the de evolution of Homo sapiens into the Eloi and the Morlocks as being a warning about the biological consequences of the political inequality of his own time.
- [19:24]
It's put pressure on the class differences of the late 19th century, hasn't it? Put immense pressure on it. So 700 odd thousand years on it and ended up with this.
- [19:32]
That's absolutely right, because Welles in his writing always wants to teach his audience a lesson. It's very much the hallmark of his 50 year writing career, right from the very beginning here, right until the end. And he always says that he would call himself a teacher or a journalist before he would ever call himself an artist.
- [19:50]
So what is what, what is he trying to tell us about the Eloi? And then about the Morlocks? There's that we know that we've said they're small, that useless, they eat fruit, they moon about, they have a few dances, they don't speak, they haven't many words of their language. But what is he saying by saying that.
- [20:08]
The class divisions of that, the class divisions that eventually result in the biological differences between the Eloi and the Morlocks can be fixed in Welles worldview with education. Now, education is Wells panacea for the social divisions that he sees in the world that he lives in. Later on, he identifies science and socialism as being essentially the same thing. It's about seeing the world in a particular way and an informed way that allows you to address it and fix it and try and make it better.
- [20:38]
It's a pretty pessimistic, bitter view of us, isn't it? We either end up as sort of weedy, small and useless and singing and eating raspberries, or we end up as deep in the earth, white, creepy and murderous cannibals. That's about it. There isn't anybody else knocking about, is there?
- [20:58]
Well, Wells really struggled to reconcile his optimism and his pessimism. I wonder if, as a scientist, he's a pessimist and as someone interested in politics, he's an optimist. He writes in the Outline of History later on that human history becomes more and more of a race between education and catastrophe. And while he's recommending education in some of his political writings, in the Time Machine, he shows a catastrophe, that this is what happens if you don't listen to people like me.
- [21:26]
Asma Khalid
America is changing and so is the world.
- [21:31]
Tristan Redman
But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [21:39]
Asma Khalid
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington D.C. i'm.
- [21:41]
Tristan Redman
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
- [21:45]
Asma Khalid
Every weekday we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [21:51]
Tristan Redman
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:59]
Melvyn Bragg
It's interesting that catastrophe seizes the public imagination, isn't it, Amanda? And he brings in the idea of eugenics, which were important then and believed in there, not now, but they were mainstream then. Can you say how they play inside this novel?
- [22:15]
Amanda Rees
Well, to a certain extent, what Simon James just had to say about the Kind of the. On what you yourself have said, you can see it as a kind of the division between the Morloi. I've just invented a new category, the division between the Eloi and the Morlocks as the literal kind of representation of upstairs, downstairs in terms of the spaces that they're occupying. He's taught by Huxley, as Simon Schaffer has already said. But I think that the most significant point here has to do with the notion of planning and the idea of being able to plan for a future and the idea of being able to plan for humanity, because fundamentally, what he is challenging, I think in his account and his vision of what this human future might look like, he's challenging the notion of progress. He's challenging the notion that intelligence is necessarily the thing that's going to lead to our salvation. And that's all tied up with the issues that he has with the machine, with the machine economy, with the city and relationships to nature and so on. But I mean, fundamentally, what's at issue here, I think, is the. Is the question of to what extent can you create a human future by design? He's challenging the idea that there's an endpoint to evolution.
- [23:45]
Melvyn Bragg
Simon. Simon Shapa. We have two Simons with us, as you might have picked up by now. Where did he get that pessimism from? His own life was optimistically driven. He loved science and he would say, this is a great bounty of knowledge on you would go. And yet, as far as I can tell, there's not a drop, there's not a gram of optimism in the whole of the Morlock Eloy relationship.
- [24:13]
Simon Schaffer
No, there is nothing progressive or salvation oriented in the bulk of the Time Machine story. And not only that, but things get even worse than that when he goes on.
- [24:25]
Melvyn Bragg
It goes on for a tiny bit at the end of the book. It goes on about 30 million years and discovers the whole thing is coming to an end. The sun's burning everything out, and then he comes back home.
