The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
H. G. Wells · a novella in twelve chapters and an Epilogue · published by William Heinemann, London, in 1895, the year of its serial in W. E. Henley’s New Review · scored on the Heinemann text, the text in common use since · read from knowledge in Wells’s English; no text in hand, and only words that are certain quoted
Mode
Scientific romance told as testimony: a hypothesis put to an audience, and a future discovered by inference rather than described
Mythos
The garden whose innocents are bred as cattle by the dwellers below; the descent to the underworld and the return; a Eurydice lost on the road back; the end of the world as a cooling
Phase
From the first dinner, where the fourth dimension is argued and a model sent into time, through the year 802,701, the Eloi and the Morlocks, the shafts, the burning forest and Weena lost, to the shore under the red sun, the second dinner and the Traveller’s last departure
Presentation
Prose narrative inside a frame: an unnamed narrator, one of the dinner guests, gives the Traveller’s own account in the first person, which fills nearly all the book; an Epilogue in the narrator’s voice
Register
The Traveller’s voice, quick, practical and humorous, moving from comic curiosity at table to grave report from the far future; lucid exposition, purple in places and hasty in others
Scale
One man, a dinner party of men named by their roles, and the whole span of the earth’s future: labour and class, evolution, entropy, the deep time of man’s rise and fall
Governing Proposition
A man of science tells a table of sceptical professional men that time is a dimension a machine can travel in, goes, and comes back lame and filthy with a tale of the year 802,701 and of a dead shore far beyond it. The wager of the book is that a division of classes, carried far enough, becomes a division of kinds; that comfort undoes the faculties that won it; and that man is a passing episode in a cosmos that does not care for him, so that the dining room where the tale is told is itself a moment in a decline.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens at a dinner in Richmond, among lamps and port, where the Time Traveller argues to his guests that time is a fourth dimension, and that a machine can move in it as a man moves in space. Then he sends a small model of such a machine into time before their eyes. The guests are professional men named by their roles: the Psychologist, the Medical Man, the Provincial Mayor, the Very Young Man; one, Filby, has a name. The narrator, another of them, has none.
The dinner is the premise and also the trial the whole book stages: a hypothesis put to an audience disposed to doubt it. At the second dinner the Traveller comes in lame and filthy, wants mutton before he will talk, and then tells the tale, with the Editor and the Journalist now at table. From here to near the end the book is his account in the first person, given back by the narrator, and the reader sits with the guests, weighing what is said against what can be believed.
The unit is the novella as William Heinemann published it in London in 1895, in twelve chapters and an Epilogue, the text in common use since. The serial in W. E. Henley’s New Review in the same year carried an episode Wells cut from the book, a further vision on a late shore; the New York edition of Henry Holt was set from an earlier and less finished state; and the device first appeared in “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888), a different story. These are context. The book was its author’s first.
Movement II
The ride through time is made physical: the lurch and the nausea, the sun hopping across the sky, night and day fusing to grey, the seasons running past. When the machine stops, colour returns slowly. The impossible thing is made credible by sensation and detail, and the future is reached by a machine one rides, not by sleep or dream as the utopias had reached it.
The year is 802,701. Over the land stands the White Sphinx, and soon the machine is gone, taken into its hollow pedestal; the Sphinx must be answered before the Traveller can go home. Around it live the Eloi, idle and gentle, in a garden world. The Traveller is ignorant on arrival and learns by inference, and so the future is discovered rather than described.
His first theory is of a communist paradise in decline: comfort and security have undone the faculties that won them, and with no need for change there is no need for intelligence. It is the first of several, and the book’s method is to have him build and discard them as a scientist does. The guided tour of the utopia is replaced by a man reasoning, and often reasoning wrong.
Movement III
The second theory is of two species. Below the garden live the Morlocks, afraid of light, at work in the dark; the idle Upper-world and the labouring Under-world of Wells’s London have, given time, become two kinds of creature. The third theory corrects the second: the Eloi are cattle, and the Morlocks feed on them. The old exploitation is reversed, and the workers eat the leisured.
The Traveller goes down the shafts into the Morlocks’ dark, lit only by matches that go out. It is the old descent to the underworld, made a descent into the economic basement of the race, and its terror is as sharp as anything in Victorian fiction. He grieves “to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been”: the race had won comfort, and comfort had undone it.
Beside him through these chapters is Weena, the one tenderness in the far future and its one person. The passages of Weena repeat one note, and the long middle of the Palace of Green Porcelain is partly inventory; they are the places where the book could be thinner.
Movement IV
On the road back the forest burns. In the glare the Traveller beats the Morlocks off with an iron bar, and Weena is lost in the fire. The scene is a dreadful sublime, and in the myth the book has built it is the loss of a Eurydice on the way up from the dark.
The properties planted earlier are paid here, the matches, the camphor, the iron lever, the lost machine: the made side of a book whose prose is purple in places and hasty in others, but whose pace and physical detail rarely fail. The Morlocks’ fear of light, their eating of the Eloi and the hollow pedestal all follow from the premise, and the logic of the far future holds to the end of it.
