In this blog post, I will summarize, from a translator’s perspective, the life of Herbert George Wells, his major works, and, in particular, the creativity and influence of ‘The Time Machine’.
Herbert George Wells: Life and Career
Herbert George Wells was a multifaceted figure who left a significant mark across the fields of literature, science, and politics during the turbulent period spanning the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. It is not easy to pinpoint a single title that truly captures who he was. All sorts of labels come to mind—novelist of manners, journalist, science fiction writer, encyclopedist, historian, socialist, public educator, scientist, utopian, feminist, and prophet—but no matter which label one applies, he transcends that category. The scope of his work was so vast that the British Museum’s catalog lists over 600 entries under Wells’s name.
To quote a review of Wells prior to this article: “As a commentator on general issues, Wells was a rambling orator; as a novelist, he was even more eloquent. He wrote scientific stories, but their novelty has long since faded due to advances in knowledge.” In his novels, he lacks the vivid depictions of social customs found in the works of John Galsworthy or Enoch Arnold Bennett, as well as the ruthless candor of William Somerset Maugham’s ‘Ashenden’. At his core, Wells was an intellectual who instinctively abhorred violence, fanaticism, patriotism, partisanship, and the flood of life and emotion; whenever he dealt with emotion, he was all too prone to insincerity. His intense emotion was a cold fury directed at intellectual or moral falsehood.
Wells wrote literary works, but he was closer to a scientist than to an artist. Although much of his work has been lost to time, it is possible that without a man like him, the common foundation of our civilization today might never have been established. The critique cited in this article is the obituary Wells wrote for himself in 1936 at the request of ‘The Listener’. Few individuals possess both the sense of humor that allowed him to view himself with such objectivity and such vast encyclopedic knowledge.
Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in Brumley, Kent, England. His father, Joseph Wells, ran a small shop, but as business was poor, he supported the family by playing professional cricket. His mother, Sarah Neal, was the daughter of an innkeeper in Sussex; before her marriage, she had worked as a maid at Upark House, a country estate owned by the aristocracy. As a boy, Wells was nicknamed “Bertie,” and having inherited his father’s love of reading, he was a frequent visitor to the Bromley Library.
After finishing elementary school, Wells enrolled at Molly Commercial School, but due to his family’s financial difficulties, he even considered emigrating to Australia at one point. When he was 11, his father suffered a leg injury, making their financial situation even more difficult. In 1880, his mother returned to work as a maid at Upark House, and Wells also took a job as an apprentice shop assistant. This experience allowed him to observe upper-class life up close, revealing to him the reality of the British class system—a perspective later reflected in his work ‘Tono-Bungay’.
After encountering the works of Plato, Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, and others in the library at Upark Manor, Wells attempted to study Latin while briefly working as an apprentice at a pharmacy in 1881, but after being fired, he enrolled as a boarding student at a provincial grammar school. He subsequently faced difficulties, including an incident where he ran away after being rehired at a draper’s shop, but his appointment as an assistant teacher at Midhurst Grammar School marked a major turning point in his life.
During his time at the grammar school, Wells developed an interest in science and studied diligently, eventually enrolling in the Science Teachers’ College in South Kensington, London, in 1884. While studying physics, chemistry, biology, and geology, he was particularly influenced by T. H. Huxley (Thomas Henry Huxley) in the field of biology. However, because he neglected his studies due to his romance with his cousin Isabel Mary Wells, he did not receive his degree; his interests subsequently shifted from science to politics and literature, leading him to attend socialist rallies organized by William Morris and George Bernard Shaw.
In 1889, he worked as a temporary teacher at a school run by A. A. Milne’s father, and in 1891, he married Isabel; however, their marriage was unstable due to personality differences. Around the same time, Wells taught biology at a correspondence college and published essays and short stories, including an early draft titled “The Chronic Argonauts,” which later served as the foundation for “The Time Machine.”
It was an era when the theory of evolution exerted significant influence as an ideology, and discussions about the fourth dimension were also lively. ‘The Time Machine’ is a work born from the combination of the theory of evolution, the concept of the fourth dimension, and Wells’ own frustrations and fin-de-siècle melancholy.
In 1893, Wells published a biology textbook and, after being discovered by Frank Harris and W. E. Henry, began contributing regularly to leading publications such as the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ and ‘Nature’. In 1895, the year he made his debut with ‘The Time Machine’, Wells and Isabel divorced, and he remarried Amy Catherine Robbins, a former student from his days at the Correspondence College. That same year, the novella ‘The Wonderful Visit’ and the short story collection ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ were published.
By around 1900, Wells had achieved great popularity and spent 3,000 pounds to build a mansion called “Spade House” in Sandgate, Kent. Thereafter, he wrote novels and criticism with great vigor and socialized with the leading literary figures of his time. Introduced by Bernard Shaw, he joined the Fabian Society in 1903 and, through his activities there until his resignation in 1908, exerted a significant influence on the younger generation.