- [24:34]
Simon Schaffer
So it seems to me the driving force of the time machine is what he calls the tragedy of extinction. The main lesson is undoubtedly pessimistic. This is what he tells Huxley when he sends Huxley a copy of the book. He says, this is about the contradiction between plenty and intelligence. If you want to be ingenious, you have to struggle. If social development removes the pressure of struggle, it will also divide us between Downton Abbey and the Satanic Mills. So the pessimism, it seems to me, comes from not just what contemporary natural science is saying, but Also, and this is always crucial for Wells, he wants to use his writing to intervene in science. He isn't just passively transmitting it. This book is an argument and the argument is partly do not suppose that natural selection on its own will give us or guarantee or produce social progress. That is an argument with contemporary biology and politics, as well as an argument derived from contemporary biology and politics. During the exact period that he was writing the final published version of Time Machine, his master Huxley had given one of the greatest science lectures of the 19th century, which is Evolution and Ethics, delivered at Oxford. And in Evolution and Ethics, Huxley makes the extraordinarily important point, a point that not everyone at Oxford at the moment seems to remember, that human ethics are contradictory to the principles of Darwinism. Huxley's argument is that if humans are going to progress, they have to register their capacity to break with natural selection, that artificial selection, social ethics, are not given to us by the principles of Darwinism. We have to fight against them. Wells book, finally is an intervention in that extraordinarily important debate against what he calls magnificent phrase excelsior, biology, a version of biology he loathed.
- [27:14]
Melvyn Bragg
Simon James the Troubler explains this to his dinner guest. He's only been away a week as far as they're concerned, even though when he came through the door he looks racked to bits. He's got scars, his clothes are filthy, he looks as if he's been through the mill and so on. He's already been called a person too clever to be believed and he tries to explain to them what he has done. Is there a sense that Wells seems to me to be using this to explain to the audience, to give it plausibility to the audience. But is there anything more to it than that?
- [27:48]
Well, I think Wells is very conscious of the time travellers lack of plausibility in his story, that right in the first dinner party at the beginning, he shows them a mini time machine and makes it disappear. But he the, the book frames this in an atmosphere that makes it look like a magic trick or possibly an act of. An act of hypnosis, perhaps, that their focus is on a darkening pool of light. One of the guests says, now, is this for real or is it like the ghost that you showed us last Christmas, that the time traveler has absolutely no proof that what he's of he's going into the future, other than the two flowers that Weena, the female Eloi, whom he befriends gives him that don't seem to correspond to know about this.
- [28:33]
What, what the thing he brings back are two flowers given to him by this child Eloy, who he protects. She's given and they somehow come back and he puts them on the table as if to say so there.
- [28:45]
Yes, that's right. And the, the botanist at his guest does look at the flowers and say, well these don't like any other flowers I've, I've ever seen. So it's this tantalizing little bit of, little bit of proof.
- [28:56]
Can I ask you to take on something that Simon Shopper was saying? The need for humanity to be kept keen on the grindstone of necessity. What do you have to say about that?
- [29:06]
Well, I think this is the playing out in the future that the time traveler sees of sexual selection and natural selection, the two great engines of the Darwinian theory of evolution. When Darwin writes the Origin of Species, he tries to put a happy ending on it. When Darwin himself read fiction, he preferred fiction with a happy ending. So he writes the Origin of Species and tries to make it end nicely and says that from, from famine, from war, from extinction of species, you know, most wonderful beings have been and are being evolved. But of course lots of people read Darwin and said, but Charles, that's not what you're actually arguing in your book that intelligence, you know, or beauty or sophistication in a species, aren't them in themselves intrinsically rewarded by, by evolution? What evolution rewards is fitness for, for a species environment and the environment of human very managed, becomes very calm, becomes very controlled, becomes very stable and therefore it's not to humanity's advantage anymore to be intelligent.
