The Time Machine and A Modern Utopia: The Static and Kinetic Utopias of the Early

H.G. Wells
Author(s): JOHN S. PARTINGTON
Source: Utopian Studies , 2002, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2002), pp. 57-68
Published by: Penn State University Press

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The Time Machine and Modern Utopia:
The Static and Kinetic Utopias
of the Early [Link]*
JOHN S. PARTINGTON

In the first paragraph of Chapter I of A Modern Utopia, H.G. Wells

attempts to differentiate between his model of utopia and all previous
utopias. Thus, he declares,
The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect
from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the
thought of the world. Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of hap
piness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in
things. [. . . ] But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape
not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of
stages. (5)
Whilst mocking his tranquil predecessors, such as Thomas More and the
anachronistic William Morris, in this passage, Wells was also providing a
reason for the failure of one of his own earlier utopias, The Time Machine.
As will be demonstrated, the kinetic utopia of A Modern Utopia developed
out of the static society of The Time Machine. From as early as 1895 Wells
was critiquing the concept of static utopia and in doing so he was laying the
foundations for the development of his own brand of utopianism. The pur
pose of this article will be to show how Wells mediates in A Modern Utopia
on the failure of utopia in The Time Machine and how his addressing of that
failure helps form his Utopian philosophy.
Frank McConnell has declared that "Whatever else it is?and it is many
things?The Time Machine is certainly an exercise in that curious literary
subtype called Utopian fiction" (71). However, the novella, written ten years
before A Modern Utopia, did not, of course, end as a utopia (or rather, to
use Lyman Tower Sargent's word, a "eutopia" [14 . 1]), but only appears
as a utopia to the Time Traveller when he first arrives in the year 802,701.
Following the Time Traveller's early belief that he has arrived at a pastoral
communism, his many discoveries about that future age reveal his initial
supposition to be entirely wrong. In what follows I will explain how society
in The Time Machine turned into a dystopian nightmare and how Wells
believed his A Modern Utopia to contain a Utopian methodology which
would ensure that the society on "that parallel planet beyond Sirius" (16)
would not end up the same way.
The first point to be made about The Time Machine is its contempo
raneity. Krishan Kumar acknowledges as much when he writes that "Wells's

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58 UTOPIAN STUDIES

The Time Machine [does] indeed have a considerable futuristic dimension, but
the impress of the events and tendencies of [his] own time is unmistakable"
(110). This "impress" is symbolically represented throughout the story by
oblique references to a recent age strikingly similar to Wells's late-Victorian
England. The architecture of the sleeping places used by the surface-dwelling
Eloi show "'suggestions of old Phoenician decorations'" (66) akin to the
neo-classicism of the Victorian period, while the great museum known as
the Palace of Green Porcelain is described as a "'latter-day South Kensing
ton'" (135). Once his story of the future is complete, the Time Traveller
asks his audience to '"Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies
of our race'" (167), and in the Epilogue to the book, the narrator suggests
that long before the Time Traveller ventured upon his journey, "He [. . . ]
thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the
growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall
back upon and destroy its makers in the end" (172-73). The evidence of
Victorian remains in the future and the Time Traveller's philosophical atti
tude about human destiny suggest his story to be more a warning to his listen
ers than an actual account of society in the year 802,7 .1 John Huntington
demonstrates this well in his The Logic of Fantasy where he notes that the
story "gives aesthetic form to the contradictions existing within our own
civilization and its values" (143), while Kumar see The Time Machine as
one of several examples of Wells warning his contemporaries through his
early writings, noting as he does that "The science fantasies are offered as
so many cautionary fables, so many dreadful warnings to humanity to look
to itself, to take stock of its current sick condition and remedy it before it is
too late" (181).
In addition to the direct references to Victorian England, the Time
Traveller's analyses of the future society are simple extrapolations from his
own time. Thus when attempting to explain the close similarities between
the male and female Eloi and between the adults and the children, he con
cludes that '"the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institu
tion of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant
necessities of an age of physical force'" (74). Where population is con
trolled, security is ensured and production is automatic, women, due to less
frequent childbearing, and men, due to less physical toil, will show less dif
ferentiation, and the consequent immaturity into adulthood that such leisure
brings leads the Time Traveller to observe that '"the children seemed to my
eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents'" (74). Far from considering
this situation an alteration of the Victorian past, he observes that '"We see
some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in the future age it was
complete'" (74).
Of course, an awareness of the ending of The Time Machine reveals
that in fact the Eloi were not masters of the earth in the year 802,701, but
this in no way detracts from the Time Traveller's analysis. Throughout the
story, the Time Traveller makes four hypotheses about the nature of human
society in 802,701, each superseding the previous one. Initially he believes