Whether the Traveller’s last theory of the Eloi is right the book never confirms. His account is offered as partial, and the guests and the reader are left to weigh it. That openness is one reason the book has been read for a hundred and thirty years as allegory of class, as Darwinian fable and as a document of Victorian anxiety, and why those readings still dispute it.
Movement V
The last journey goes on, in the Traveller’s estimate, more than thirty million years. On a shore under a huge red sun there are crab-like things, then an eclipse, cold and silence: “The darkness grew apace.” A round thing with tentacles hops on the shoal. It is the end of the world as a cooling, an eschatology without a God, and the second law of thermodynamics made a place. That chapter is the book’s height.
Then the second dinner, and the tale ends at table, among men who doubt it. The evidence is two strange white flowers and a battered machine. The Traveller leaves again with a camera and a knapsack, and in the Epilogue he has been gone three years. The tale is left unproved, and the dining room where it was told is, by the book’s own law, a moment in a decline.
The narrator ends on a hope against the shore, that “gratitude and a mutual tenderness” survived in the heart of man. The book has been in print without a break since 1895, translated widely and taught, filmed by George Pal in 1960 and by Simon Wells in 2002, and its device has passed through Heinlein, Bradbury and Doctor Who, its dying sun through Hodgson, Stapledon and Clarke; Eloi and Morlock are names in common speech for the two halves of a society.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little to take, and what it finds is in the middle. The frame cannot go: the first dinner, where the fourth dimension is argued and a model sent into time, is both the premise and the trial of belief the whole book stages, and the second, where the Traveller comes in lame and filthy and wants mutton before he talks, makes the tale testimony. The last departure, with a camera and a knapsack, is required to leave the tale unproved. Within the tale, the Traveller’s successive theories of 802,701 are the design, not repetition, since each corrects the last. What could be thinned: some Weena passages, which repeat one note of tenderness, and the long middle of the Palace of Green Porcelain, which is partly inventory. Thinning, not cutting.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and most of it holds. A division of classes, carried far enough, becomes a division of kinds: the idle above and the labouring below in Wells’s London become two species, and the old exploitation is reversed, so that the workers feed on the leisured. Comfort and security undo the faculties that won them, and the Traveller grieves “to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been”. Deepest, man is a passing episode in a cosmos indifferent to him, and the last shore is the second law of thermodynamics made a place; that finding is made by the action, not stated beside it. Held below the top because the social disclosure is schematic, a thesis given a world rather than a world yielding a thesis, and the people of the frame disclose little.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height is reached several times, and once at the summit of English prose of its decade. The first passage through time, the sun hopping across the sky and the seasons running past, is transport. The descent down the shafts into the Morlocks’ dark, lit by matches that go out, is terror as sharp as anything in Victorian fiction. The burning forest, Weena lost and the Traveller beating off the Morlocks with an iron bar in the glare, is a dreadful sublime. Then the last shore: a huge red sun, crab-like things, the eclipse, the cold, the silence, “The darkness grew apace”, and a round thing with tentacles hopping on the shoal. That chapter is among the great cold heights of the literature. What keeps the axis here is frequency: the dinners and much of the exposition of 802,701 are lively, not elevated.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The Eloi and the Morlocks are a modern myth made from a scientific premise: a garden of Eden whose innocents are bred as cattle by the dwellers below, so that the old descent to the underworld becomes a descent into the economic basement of the race. The structure carries it. The White Sphinx, a riddle of the ages of man, takes the machine and must be answered; the Traveller goes down into the dark and returns; Weena, a Eurydice, is lost in the fire on the road back. The last chapter builds an eschatology without a God, the end of the world as a cooling. The figure is argued from that construction, not from the names’ later life in common speech. Held where it is because the men of the frame are types rather than archetypes, and the Traveller is a function more than a figure.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the utopian dream of the future, Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890); the underground race of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871); the evolutionary pessimism of T. H. Huxley, under whom Wells had studied; and the traveller’s tale with its frame. The turn is double. The journey is made mechanical and rational, a machine one rides, where the future had been reached by sleep or dream, and so time becomes a direction of travel. And the utopia is turned inside out: a future produced by evolution and entropy rather than by reform, where progress has run to decadence. The stake was real for a first book set against the reforming optimism its readers knew, though the scientific romance had an eager market in Verne and the frame is a familiar shape.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The form carries knowledge. The frame of sceptical professional men at dinner makes the tale a hypothesis put to an audience, which is the book’s method throughout: in 802,701 the Traveller builds and discards theories as a scientist does, and the reader is placed with the guests, weighing two strange white flowers and a battered machine against incredulity. A single traveller’s single voice, ignorant on arrival and learning by inference, discovers the future where the utopia gave a guided tour. The order of the journeys, from the garden to the shore, is an argument about time: social evolution first, then cosmic death. Held below Heart of Darkness, whose frame is the knowledge itself, because here the form is a sound container more than a necessity at every point, and a third-person telling would lose less than the top of the axis asks.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over a hundred and thirty years. The book has been read as social allegory of class and labour; as Darwinian and degenerationist fable; as a parable of entropy and the heat death; as a document of late Victorian anxiety about empire and decline; as a critique of the Traveller’s own confident inference, since his theories are explicitly partial and the book never confirms the last; and as a text of desire and its displacement in Weena. Its questions stay open: whether the Traveller’s final reading of the Eloi is right, and what the hope of the Epilogue weighs against the shore. Held where it is because much of the yield is taken on the first reading, and return tends to confirm what was found rather than transform it.