- [30:05]
Why Amanda Manderist, do you think that well set up such a contrast between the Eloi and the Morlocks? Such a, such a massive. With nothing in between, no gradations, no subtleties. Bang. Effete, useless, finished, bang. Brutal cannibals in charge.
- [30:23]
Amanda Rees
But underground, it's actually a pattern that he's followed in other books or that he will go on to follow later on as well. I think the class struggle is absolutely essential to the story. But I think Welles is also playing around with some other binaries in Western civilization or in Western thought there. I think that you can see the Eloi and the Morlock as representations of those as well. So I mean one of the things that's really, really striking as well as the He. He lands in this Edenic heaven, you know, he's in what appears to be the Garden of Eden. The machines are all under. You've got. So you have this contrast on the one hand between the Lush garden on the surface and the machines underneath. So you have this nature culture, this nature society division being played out there, which ties again, into all kinds of questions that he's also beginning to ask about, well, what impact is civilization having on the way in which we understand humanity? What impact is this kind of natural. Sorry, what impact is this relaxed life that certain groups can now lead? How is that blunting their efforts in the struggle for existence?
- [31:36]
Simon Schaffer
We're lucky enough to have many different versions of Time Machine before the one that was published in May of 95. In earlier versions, Wells doesn't make the contrast so explicitly between the aristocrats and the working class. The phrase he uses, I think, fascinatingly, is that this is a contrast between aesthetes and puritans. And it's worth remembering that Time Machine is published the month of Oscar Wilde's trials. The themes of aesthetics, of degeneration of languor and social and natural corruption are all over the newspapers at this point. And the bipolar quality of Wellesley's future is capturing not just biology but also politics of the time.
- [32:29]
Melvyn Bragg
Simon James, the time Traveller, seems to be massively, massively, spectacularly ill equipped for this job. I mean, you're sitting at dinner, it doesn't change or anything. It's obviously some sort of. I presume dinner jacket is smoking cigars. He's got a few matches in his pocket which come in very handy, as in colonial literature, you strike a match and people run away, that sort of stuff. What do you think of the way that Wells presented him?
- [32:54]
Well, I think he's a. He's a fascinating set of contradictions. In fact, the. It's, It's. He points out to himself, he's most of the way through telling his own story when he says, maybe I should have brought a gun, you know, perhaps a camera would have been a good idea. Maybe I should have brought more matches than a single box of. Than always as a reader, I think, well, yes, maybe you should too. I think also he's a fascinating combination of aesthete and technician himself when he says at the end, treat my assertion of my story's truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. I think he's sounding like Oscar Wilde, that he is this, you know, very bourgeois, you know, you know, louche traveler. So in that sense, he's like. He's like the Eloi. But of course, he is also a technician. He is. He is science as well as. As well as the arts and humanities as well, too. So, you know, he's he, you know, revolts against the, against the Morlocks. But I wonder if he is in a sense part Morlock himself too, because it's the Morlocks who work the machines.
- [33:51]
Well, there's a sense of grandeeism about him, slightly like with Sherlock Holmes as well. These, these very well educated men who are apart from the rest and can solve problems that the rest can't solve but tend to do it on their own in, I presume in, in London in well, upholstered circumstances. That's going on as well, isn't it?
- [34:11]
Indeed. And that's, I mean the, the conversation starts with a discussion about maths. He says, I want to tell you. Exactly, exactly.
- [34:20]
It's a bit tougher, a bestseller, you know.
- [34:22]
You know. Good evening everyone. I'm going to contradict the version of John of Geometry that you were taught in schools.
- [34:26]
Yeah, that's how it begins.
