Chapter Darwin begat Huxley begat Wells of The Time Machine - Study Guide by H G Wells

As the Time Traveller makes clear, although he has stumbled upon a period in which evolution from the year 1895 has reached its logical conclusion, he is also aware that he may have arrived at a period of fresh change - the increasing dominance of the Morlocks. The novel is indeed concerned with processes of change not periods of stasis, and makes the point that as human observers we merely experience a cross- section of the continuum of these processes. At the same time, however, these processes make up a complete picture: as the Time Travellers demonstrates to his guests at their first meeting: "here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four- Dimensional being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing."

Implicit in this statement is almost a sense of predestination, and as the Time Traveller journeys further forward "to futurity" Wells' vision becomes more bleak and pessimistic. The sense of evolution played backwards had already been apparent in the "ape-like" figures of the Morlocks. Elsewhere, the Time Traveller refers to one of them as a "Lemur" and notes that "there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back... I cannot say whether it ran on all-fours, or only with its forearms held very low." The Morlock seems as much monkey as it is man, just as post-Origin of Species, as W.S. Gilbert put it, "Man though well-behaved / At best is only a monkey shaved." Or as Darwin himself wrote as the closing words of The Descent of Man (1871): "Man, with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." The writer V.S. Pritchett picked up on Wells' innovation of returning man to his ancestry: "It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful? What if it is unsurmountably unpleasant? Suppose the monkey drives the machine, the gullible, mischievous, riotous and irresponsible monkey? It is an interesting fact that none of Wells' optimistic contemporaries considered such a possibility."

But the future Earth is much more than just a planet of the apes, as becomes clear as evolution further unravels. After travelling several million years into the future, the Time Traveller find himself underneath a red, dying sun, surrounded by "monstrous crab-like creatures[s]... as large as [a] table." And further forward from that he finds a world reduced to a primordial state: "I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct." Beyond the lifeless sounds of the wind, "the world was silent... All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cry of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives - all that was over." He sees a black "round thing, the size of a football... hopping fitfully about" on the shore. Life, it seems, is ready to crawl back into the ocean from whence it came. So much for the triumph of life.

This idea of a reversing evolution is contained in Evolution and Ethics, a lecture Huxley gave in 1892, in which he coined the term 'retrogressive metamorphosis' stating that 'all forms of life will die out,' and a scene cut from the final edition of The Time Machine (printed as an appendix in the Everyman edition of the novel) underlines the idea - perhaps too obviously, for which reason Wells is likely to have left it out. It features the Time Traveller stopping in a time when he encounters an unintelligent grazing creature covered in hair, with "five feeble digits to both its fore and hind feet... a roundish head and forward facing eyes." The metaphorical 'cattle' of the year 802,701 have by this point effectively become little more than free-range livestock.