Post-industrialism reflected in H.G. Well’s novel The Time Machine

1. Post-industrialismreflected inH.G. Well’s novelThe Time Machine

2. Features of post-industrialism relating to the novel: • The increase in number of the population • People moved to urban areas to work in factories • New inventions (telephone, subway trains, automobiles,) • The speeding up of the daily life • Class and gender issues (division of the class and gender roles) • The disappearance of the nuclear family • Standardization and lack of individuality was a problem • The crisis of natural resources (non-regenerative type) and the damaging of the environment (pollution) • The disappearance of the traditional production-consumption

3. ‘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.’ • ‘What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?’ • ‘I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of to-day.’

4. Names of the characters Lack of individuality (you are what you do, specialists): • The Time Traveler • The Very Young Man • The Psychologist • The Medical Man • The Editor • The Provincial Mayor • Filby (common name at the time) The appearance of a struggle toward individuality: • Weena

5. Technological development • The search for the new thing • Lack of Intelligence, education and cooperation • Natural medicine • Darwin’s theory • Subjugation of nature • ‘Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like?’ • ‘There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among them. […]I could not see how things were kept going.’

6. Nuclear family and Gender roles • The disappearance of the nuclear family: • ‘…where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no necessity for an efficient family…’ • The disappearance of the traditional gender roles: • ‘…and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears.’

7. Population and Urbanity • The population stopped increasing and began to de extinct: • ‘The difficulty of increasing population had been met, I guessed, and population has ceased to increase.’ • There was no sign of urbanity, only primitive rural sight: • ‘…I realized that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household had vanished.’

8. Standardization and lack of struggle • All the Elois had: • Same physical features • Same clothes • Same behavior • Same preoccupations (lack of them) • The lack of struggle: • No preoccupations • No wish for improvement • No knowledge of danger • ‘I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for 24 hours—that is another matter’.

9. Natural resources crisis and damaged environment • Crisis (non-regenerative resources) • ‘Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can.’ • Most animals are in extinct • The green revolution (manipulating plants) • Damaged environment: • ‘I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age.’ – damaged ozone layer

10. Class difference • ‘At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position’ • The Elois were the upper class and the Morlock the lower class. • ‘Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the Earth?’

11. Other features: • The disappearance of the traditional production-consumption: • ‘I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone.’ • No form of art present: • ‘To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more’

12. Conclusion • The inhabitants from the future are primitive (fire is not familiar to them) • They are split into two races: upper and lower class • They lack individuality • Nature won the battle with technology • No interest in economy, commerce, development of any kind (including population) • No nuclear family of gender roles • No urban areas • No time awareness • Damaged environment and extinct animals • General carelessness towards life