View of Humanity ( the Time Machine by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells The Time Machine Mischel Figusch

Englisch-LK Jg. 13

The view of humanity in The Time Machine - Essay

This essay is about the view of humanity that arises from "The Time Machine"

It includes the TT's speeches and his theories about how the Eloi and the Morlocks came to be. It also shows that Wells haunts at critical aspects on society.

The first hints at Wells political attitude are already noticeable in the beginning of the novel: "To discover a society", said I, "erected on a strictly communistic basis."(page 10, line 19)

By the example of Eloi and Morlocks, he warns of Capitalism and its consequences to mankind. This vision which is presented in "The Time Machine" shows or rather forecasts the results of the social split between the leisurely wealthy upper class and the working class, especially in the Victorian England.

The increasing development of the division between "upper" and "lower" class will lead into a big disaster in further future. The intelligence of the human species is going to be at an unthinkable minimum. All achievements in culture, technology and knowledge will be vanished.

"You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children-- asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm!" (page 38, line 4 - 11)

The reason for this "devolutionary evolution" is the non-existence of the necessity to learn more, or rather to use the learned or skilled things. Knowledge and accordingly advancement of knowledge hasn't got a meaning anymore.

In one of his former theories, the TT assumes that the Morlocks, the inferior race (at this point in time) which lives in the underworld, are the direct outcome of England's East-end worker, who already live "in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth." (page 77, line 17)

"The Time Machine" can be seen as Wells's socialist