- [34:27]
But it comes, but it ties in. I think that's partly what the, what the Sphinx is doing in there too. And I think, which I think he gets from Bellamy because Bellamy says that the. The riddle of the sphinx in the 19th century. The hero of that novel falls asleep in the 19th century and awakes in the last year of the 20th. He awakes in the year 2000. He says the riddle of the Sphinx in the 19th century is the labour question. And as Simon said, when the time traveller goes into the future and he sees the sphinx in front of him. The riddle of the Sphinx, of course in the play is what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, three legs in the evening. And the answer is man. The time traveller, as we've heard, wobbles on his time machine. When he lands, he falls off the time machine right at the beginning. He's on four legs. He then explores the future of 82701 on two legs. And then in the final section of the novel, he has a crowbar, he has an iron bar that he wants to hit, you know, Morlocks with too. So he, he embodies the riddle of the Sphinx himself that, that, you know, he is on top of that just to labour the point still further. At one point we're told he. A nail in one of his dress shoes works itself loose and he finds himself limping so that the time traveller becomes the Oedipal quester for knowledge in the future.
- [35:39]
It's great, isn't it? Amanda Reese what would the. Would the first readers have seen it as a warning or as a accurate enough prediction or a Bit of fun. We've talked about the immense reaction. So what was the gist of the immense reaction?
- [35:56]
Amanda Rees
It depends on whether or not you think that what he was trying to do was to predict the future or whether what he was trying to do was to give a warning about the present. And we've heard that theme come through a little bit in the conversations that we've had thus far, that it's less important to get the science right and less important to get the future right. And more important to use the encounter with the potentialities of science, the potentialities of technology, to start thinking about the kind of choices that we as a society might choose to make, what we might choose to do with the knowledge that we have. And it starts a whole theme within kind of that kind of speculative literature in which this kind of relationship between science and technology is actually put into. Actually into quite close tension. A kind of series of sociological or speculative. Of experiments with sociological organisation or cultural organisation in which it does seem very simplistic.
- [36:52]
Melvyn Bragg
The organization he ends up with, isn't he. Below ground, people are hacking away and trying to capture the upground people to eat upground. They're wandering around eating strawberries, waiting to be caught.
- [37:03]
Amanda Rees
Really, isn't that the mark of catastrophic literature in general? Once you've wiped out the complexities of an advanced. She said, doing scare quotes? That is I think, really absolutely central to the point that Wells is trying to make about the role of the city and the role of civilization, that essentially what it depends upon is complexity. It depends upon an advanced system of the division of labor. You know, all the sociologists like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, they're all addressing the consequences of increasing specialization. They're doing it in very, very dry tones. Wells is doing it in the language of the emotion in a way that will actually get to the heart of things that his readers might care about in a way that they wouldn't necessarily care about reading. A kind of a rather drier tone. Even though, granted, we do begin with a let me tell you things you don't know about mathematics. But what he's saying essentially is that the greatest achievement of humanity is civilization, and the city is emblematic of that achievement. The city is the icon of civilization, but in the future, the city's not there. In the future, the city is gone. Why? Because the greatest achievement of humanity contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. It is Janus faced and it's the Achilles heel. Modernity contains the seeds of its own destruction and can't possibly end well, there's.
- [38:25]
Simon Schaffer
A very good example of this which we haven't mentioned so far, which is one of the places the time Traveller visits in 802, 701, which is the palace of Green Porcelain. He comes across what is effectively South Kensington almost a million years from now. This is a museum complex which obviously begins to raise both I think for the author and for the reader some reflection on the paradoxes of time. Because what are you going to find in a museum of the future? You might, for example, it's always seemed to me perfectly plausible you might find the time machine in a museum of the future. It doesn't seem to cross the time travellers mind to go and look for his own machine there. What he finds is exactly as Amanda has said, ruins. Every single book in the vast library in the palace of Green Porcelain is shredded, almost all the machines abandoned, rusted, useless. Every monument, every achievement of urbanity has fallen to bits and is now neglected. So rather, it seems to me than reading this as pure prediction, this is judgment, this is warning, this is without the kind of pressure that makes urbanity what it is. This is what our future will be. And it's no coincidence that it's best embodied in imagining a ruinous South Ken.
- [40:09]
Melvyn Bragg
But he imagines more than that. Simon James. It seems to me in the book that he presses the wrong lead. He was in a hurry to get out. He's got to be assassinated if he doesn't get out. It's a near thing, it's very exciting. He bangs a lever. Instead of going back home, he zips into the 30 million years ahead. Future still one presumed beside the Thames. And what does he find there that is eerie?