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is English prose fiction of the 1890s, and within it the scientific romance as it then stood. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility, not an accent: the book made time a dimension a fiction could travel in by machine, and so made possible a body of fiction that did not exist before it, and it founded the evolutionary far future and the dying earth as subjects for serious narrative. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the time machine as a device across the twentieth century, in Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941), Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1952) and the BBC’s Doctor Who from 1963; the far future and the dying sun in Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) and Clarke; the two-species society in later dystopia. The scientific romance is often dated from this book. Held below Frankenstein’s 9.2 because the reach runs mainly within genre fiction, and the literature at large was not redirected by it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
A hundred and thirty-one years, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text survives whole; the variants of the Heinemann and Holt editions and the episode cut from the serial are textual history and take nothing from the work. Presence: in print without a break since 1895, translated widely, taught in schools and universities, filmed by George Pal in 1960 and Simon Wells in 2002 and adapted many times, its title and its two peoples in common speech. Fabric: it has outlived the conditions that made it, since the Victorian class anxiety it draws on is gone and the book is read without it. Charged, a little: its science, the fourth dimension and the evolution of species in eight hundred thousand years, has dated, and part of its presence is the fame of the title and the device rather than reading of the text.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Wells’s English. The command is of narrative pace and of the physical sensation of an impossible thing: the ride through time, its lurch and nausea and the slow return of colour, is made credible by concrete detail, and the matches, the camphor, the iron lever and the lost machine are planted and paid like the properties of a good play. The exposition is lucid, and the Traveller’s voice, quick, practical and humorous, holds the book. Charged: the prose runs to the purple in places and is hasty in others, as of a journalist writing to deadline; Weena is drawn in sentiment; the guests are sketched rather than made. The making is good, and in the last chapter it bears the weight; it is not, across the book, the sentence-by-sentence command of Heart of Darkness, at 8.8 on this axis.
Score: 8.0 / 10
One physics governs the whole, and it is the book’s subject: the laws of evolution and of energy, applied without exception to man. Take the two most distant elements, the Richmond dining room with its lamps and port, and the shore more than thirty million years on under the red sun. They obey one law: what is comfortable now is a stage in a process that does not care for it, and the dining room, like the garden of the Eloi, is a moment in a decline. The tone, curious, ironic, then grave, moves without a break. The internal logic of the far future is kept: the Morlocks’ fear of light, their eating of the Eloi and the hollow pedestal of the Sphinx all follow from the premise. Held below the top only because the range, wide in time, is narrow in people.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a novella holds, and charged only for what it does not. Held together, not listed: labour and class, as the cause of the divide between the species; the natural order, as evolution; the cosmos, as entropy and the end of the earth; history, as the deep time of man’s rise and fall; the scientific mind, in the Traveller’s inference and the guests’ doubt; the body, in hunger, fear and the eating of flesh; tenderness, in Weena and the Epilogue. One argument joins the orders. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the human range: consciousness beyond the Traveller’s practical mind is thin, the family is absent, and the state and the sacred appear only as their absence in 802,701. A short book holding the earth’s whole future in one structure is a real achievement here, and its people are few.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7. A survival of a hundred and thirty-one years, in print without a break, taught, filmed and spoken of, beyond the Victorian anxieties that made it; and a force that made time a dimension fiction could travel in and founded the far future and the dying earth as subjects. Beside them The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6: the shafts, the burning forest and the last shore under the red sun, and a myth of the garden and the basement built from a scientific premise.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: the book holds the earth’s whole future in one structure, but its human range is narrow, with the family absent and the state and the sacred present only as absences. Next above it, The Made at 8.0, a sure command of pace and physical detail charged with purple and hasty prose, a sentimental Weena and sketched guests. Then The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 8.2: a sound container rather than a form necessary at every point, and a yield taken mostly on the first reading.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Inner Law at 8.4, The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls short by a tenth, its social disclosure a schematic thesis given a world. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Made at 8.0, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The aggregate stands well below the summit in any case, and the unmet Epochal Gate would hold it there.
Basis · H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, scored on the London edition of William Heinemann, 1895, in twelve chapters and an Epilogue, the text in common use since. The serial in W. E. Henley’s New Review (January to May 1895), with the episode Wells cut from the book, the New York edition of Henry Holt (1895), set from an earlier and less finished state, and “The Chronic Argonauts” (Science Schools Journal, 1888), a different story with the same device, are context and not the unit. The work is in English; there is no translation between the desk and the work. Read from knowledge: no text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The order of events, the frame, the principal scenes and many sentences are known closely; only words that are certain are quoted, briefly, and none is cited by chapter. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the length in words, the exact chapters the Traveller’s account fills, the critical studies that first gave the book its place in the history of its kind, and the particular words in which Weena is drawn.