A Victorian Scientist’s Travel Through Time
WELLS, H. G. The Time Machine. London: William Heinemann. 1895.
8vo. Original tan cloth, maroon lettering to front cover and spine, brown winged sphinx vignette to upper board, brown publisher’s device to lower board, uncut; pp. [viii], 151, [33 (advertisements)]; spine lightly sunned, a few spots to upper edge; minimal offsetting to pastedowns; else near fine.
First UK edition, published in the same month as the first, of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, a foundational work of both the science-fiction genre and the modern time-travel narrative.
Introducing the term ‘time machine’ in print for the first time, Wells’s post-apocalyptic novella – recounting the journey of a Victorian scientist 800,000 years into the future – captivated readers on the cusp of a new technological age. Even before its serialisation by The New Review had concluded in May 1895, Wells had been hailed as ‘a man of genius’, and the book heralded the beginning of a fifty-year career as one of the most influential cultural and political controversialists of his time.
The work offers a sardonic rejection of Victorian ideals of progress and improvement, and a pointed satirical commentary on the Decadent culture of the 1890s, reflecting Wells’s criticism of the social consequences of industrialisation. As George Orwell later wrote: ‘I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920 […] influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us […] would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.’
Henry Holt and Company in New York published the first book edition on 7 May 1895; Heinemann published this British edition on 29 May. The binding device of the winged sphinx, chosen by Wells himself, alludes both to its traditional symbolism of mystery and to its role in the narrative as the monument beneath which the Morlocks conceal the Time Machine.
See Luckhurst, Introduction to The Time Machine (2016); Orwell, “Wells, Hitler and the World State” (1941).
SKU: 2120291