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 Utopias of the Early H.G. Wells 59

the Eloi to be the sole descendants of humanity in a pastoral communism;

then he considers them the lords of a class-divided earth, holding the subter
ranean Morlocks in subjection; then he sees a class-divided society on the
verge of a Morlockian uprising; and finally he recognises the Morlocks as
the ascendant class, ironically living beneath the Eloi, who provide for the
Eloi before consuming them in a cannibalistic feast. The class-relations
described by the Time Traveller find their origins in Victorian society. The
Morlockian cannibalism can be seen as representing the imminent proletar
ian revolution feared by some following the growth of militant trade union
ism and working-class political organisation. While the Time Traveller's
beliefs about the society he discovers require several revisions during the
course of his adventure, nonetheless his earlier hypotheses concerning Eloi
Morlock class-relations can be taken to represent earlier stages in human
development prior to 802,701.
If such was not obvious to the well-engaged reader, Wells banishes any
doubts by didactically describing how the Eloi rose to ascendancy and how
they were subsequently dethroned by the static nature of their society. He
"'saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and [. . .]
engaged in no toil'" (79). He "'saw a real aristocracy, armed with a per
fected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of
to-day [whose] triumph had not been simply a triumph over nature, but a tri
umph over nature and the fellow-man'" (108). All the surface of the earth
came to be owned and controlled by the Victorian bourgeoisie and it was in
the '"artificial Underworld that such work as was necessary to the comfort
of the daylight race was done'" (103). The Time Traveller maintains that,
for his listeners, envisioning such a society does not require a great leap of
the imagination as '"even now there [. . . ] is a tendency to utilize underground
space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metro
politan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways,
there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and
they increase and multiply'" (104-05). Ultimately all industry and working
class accommodation were removed underground and the surface of the
earth was left for the pleasures of the ruling class. Having achieved such an
ascendancy, however, the Eloi failed to maintain their position. It is through
analysing how the Eloi degenerated and how the Morlocks asserted them
selves that we can understand the flaw in the utopia of The Time Machine.
It would appear that at some stage in the social evolution between the Time
Traveller's late-Victorian contemporary society and the world of 802,701,
the surface-dwelling Eloi had established a seemingly permanent control
over the toiling subterranean Morlocks. As the Time Traveller speculates,
'"The work of ameliorating the conditions of life?the true civilizing proc
ess that makes life more and more secure?had gone steadily on to a climax.
One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another'" (77),
and later he states that " thought of the physical slightness of the people,
their lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and I strengthened
my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet.

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 60 UTOPIAN STUDIES

Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its
abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came
the reaction to the altered conditions,,, (80). As "'Strength is the outcome of
need'" and "'security sets a premium on feebleness'" (77), the Eloi degener
ated physically and mentally. As they never needed to work to provide for
themselves, and as the Morlocks' subterranean habitats meant they had no
choice but to labour automatically for the Eloi or face suffocation or starva
tion, the Eloi no longer required intelligence or strength and thus, following
Darwinian logic, they adapted to their new conditions and grew mentally
and physically weak. As the Time Traveller puts it, '"For countless years I
judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from
violent beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no
need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well
equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak'" (80). It was just such a
sustained spell of security which led the Victorian middle class to devolve
into the Eloi of 802,701. As the Time Traveller notes, under conditions of
perfect security, such a devolved species is '"no longer weak'". However,
as the Time Traveller ultimately discovers, the privileged status of the Eloi
as the automatic rulers of the earth contained a fatal flaw: '"that perfect
state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection?absolute perma
nency'" (153-54). Had the Eloi guaranteed for all time that the Morlocks
were provided for, their feebleness need not have affected their ruling status.
However, the Time Traveller believes that '"Clearly at some time in the Long
Ago of human decay the Morlocks' food had run short'" (129) '"And when
other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbid
den'" (154). The threat of starvation forced the Morlocks to break the taboo
of cannibalism and turned to their over-world masters for meat. The Eloi
that the Time Traveller encounters in 802,701 '"were mere fatted cattle,
which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon?probably saw to
the breeding of" (130).
This final speculation, that the Morlocks '"probably saw to the breeding
of" the Eloi, suggests the use of positive eugenics, both by the Eloi when
maintaining themselves as a class apart and afterwards by the Morlocks
when farming the Eloi for food, which is supported by stereotyped imagery
throughout the story. Indeed, the Time Traveller believes that middle-class
inbreeding was fundamental to the split in humanity that produced the Eloi
and the Morlocks, with the '"widening gulf" between classes being a result
of '"that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of
our species along lines of social stratification'" (106) becoming '"less and
less frequent'" (106-07). Wells's Eloi all appear identical. As was pointed
out earlier, the children are but miniatures of the adults and differences of
gender are difficult to recognise. Indeed, although the Time Traveller refers
to his companion of the future, Weena, as '"she"' throughout the story, he
expresses uncertainty about her gender, referring to her at one stage as '"my
little woman, as I believe it was'" (94). The Eloi's general appearance is
uniform. Thus, '"Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp

