H.G.

Wells – The Time Machine

Setting of the Story

England in the 1890s,

in the year AD 802,701,

more than 30 million years

in the future
Eloi and Morlock

The Eloi and the Morlocks are the two species that have evolved from
humanity. The Time Traveler isn't very subtle in the book about their
characteristics – he calls them like he sees them:

 The Eloi are pretty and the Morlocks  The Eloi are herbivores, the Morlocks
are not are carnivorous.
 The Eloi are dumb and the Morlocks  Perhaps most important, the
are not (or, at least, not as dumb) Morlocks work and the Eloi do not.
 The Eloi wear clothes, the Morlocks
do not.
The tale of 802,701 is political commentary of late Victorian
England. It is a dystopia, a vision of a troubled future. It
recommends that current society change its ways lest it end
up like the Eloi, terrified of an underground race of Morlocks.
In the Eloi, Wells satirizes Victorian downfall. In the Morlocks,
Wells provides a potentially Marxist critique of capitalism.

[Class in The Time Machine, Matthew Taunton,15 May 2014]

“While at first glance the Eloi seem to inhabit a classless society, when
the primitive Morlocks come into view—savage brutes who live
underground and seem to perform the mindless drudgery necessary to
keep society functioning—the Time Traveler awakens to another
possibility. Has the social separation between rich and poor become so
extreme that the two groups have evolved into separate species? “

[Class in The Time Machine, Matthew Taunton,15 May 2014]

The rest of the novella deals with the science fiction of time
travel. Before Wells, other people had written fantasies of
time travel, but Wells was the first to bring a strong dose of
scientific speculation to the genre. Wells has his Time
Traveler speak at length on the fourth dimension and on the
strange astronomy and evolutionary trends he observes as
he travels through time. Much of this was inspired by ideas
of entropy and decay promulgated by Wells' teacher,
Thomas Henry Huxley.
[Class in The Time Machine, Matthew Taunton,15 May 2014]