- [40:33]
He finds the extinction of animal or the near extinction of animal life on the Earth. He does notice when he visits the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks, that. That there don't seem to be insects, that there don't seem to be weeds, that the ecology of the Thames, the parts of London around the Thames, have become much simpler, have become less complex. And when he travels even further into the future, he's also dealing with the consequences of the impending heat death of the sun as well too. So he witnesses an eclipse in the future so that the, he sees the world around him become much, much darker. So it is, it's the moon passing between the earth and the sun. But I think it also, it's a suggestion of the reminder that you know that even if we do try and fix our own society, that we try and remedy the social Divisions that create the Eloi and the Morlocks. The energy that the sun produces is finite and that mankind, no species, can exist forever in the future.
- [41:34]
Amanda Rees
AMANDA Just to go back to something that Simon Schaffer was saying earlier, which had to do with essentially the breakdown of civilization and the fact that all of these achievements of humanity, the acme of human creations, are now just so much done to dust. And I think that what's interesting here as well is the way in which that then gets developed not so by later writers like people like John Wyndham. It's a theme that gets picked up very, very strongly in later science fiction, this notion of the inevitable conflict between nature on the one hand and the city on the other, and the efforts made by the city, by nature, to reclaim the space of the cities.
- [42:22]
Melvyn Bragg
Why does Welles leave the idea of truthfulness open? He leaves it open at the end of Is this true or not? Is it a dream? Have they been flummoxed by the the time traveler? Why do you think he leaves it like that quickly for each of you?
- [42:37]
SIMON JAMES Because I think he wants the possibility for the future that he has shown to be different, to be to be changed. The narrator at the end, after the time traveler disappears, he goes back for another journey, and then we never see the time traveler again, and we're just left with the possibility of an open future. And the frame narrator says that the time traveler was a pessimist and he didn't think, he thought that civilization was. Was heading for a black future. But the frame narrator himself concludes, if that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. So we should try to make things better. That that future is not is not written in ink. There is a chance for humanity to change it.
- [43:14]
Simon.
- [43:15]
Simon Schaffer
SIMON CHAPA One of the striking things about Time Machine, for us reading it now, is that the time traveler doesn't go into the past. This is a book about our possible future and therefore confessedly conjectural.
- [43:32]
Amanda Rees
And AMANDA because it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It doesn't matter if what's. It doesn't matter if the story is veridical in any sense. What matters is the story, and what matters is the warning contained within the story.
- [43:45]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Amanda Reese, Simon James, Simon Schaffer. All suggestions for our listener week in by the 25th of October, please. Next week week, it's the poet Robert Robbie Burns, whose first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, set him on the way to Worldwide fame. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets.
- [44:05]
Some extra time now with a few.
- [44:07]
Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [44:11]
That was. That feels like five minutes. It feels like we just. Just got going.
- [44:15]
Simon Schaffer
No, it sounds like a dinner party in Richmond. One question I have actually for you, Simon, is what you think about Welles relation with the aesthetic movement. What is happening in fashionable writing at the time. It's always struck me as perverse and fascinating. So, for example, in the passage that we got onto towards the end, where Welles is evoking for us what 30 million AD will be like, the idiom is the idiom of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. It's an idiom of languorous decay, of a kind of Japanese pastels as the sun slowly dies. This is the degenerate side of the aesthetic movement. Is that a criticism or an endorsement? What's he doing?
- [45:14]
Melvyn Bragg
I think he's engaging with it and he eventually he absolutely turns against it. So there's a moment in. There's a dinner party in the Picture of Dorian Gray where someone uses the term fantasiecle, and Lord Henry picks it up and says, fantasiecle. Fandu globe. I wish it were fandu globe. Life is a terrible disappointment. So. So Welles can write in that language and he's engaging with it, but he absolutely turns against art for art's sake. And, you know, key in my own work on Welles is the falling out that Wells has with Henry James 20 years after he writes the Time Machine. That Wells has had 20 years of James patting him on the head and saying, we know very good, little Wells. You know, it's a splendid book. And eventually he thinks that asceticism is. Is morally irresponsible. He thinks that the novel is so important, you should use it as a vehicle of instruction to make the world better. And that art for art's sake leads to the. You know, to the Eloi.