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 Utopias of the Early H.G. Wells 61

end at the neck and cheek, there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the
face, and their ears were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with
bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were
large and mild'" (64). And again the Time Traveller notes that "T perceived
that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the
same girlish rotundity of limb'" (73-74). Although positive eugenics is not
directly referred to in The Time Machine, the vulnerability of the seemingly
eugenically created Eloi begs the question whether Wells was taking a pot
shot at those social Darwinists who advocated selective breeding of humans
to create a healthier race of people. Wells consistently rejected positive eugen
ics throughout his life, overtly for the first time in Mankind in the Making in
1903 in a chapter entitled "The Problem of the Birth Supply" (34-73). If the
hypothesis here is correct, it is possible to date Wells's rejection of positive
eugenics eight years earlier, to the publication of The Time Machine.
If the Eloi's degeneration and ultimate vulnerability can been seen as a
consequence of an epoch of security, it must next be asked how the Morlocks
gained the impetus to throw off the Eloian yoke and avenge the centuries of
exploitation by the upper-worlders. As has already been pointed out, at
some stage in their past the Morlocks' food supply must have run short and
they turned to cannibalism to maintain their existence. But what prevented
the Morlocks from degenerating in a like manner to the Eloi? What allowed
them to assert themselves when faced with the problem of survival?
When considering the Eloi's adaptation to a life of toil-less pleasure,
the Time Traveller several times invokes the Darwinian law of evolution.
Thus, he declares, when considering their lack of intelligence, "'An animal
perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature
never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no
intelligence where there is no change and no need of change'" (153).
Clearly over the centuries the Eloi had adapted so well to their environment
that life had become instinctual once again. However, when considering the
Morlocks, the opposite must be the case. As the Time Traveller points out,
'"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the com
pensation for change, danger, and trouble. [. . . ] Only those animals partake
of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers'"
(153). While the Eloi lived in unchanging leisure, the Morlocks required
some intelligence both to provide for the wellbeing of the upper-worlders
and to ensure their own survival, especially once their food supply had run
scarce. Although it is safe to presume that the Morlocks' round of duties,
when providing for the Eloi, was more or less the same throughout time,
simply manufacturing their clothes, maintaining their habitats and providing
their food, the Time Traveller notes that '"The under-world being in contact
with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought out
side habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of
every other human character, than the upper'" (154). Towards the end of the
story we get an inkling of the Morlocks still active curiosity?in contrast to
the '"lack of interest'" (70) often demonstrated by the Eloi?when the Time

