The Time Machine -- By H. G. Wells

          The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells is about a 19th Century man who discovers a way to travel through time. On his first journey through time, he goes to 802,701 A.D. He is still in London; in fact, he is in the same place he was when he first departed on his journey to the future. Shortly after arriving, out of nowhere, a flock of little creatures, called Eloi surround him and call him the sun god. After observing them briefly and seeing the “great hall” where they all eat and sleep, he first assumes that they are communists. Communism means “a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs" (OED). He observes that the Eloi do not seem to be working, they all eat and sleep together, and they use no money. During the time when H.G. Wells wrote this novel, Russia was becoming a communist country. Much of the world, and particularly Great Britain, feared this new political approach and therefore disavowed everything about it. Some people however found this political approach to be an amiable, if Utopian, form of political organization. This is why the time traveler's first instinct is to think that the Eloi are communists. He considers the Eloi to be the natural consequences of a communist world view. At this point, he decides to feel existentially frought about these "communists." He notices that the Eloi are lazy and rather stupid or simplistic. He thinks that communism leads to such laziness and weak-mindedness. Later in the book, the time-traveler, who one assumes represents Wells' views, changes his opinion about what may have caused humans to evolve into the Eloi. These, however, are his first impressions.

          As he wanders through this “utopia,” without a cicerone, he stumbles upon a well, which eventually causes him to rethink his initial evaluation. When he drops something into the well, it sucks it down. This inescapable “sucking” eventually becomes an interesting metaphor for the time traveler who realizes that the underground dwellers are unable to escape from the lives they’ve been born into as workers. Throughout the novella, the time traveler has seen white ape like creatures that he later realizes are known as Morlocks. They dwell underground and come up out of the wells in the middle of the night (this may also be a metaphor for how H.G. Wells gets ideas for his novels…. Maybe they come out of him in the middle of the night). As he tries to understand how the Morlocks relate to the Eloi, he crafts a theory that, somewhat like our own democracy, there are “Haves and Have nots” in the future. He sees his own world becoming more and more socially and economically stratified and he thinks the situation with the Morlocks and Eloi is an exaggerated version of this:

"About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. And this same widening gulf will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting for our species along the lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-Nots; the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labor” (273).

          As the time traveler sees more and more of how the Eloi and the Morlock interact, he becomes more certain of his “haves and have nots” theory. He believes that the Eloi are the “Haves” and the Morlocks are the “have nots.” The Eloi have become weak-minded from having too much of everything too easily and the Morlocks having nothing, but constant work, have become vengeful and malevolent, and now stalk and feed off the Eloi, literally.