WELLS, H G. The Time Machine. London: William Heinemann. 1895.
8vo. Beige cloth boards with red lettering and stamped with a sphinx and publishers device to lower board; pages untrimmed; pp. [8], 151, [33 (ads)]; slight foxing to upper edge; minimal offsetting from pastedowns; fine.
First Edition
'We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams'.
It was H.G Wells who would be the first to coin the now universal term, 'Time Machine'.Well's post-apocalyptic science fiction novella about a Victorian scientist known as the Time Traveller who journeys 800,000 years into the future captivated readers on the cusp of a new era and continues to enthrall generations of readers plagued by similar fears of the ecological and social status of the world today. Significant in its symbolism, it was Wells who requested the particular stamp of the Sphinx on the front cover of this first edition as it would have been familiar to his readership being the body in which the Morlocks hide the time machine and responds to the sphinx in the story of Oedipus.
The Time Machine reflects Wells's own socialist political views but also his outspoken and active rebellion against rising industrial imposition. George Orwell spoke in admiration of the groundbreaking influence of Wells; 'I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us…would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed'.
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