- [46:07]
Simon Schaffer
Another. Sorry, but another thing we didn't get onto, which I always find also fascinating, is Marxist critics in the 1930s like Christopher Caldwell say, look, the reason why the Traveler gets on better with the Eloi than he does with the Morlocks and obviously feels admitted ambivalence by. But basically sympathy for the Eloi and absolute loathing and detestation for the Morlocks is because that is the predicament of the lower middle class. That is the situation in which Welles Class Daisy finds himself. Is that true, do you think?
- [46:52]
Amanda Rees
I think there's a lot to be said for it, but it's not. I mean, I suppose one of what I'd rather think about for the minute is that point that you raised before, that the traveller doesn't go back in time. And that's interesting for two reasons. First of all, because when you think about the kind of time travel fiction that follows on from Wells, the post Eisensteinian time travel fiction is all about going back in time. Paradoxes in time, how actions in the past change the present, therefore change the future. But you don't. The traveller's a tourist, he doesn't do anything, just goes back, looks, goes, oh my goodness and runs away very, very fast, as fast as he possibly can. But Wells does get involved in prehistoric fiction a lot. A lot in prehistoric fiction. And there's two examples that I'm thinking of, but particularly the Grizzly Folk, this story that he writes about the encounter between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalists at the dawn of time. And the notion is that in this encounter the Neanderthals nick a human kid and they eat it. So you have the, this theme of two different kinds of humans in inevitable conflicts. And with cannibalism, the worst sin that a human can commit against each other. With cannibalism as the kind of, as the, as the mode of engagement.
- [48:10]
Simon Schaffer
Except it isn't cannibalism because they're not the same species.
- [48:13]
Amanda Rees
Exactly. That's the point though, isn't it? But it's that failure to recognize the humanity in each other, which again, you see it with the Eloi and the Morlock and you see it going back to the point about what is the class position of Welles and how does that then relate to the way in which he's depicting the Eloi and the Morlock with that kind of the inability to look at somebody that looks different and to see in them and to confer on them a recognition of their own essential humanity.
- [48:42]
Melvyn Bragg
You raised. I mean, I'm not supposed to. I mean my own rule about this is not to interfere. But as you raise the business about his quarrel with, later quarrel with Henry James in the east eats, was he considered to be a popular success, but an outsider or rather below the salt as far as.
- [48:59]
Yes, very much so. In fact, Welles, because of course he lived long into the, the 20th century, we tend to think him as a Victorian Edwardian writer. He died in, in 1946. So we have the example I'm going to use. We have recordings of his, of his voice.
- [49:13]
Voice.
- [49:14]
Wells described himself as a cockney. He said that he, he was never Much of a success as a public speaker. And he was never very successful going into public life because he had this squeaky lower class voice. It certainly doesn't sound like that if you hear that. If you hear that voice now. I think also because of the, the poverty of his upbringing too. He, you know, he thought he was shorter than he should have been in 1905 in a modern utopia. He imagines the world as it should be, man made perfectly. And he meets the parallel universe version of H.G. wells, who is larger and hence more handsome than the real H.G. wells is because he's been fed properly when he's been grown up. But.
- [49:52]
Simon Schaffer
No, it is extraordinary how long Wells goes on. He doesn't stop talking, writing, broadcasting and so on. This is someone who, after all, writes this story in its first version in 1888.
- [50:07]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah.
- [50:08]
Simon Schaffer
And is broadcasting on Australian radio in 1938, 50 years later, explaining what the time machine really means. So there's, it always seems to me that there's a very strong sense in which the reason why the figure of one reason it's not the only reason, one reason why the figure of the time traveler is, is so constitutive of Wells is that he is that person. He is this time traveler, after all, he's capable and more better than any other writer of his generation of taking us to some other time. He treats fiction like that.