Between 1900 and 1910, Wells’s literature shifted from science fiction to social novels. Representative examples of his social novels include ‘Love and Mr. Lewisham’ (1900), ‘Kipps’ (1905), ‘Tono-Bungay’ (1909), and ‘The History of Mr. Polly’ (1910). These works share several common traits: they contain strong autobiographical elements; their protagonists, hailing from the lower-middle class, strive to rise in society through education and talent within the class-based society of the Edwardian era; and the dialogue, which employs the speech patterns and slang of the lower classes at the time, brings the novels to life.
Alongside these, Wells also published sociological works; titles such as ‘Mankind in the Making’ (1903) and ‘A Modern Utopia’ (1905) had a significant impact. George Orwell later cited Wells as the writer who most influenced young people in the 1900s and 1910s among the writers of subsequent generations.
The most controversial event in Wells’ life was the publication of ‘Ann Veronica’ (1909). This novel, which celebrated the sexual liberation of young women, greatly disrupted Edwardian moral standards and was harshly criticized by many reviewers; however, Wells remained steadfast in his belief that sexual liberation was a necessity of the times.
Following the publication of ‘The New Machiavelli’ in 1911, Wells’ novels gradually evolved into “problem novels.” A “problem novel” is a genre in which the characters or plot serve as tools to convey the author’s arguments or concerns. His major works include ‘Marriage’ (1912), ‘The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman’ (1914), and ‘The World of William Clissold’ (1926).
During World War I, Wells argued that Britain was fighting “the war to end all wars,” engaged in anti-German propaganda, and entered into debates with the literary community. In ‘Boon’ (1915), written under the pseudonym Reginald Bliss, he attacked Henry James and argued for novels that should capture real life rather than literature overly focused on formal beauty.
After the war, Wells participated in initiatives such as the League of Nations and acted as a global figure, attending the Washington Conference and interviewing Stalin. However, on a personal level, he displayed vanity and a sense of spiritual emptiness, and during the 1920s, he began to be increasingly devalued within intellectual circles. Although he gained popularity with the general public through the publication of ‘The Outline of History’ in 1920 and ‘The Salvaging of Civilization’ in 1921, his credibility among intellectuals waned.
After 1922, Wells entered politics but was defeated in elections; he also suffered personal hardships, including his breakup with Rebecca West in 1924 and the loss of his first wife, Catherine, in 1927. Published in 1934, ‘An Experiment in Autobiography’ garnered attention as an autobiography in which he candidly confessed the details of his early life.
In 1939, as World War II broke out, Wells expressed a grim foreboding about humanity’s future in ‘The Fate of Homo Sapiens’, warning that humanity could face destruction if it failed to exercise self-control over its mechanized civilization. He remained in London throughout the war and died of liver cancer on August 13, 1946.
News of Wells’ death spread around the world, and Jorge Luis Borges, in his tribute, mentioned ‘The Time Machine’, ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’, and ‘The Invisible Man’, noting that Wells had been an author he had loved since childhood.
The Creativity and Literary Influence of ‘The Time Machine’
When Wells became an overnight sensation with ‘The Time Machine’, what was the novelty of this work? In a nutshell, it was that he liberated time travel from the realm of magic, dreams, or miracles and endowed it with scientific theory. Furthermore, by introducing a “machine” as a means of time travel, he eliminated the mystical aspects of future travel and brought “scientific wonder” to the forefront, thereby securing his position as a pioneer.
‘The Time Machine’ gained acclaim immediately upon its publication and drew attention through reviews in various newspapers. While some media outlets pointed out the impossibility of time travel, it is certain that this work transformed the nature of journeys into the future. By employing scientific hypotheses, it provided a literary justification for the possibility of future travel and, furthermore, allowed for a flexible treatment of the very concept of “time” within the novel. This broadened the horizons of the novel genre and allowed readers to view human society from the perspectives of the past or the future. This can be considered the beginning of science fiction.
While imagining a future 800,000 years from now, Wells raised the question of how society would fragment and regress following extreme progress. If Robert Louis Stevenson depicted the inner contradictions of the individual in ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, Wells depicted the contradictions of a society divided into the Eloi and the Morlocks. He succeeded in capturing, through literary imagery, the stagnation and demise that follow the pinnacle of progress.
The time traveler in the novel comes to realize the transience of the dreams of human intellect and harbors a pessimistic outlook. What he witnessed was not only the end of human society but also the end of the Earth itself. At the end of the novel, the sun has come to a standstill, flora and fauna have nearly vanished, and an apocalyptic, deathly silence envelops the Earth. Wells vividly captured the Earth’s harrowing demise.
This regressive cosmological imagination can be seen as the result of extrapolating Darwin’s theory of evolution in reverse. Wells imagined a cycle in which life on Earth arises, gradually becomes more complex, and eventually degenerates. T. H. Huxley had previously proposed a pessimistic cosmology in ‘Evolution and Ethics’, suggesting that once evolution reaches a certain point, it may embark on a path of decline. Wells adopted this perspective in ‘The Time Machine’, transforming the cyclical concept of evolution and degeneration into literature.
In conclusion, Wells combined the imagination of a novelist with the insight of a scientist to open a new path for contemplating and depicting the future. Although his imagination sometimes fell short of the intellectual advances of his time, works like ‘The Time Machine’ remain worth reading today for their contribution to broadening the horizons of literature and thought.