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 62 UTOPIAN STUDIES

Traveller observes, on reacquiring his time machine, that " was surprised
to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned. I have suspected since that
the Morlocks had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim
way to grasp its purpose"' (154).
It is this curiosity and initiative, associated in several of Wells's works
with technicians and engineers (e.g., Wells 1902; Wells 1933; Wells 1935),
which allow the Morlocks to react against their subjection by the Eloi and
their imminent starvation, and continue to adapt long after the Eloi have lost
their ability to do so. While the Eloi settled for a society of leisure and rest,
the Morlocks pursued adaptation and change out of necessity and eventually
threw off the dominance of the Eloi. Again, the Time Traveller uses Dar
winian logic to spell this out: "'What, unless biological science is a mass of
errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom:
conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker
go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capa
ble men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision'" (79). It was through
cooperative effort and the application of old skills to new problems that the
Morlocks ended the Eloi's exploitation. But in The Time Machine, the Mor
locks success comes too late. As Robert M. Philmus points out, "by 802,701
no species has the intelligence any more to set limits on the struggle for exis
tence, in which the defenseless Eloi fall victim to the carnivorous Morlocks"
(75). Furthermore, the Morlocks are unable to dwell upon the surface of the
earth due to their blindness in daylight and their new role as exploiters of the
upper-world Eloi simply reverses the old equation rather than changes its
nature. Thus the story ends with general biological devolution and the death
of the planet as witnessed by the Time Traveller in his "Further Vision" (157).
Nonetheless, the adaptability of the Morlocks is the key theme in The
Time Machine in relation to Wells's Utopian model. In The Time Machine
Wells wished to demonstrate the evils of a static society rather than the ben
efits of a kinetic one and thus his story inevitably ended in doom. However,
in A Modern Utopia Wells takes the Morlockian curiosity and initiative and
imagines a society founded upon it. In A Modern Utopia curiosity and ini
tiative are not weapons to be used by one class against another, but are tools
used by the human race to direct its own evolution through educational, cul
tural and biological competition on its own terms.2
Wells's attitude towards evolution was not that humankind should con
trol it (he recognised this as impossible), but that it should direct it. As he
admits in A Modern Utopia, "We are to shape our state in a world of uncer
tain seasons, sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and inimical beasts
and vermin, out of men and women with like passions, like uncertainties of
mood and desire to our own" (6). In A Modern Utopia, utopia has not been
created through a miraculous event3 but has come about through central
planning using the natural and human resources available on earth in 1905.
Passions, temperaments and even levels of intelligence are the same in
utopia as upon earth, only they are channelled towards the creation of a
planetary utopia rather than towards international competition and conflict.

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 Utopias of the Early H.G. Wells 63

Competition does indeed remain, as, according to Wells, "Progress depends

essentially on competitive selection, and that we may not escape" (106), but
the nature of competition, and the areas of life in which it occurs, are very
different in utopia. There is no sense of 'class' or 'group' competition as
"Throughout Utopia there is, of course, no other than provisional classifica
tions, since every being is regarded as finally unique" (157) and, inciden
tally, Wells argues upon this basis against any form of racial classification
also, stating that "The natural tendency is to forget all this range [of individ
ual characteristics] directly 'race' comes under discussion, to take either an
average or some quite arbitrary ideal as the type, and think only of that
[. . . ] but the thing that must be done if we are to get just results in this dis
cussion, is to do one's best to bear the range in mind" (195).
For Wells's model of utopia to succeed, it is imperative that the state's
central planning does not infringe detrimentally upon individual competi
tion and, thus, racial evolution. At the philosophical level, Wells argues for
a governing ideology equidistant between the two ideological extremes of
his day, extreme collectivism and extreme individualism:
To have free play for one's individuality is, in the modern view, the subjective
triumph of existence, as survival in creative work and offspring is its objective
triumph. But for all men, since man is a social creature, the play of will must
fall short of absolute freedom. [. . . ] In an organised state each one of us has a
more or less elaborate code of what he may do to others and to himself, and is
limited by the rights of others, and by considerations affecting the welfare of
the community as a whole. (20-21)

Kumar argues that Wells sought "a necessary and creative tension between
individual strivings and collective needs" (192), and thus the degree of suc
cess of A Modern Utopia must be measured by how well individual liberty
and state intervention are balanced, the sum of which must ensure continu
ous human diversity as well as sustainable material development.
The role of the state in Wells's utopia is crucial in two fields. Firstly, it
provides a regulatory framework for society which prevents the exploitation
of individuals or groups by other individuals or groups. Although Wells per
mits a degree of private enterprise in utopia and people are able to grow rich
through their own endeavours, employment is carefully regulated to ensure
that no person receives an inhumanely low wage and it is illegal for one to
profit from simply buying and selling a commodity without adding anything
to it or changing its nature. Similarly, the various insurances, life, health,
accident, old-age, etc., are organised by the state so as to prevent gain
through financial speculation.
And secondly, the role of the state is to provide a basic minimum stan
dard of life through welfare, education, health, housing and legal reform.
This aspect of the state's activities is most important for this discussion as it
affects directly Wells's ambition to balance individual liberty with the col
lective wellbeing of society.
Wells's vision for the legal system is one of prohibition rather than
command. He justifies this by stating that "a general prohibition in a state

