Chapter Sample Questions of The Time Machine - Study Guide by H G Wells

It was Wells' great influence, T.H. Huxley, who coined the phrase 'agnostic' (literally referring to an inability to know whether or not God exists), but Wells seemed more certain about matters. He claims to have been "born blaspheming," and fully embraced his atheism at age fifteen as "the last rack of a peevish son-crucifying Deity dissolved away into blue sky" (Experiments in Autobiography, 1934).

Whilst The Time Machine is not a direct attack on belief in a God, to what extent is God conspicuous by his absence? A contemporary review made this the very basis of its criticism of the book, saying that the book should only be read 'because it will draw attention to the great moral and religious factors in human nature which he [Wells] appears to ignore.' Whilst Christianity reserves the fate of man for the final judgement of God, The Time Machine leaves him for the ravages of evolution until he has evolved through brute or herbivore to extinction. To what extent might religious opposition to the book be connected to the greater debate surrounding Darwinism? Moreover, The Time Traveller makes no direct reference to God or Religion within the book, nor do his sceptical audience. The closest Wells comes is the religious reference in the naming of the Eloi and the Morlock. Why might Wells be using religious references for the names of future-man?

Examine the Narrator's Epilogue. He reveals that the Time Traveller "thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so." A humanist conclusion?