deliberately or by accident, it was as though Merrick had supplied him with enough plots to last several years while he and Wells had pretended they were having tea. He recalled Merrick’s disappointment at Dr Nebogipfel being so uninterested in venturing into the unknown world of tomorrow, and this omission appeared worth rectifying now that he had the experience of writing all those articles.
Without a second thought, he got rid of the unsavoury Nebogipfel, replacing him with a respectable, anonymous scientist in whom any inventor could see himself portrayed, and who even embodied the archetypal scientist of the dawning new century. Endeavouring to create something more than just a naïve fantasy from his idea of time travel, Wells gave it the same scientific veneer he had given the stories he wrote for Hind, making use of a theory he had developed in his earlier essays published in the Fortnightly Review: the idea that time was the fourth dimension in a universe that appeared to be three-dimensional. The idea would be far more impressive if he used it to explain the workings of the contraption his character would use to travel through the time continuum.
A few years earlier, an American medium called Henry Slade had been tried for criminal deception. Besides bragging of his ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead, he would drop knots, conches and snails’ shells into his magician’s hat, then pull out identical versions, but with the spirals going in the other direction. Slade maintained that a secret passageway to the fourth dimension was hidden in his hat, which explained the reversal the objects underwent. To many people’s astonishment, the magician was defended by a handful of eminent physicists, including Johann Zöllner, professor of physics and astronomy, all of whom argued that what might appear to be a fraud from a three-dimensional point of view was perfectly feasible in a four-dimensional universe. The whole of London was on tenterhooks during the trial.
This, with the work of Charles Hinton, a mathematician who had come up with the hypercube, a cube out of phase with time that contained every single instant of its existence, all occurring at the same time – which man’s current three-dimensional vision prevented him seeing – made Wells realise that the idea of the fourth dimension was in the air. No one was sure what it involved, but the words sounded so mysterious and evocative that society longed for, positively demanded it to be real.
For most people, the known world was a tiresome, hostile place, but that was because they could see only part of it. Now they were consoled by the notion that, just as bland roast meat is made tastier with seasoning, the universe improved if they imagined it was no longer reduced to what they could see, but contained a hidden component that could somehow make it bigger. The fourth dimension gave their dull planet a magical feel; it conjured up the existence of a different world in which desires that were impossible in the three-dimensional one might be realised. These suspicions were backed up by concrete actions, such as the recent founding of the Society for Psychic Research in London.
Wells was also forced to endure becoming embroiled almost every day in tiresome debates on the nature of time with his colleagues at the Faculty of Science. One thing led to another, as they say, and as every thinker was turning the fourth dimension into his private playground, Wells had no difficulty combining both ideas to develop his theory of time as another spatial dimension through which it was possible to travel in exactly the same way as it was through the other three.
By the time he entered Henley’s office he could visualise his novel with startling clarity, enabling him to relay it with a preacher’s conviction and zeal. The time traveller’s story would be divided into two parts. In the first he would explain the workings of his machine to a gathering of sceptical guests, to whom he had chosen to present his invention and whom he must try to convince. This group would consist of a doctor, a mayor, a psychologist and some other representative of the middle classes. Unlike Jules Verne, who took up whole chapters with detailed explanations of how his contraptions worked – as though he himself doubted their credibility – Wells’s explanations would be straightforward and concise, using simple examples that would enable the reader to assimilate an idea that might otherwise seem too abstract. ‘As you are aware,’ his inventor would observe, ‘the three spatial dimensions (length, breadth, and thickness) are defined in reference to three planes, each of which is at right angles to the other.’
However, under normal circumstances, man’s movement through his three-dimensional universe was incomplete. He had no difficulty in moving along its length and breadth, but was unable to overcome the laws of gravity in order to move up and down freely, except by using a hot-air balloon. Man was similarly trapped in the time line, and could only move in time mentally – summoning up the past through memory, or visualising the future by means of his imagination. He could free himself from this constraint if he had a machine that, like the hot-air balloon, enabled him to triumph over the impossible, that is to say, to project himself physically into the future by speeding up time, or going back into the past by slowing it down. In order to help his guests understand the idea of this fourth dimension, the inventor referred to the mercury in a barometer: it moved up and down over a period of days, yet the line represented by its movement was drawn not in any recognised spatial dimension but in that of time.
The second part of the novel would describe the journey that his main character would undertake to put his machine to the test once his guests had left. As a tribute to Merrick’s memory, he would set off towards the unfathomable oceans of the future, a future that Wells outlined briefly but eloquently to the editor of the National Observer.
Henley, an enormous fellow, virtually a giant, condemned to walk with a crutch because of a botched childhood operation, and on whom Stevenson claimed to have based his idea for Long John Silver, pulled an incredulous face. Talking about the future was dangerous. It was rumoured in literary circles that Verne had portrayed tomorrow’s world in a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century, but that his editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, had refused to publish it, considering naïve and pessimistic his vision of 1960, when criminals were executed by electric shock, and a system of ‘photographic telegraphs’ made it possible to send copies of documents anywhere in the world. And it seemed Verne had not been the only author to envisage the future. Many others had tried and failed in the same way.
But Wells did not let Henley’s words discourage him. Leaning forwards in his seat, he stood up for himself, assuring Henley that people were eager to read about the future, and that someone should take the risk and publish the first novel about it.
And so it was that, in 1893, The Time Machine came out in serial form in the prestigious National Observer. However, to Wells’s understandable despair, before the novel could be published in its entirety the owners of the magazine sold it. The new board of directors carried out the usual purges, putting an end to Henley and his publishing projects. Happily, Wells scarcely had time to wallow in his misfortune for Henley, like his Stevensonian alter ego, was a hard nut to crack. He immediately took over at the helm of the New Review, where he offered to continue serialising the story of the time traveller, and even convinced the stubborn William Heinemann to publish the novel.
Encouraged by Henley’s doggedness, Wells resolved to complete his unfinished novel. However, as was becoming the custom, this turned out to be a difficult undertaking, hampered by the usual impediments, although this time of a far more humiliating nature. At the insistence of his doctors, Wells had once again moved to the country with Jane, to a modest boarding-house in Sevenoaks. But along with the wicker basket and a stream of boxes and trunks came Mrs Robbins, like a piece of junk no one dared throw out. By this time, Jane’s mother had gone to unspeakable lengths in her role of leech, reducing her daughter to little more than a pale, worn-out shell with her constant complaints. Mrs Robbins had no need of reinforcements in her war of attrition against Wells. She found an ally in the boarding-house landlady, once she had discovered that it was not a marriage being consummated each night in her house but the sinful cohabitation of a shy young girl and a depraved defendant in a divorce suit.
Battling on two fronts, Wells was scarcely able to concentrate sufficiently to make any headway with his novel. His only consolation was that the section of the plot – the time traveller’s journey – to which he was giving shape interested him far more than the part he had already written: it enabled him to steer the novel towards the domain of social allegory, where he could deal with the political