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 64 UTOPIAN STUDIES

may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it,"
and he rejects the notion that "a man is more free where there is least law
and more restricted where there is most law," declaring that "A socialism or
a communism is not necessarily a slavery, and there is no freedom under
Anarchy" (21). He further supports prohibitionist laws by pointing out that
"Prohibition takes one definite thing from the individual liberty of man, but
it still leaves him an unbounded choice of actions. [. . . ] But compulsion
destroys freedom altogether" (22). Where the collective wellbeing is under
threat, the state will declare a prohibition against the individual, but beyond
that the law will make no insistence on the citizen. Indeed, even in work,
"The modern Utopia will [. . . ] exercise the minimum of compulsions to
toil" (91). Rather than insist that all must work, the Utopian state "will offer
some acutely desirable prizes" (91) for exertion. Legal prohibitions to deter
crime and "prizes" to encourage effort are central to the functioning of
Wells's utopia and he goes into detail about what he aims to achieve by
offering state-sponsored incentives to exertion to all the citizens of utopia:
The aim of all these devices, the minimum wage, the standard of life, provision
for all the feeble and unemployed and so forth, is not to rob life of incentives
but to change their nature, to make life not less energetic, but less panic
stricken and violent and base, to shift the incidence of the struggle for existence
from our lower to our higher emotions, so to anticipate and neutralise the
motives of the cowardly and bestial, that the ambitious and energetic imagina
tion which is man's finest quality may become the incentive and determining
factor in survival. (91)

Or, as he puts it elsewhere in the book, "The State is for individuals, the law
is for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience, and change: these
are the fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia must go" (53-54).
As Wells's legal philosophy shows, they are also the "fundamental beliefs"
upon which all the laws are made and the state-sponsored incentives offered.
Tied in with Wells's legal philosophy is his proposal to provide a basic
minimum standard of life, the "prizes" offered by the Utopian state as referred
to earlier. More than simply being prizes, however, Wells's basic minimum
aims to provide a minimum economic, educational and health platform from
which all citizens of utopia may compete for success in employment, par
enthood, government and all other areas of life. Wells's minimum standard
is not intended to create a eugenically perfect citizenry, as "In a modern
Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia there must also be
friction, conflicts and waste, but the waste will be enormously less than in
our world" (155). Wells aims, through his minimum standard, to eliminate
struggle for the basics of life; housing, food, clothing and amenities such as
heating and fresh, warm water. However, beyond these fundamentals, Wells
wishes to encourage competition and striving for success. In Wells's com
petition of life, however, there will be few losers and no winners, as human
success must always be built upon. For, as initial goals are achieved, a
whole new set of objectives will be aimed for. As he declares, "Nothing
endures, nothing is precise and certain [...], perfection is the mere repudi

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 Utopias of the Early H.G. Wells 65

