SOURCE: Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. “The Time Machine: A Romance of ‘The Human Heart’.” Extrapolation 20, no. 2 (summer 1979): 154-67.

In the following essay, Hennelly relates Wells's scientific writings to his The Time Machine and explores different aspects of the novella, particularly the roles of the Narrator and Time Traveller.

I felt I lacked a clue. I felt—how shall I put it? Suppose you found an inscription, with sentences here and there in excellent plain English, and interpolated therewith, others made up of words, of letters even, absolutely unknown to you? Well, on the third day of my visit, that was how the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One presented itself to me!

(pp. 57-58)¹

The reader of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) shares these insecurities with the Time Traveller since the full meaning of his “strange adventures” (p. 95), and especially the enigmatic...