- [50:47]
Melvyn Bragg
Does he? Sorry, after you.
- [50:49]
Amanda Rees
But it was, I mean, one of the, one of my favorite HG broadcasts is one that he does in 1933. And it's basically, it's a, it's a call for professors of foresight. And it is brilliant. It is wonderful. Essentially, he's, he's making a call for the social value of science fiction in that he's saying up and down this country we have thousands of professors and students of history all studying the past, and not one, not one professor of foresight. And you know who he thinks that professor of foresight ought to be? It was. Look, mate, give us a job I could do with. So he's calling for this professor of foresight because what he's trying to suggest, what he's, what he's arguing, in essence, is that there is a. There is a grand failure of the public, of the democratic imagination to conceive of the kind of impact that science is going to have. It's really, really easy to imagine what the next scientific step might be or what's technological. It's easy to imagine or to speculate on scientific and technological development. It is so Much harder to figure out what the social consequences of those developments are going to be. And that's why I personally love science fiction, because that's exactly what they're doing. They're doing applied sociology, they're doing applied history of science. And they're doing it in a way that's much more successful than the stuff that we write, I think, in many ways, because it's putting it in the emotional context, it's enabling people to feel what it would be like to be in that position, particularly in the kind of sharp divisions, the sharp divisions of the differential distribution of economic or intellectual power that Wells himself is experiencing as well. And his heir, you know, John Wyndham, did exactly the same thing and made exactly the same set of calls. But, yeah, it's just an incredibly valuable, sorry, slight rant.
- [52:45]
Melvyn Bragg
Are you talked out or would you like to say some more? The producer has not yet arrived. He will loom through. Loom through that door in a minute. You've got a minute. Oh, he's looming.
- [52:53]
So, just one more thing I wanted to say quickly, if that's all right. Wells was obsessed with technology as a transport, and this is just the first one that Wells writes about space flight, about the tanks, you know, the powered airplane that. The helicopter before. Before they're even. Before they even exist. But the first of them is the time machine, and we haven't mentioned the book subtitle. It's the Time Machine and Invention, which is a wonderful pun on the machine and the story together.
- [53:23]
Thank you very much. Simon and Three Simons in one room at the same time.
- [53:29]
Simon Schaffer
No, I said the world would come to an end if you had Three Simons.
- [53:33]
Melvyn Bragg
You can have a cup of tea.
- [53:34]
Simon Tillotson
Or coffee first before that happens.
- [53:36]
Simon Schaffer
That would be lovely.
- [53:37]
Simon Tillotson
Tea?
- [53:38]
Simon Schaffer
Coffee?
- [53:38]
Melvyn Bragg
Coffee?
- [53:39]
Amanda Rees
Tea, please, if that's okay.
- [53:42]
Melvyn Bragg
Fruit tea of some kind. I think there was a ginger one or something like that, if that's ordinary.
- [53:46]
Simon Tillotson
We're also remembering Simon James, who passed away this summer and who, we're told, really enjoyed. This recording In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg is produced by me, Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production.
- [54:02]
Rory Stewart
I'm Rory Stewart and I want to talk about heroes. When I was a child, I imagined a heroic future for myself in which I would achieve great things and die sacrificing my life for a noble cause before I was 30. But my experiences in the Middle east and in politics showed me that there was something deeply wrong with my idea of heroism. From BBC Radio 4, my podcast, the Long History of Heroism explores ideas of what it meant to be a hero through time. How have these ideas changed? Who are the heroes we need today? Listen to Rory Stewart, the Long History of Heroism, first on BBC Sounds.
- [54:43]
Asma Khalid
America is changing and so is the world.
- [54:48]
Tristan Redman
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [54:56]
Asma Khalid
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [54:58]
Tristan Redman
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
- [55:02]
Asma Khalid
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [55:08]
Tristan Redman
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.