ation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious

inmost quality of Being" (13). And, borrowing from Heraclitus, he concludes,
"Being, indeed!?there is no being, but a universal becoming of individuali
ties" (13-14).4 The responsibility of one generation, therefore, is to provide
the best opportunities and conditions for the next generation to build upon
and succeed, and such a responsibility will rest with all future generations
of human beings ad infinitum. The potentially infinite duration of such a
biological striving is what Wells refers to when he remarks that "there is no
being, but a universal becoming of individualities." Unlike all other utopias
before A Modern Utopia, Wells strives not for material perfection in the
here and now, nor for spiritual perfection in the afterlife, but for continuous
racial advancement. It is the post-Darwinian burden of evolution which
makes kinetic utopia inevitable and Wells's aim in his story is to create a
framework in which the burden can be managed by humankind for ever
more. Managed, but not controlled, as "The real world is a vast disorder of
accidents and incalculable forces in which men survive or fail" (80). Wells
seeks to "order and humanise the conflict" (80) in life, but human evolution
within the context of a changing universe beyond humankind's perception
will go on forever. To understand how Wells proposed humanity to bear the
evolutionary burden, or in other words to realise the practical biological
aspect of his kinetic utopia, it is vital now to consider Wells's ideas on pro
creation and the upbringing of children.
In A Modern Utopia, the greatest degree of state regulation is reserved
for the field of procreation and child-rearing. Although Wells's initiatives in
this area are aimed at providing the best environment for the development
of the child and the potential child, he is also keen to shield humankind
from the brutal way in which nature deals with species generation. Be it
reiterated that Wells does not want to remove "friction, conflicts and waste"
from even this aspect of life, but he does seek to "order and humanise the
conflict". Thus, although the "way of Nature [. . . ] is to kill the weaker and
the sillier, to crush them, to starve them, to overwhelm them, using the
stronger and more cunning as her weapon," Wells declares that "man is the
unnatural animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn
himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him" (81). In Wells's
utopia, "No longer will it be that failures must suffer and perish lest their
breed increase, but the breed of failure must not increase, lest they suffer
and perish, and the race with them" (81).
Although, as pointed out in relation to The Time Machine, Wells was
vehemently opposed to positive eugenics, stating in A Modern Utopia that
"from anyone in the days after Darwin, it is preposterous" (107), he did for
a time5 see a use for negative eugenics in preventing the procreation of cer
tain 'types', namely congenital invalids and certain antisocial 'types' such
as violent criminals and drug (including alcohol) abusers. In A Modern
Utopia Wells insists on the celibacy or chastity of these groups and provides
island prisons for those who break the prohibition. The rationale for Wells's
advocacy of negative eugenics is the same as that determining his advocacy

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 66 UTOPIAN STUDIES

of a basic minimum standard of life. By eliminating the worst aspects of

life, insanitary housing, low wages, long working hours, etc., Wells believed
he was advocating, to borrow an expression from the British prime minister,
Tony Blair, a "hand up, not a hand out". Wells sought to encourage compe
tition in life between healthy, intelligent, financially-secure individuals. He
saw the prevention of congenitally diseased or antisocial types procreating
in the same light as he saw the demolition of slum housing or the elimina
tion of sweated labour; as the removal of a boil from the face of humanity.
He believed his policies would raise the standard of population at the base
of society whilst leaving plenty of scope for competition for success in
employment, education and childbearing. The establishment of a basic mini
mum standard of life would be a springboard to racial success, and negative
eugenics had an important role to play in establishing that minimum stan
dard. Thus he felt his advocacy of negative eugenics would not harm his
ideal of an evolving species; indeed it would assist it, as it would allow plenty
of individual choice whilst protecting the collective wellbeing of society as
a whole. He sums up his reasoning in A Modern Utopia as follows: "it is a
conceivable and possible thing that this margin of futile struggling, pain and
discomfort and death might be reduced to nearly nothing without checking
physical and mental evolution, with indeed an acceleration of physical and
mental evolution by preventing the birth of those who would in the unre
stricted interplay of natural forces be born to suffer and fail" (106). As
Wells made clear when outlining his philosophical position, the kinetic
utopia aims to provide as much liberty for the individual as possible without
restricting the free play of others or of society as a whole. By placing
restrictions upon the procreation of certain people, Wells had "the welfare
of the community as a whole" at heart and thus felt that the fundamental lib
erties of society were being preserved even where some important liberties
of some individuals were being restrained or denied.
Although this essay has not gone into detail about Wells's specific
social, educational and welfare policies,6 it has attempted to present Wells's
Utopian philosophy and some of the general areas of policy that it would
affect. Given Wells's abundant scientific writings of the 1890s, it seems rea
sonable to assume that many of the ideas he presented in A Modern Utopia
were already fermenting in his mind as he wrote the final version of The
Time Machine in 1895. As presentations of utopia, the two stories are anti
thetical, The Time Machine concerning the fate of a static utopia and A Mod
ern Utopia presenting the potential of a kinetic utopia. Wells considered A
Modern Utopia to be an experimental work, "a sort of shot-silk texture be
tween philosophical discussion on the one hand and imaginative narrative on
the other" (xlvii), and so it is possible for the modern reader to be revolted by
some of Wells's ideas, particularly his attitude towards negative eugenics,
whilst still acknowledging the value of his contribution to the writing of
utopias. Rejecting earlier utopias which created "one ordered arrangement of
citizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness safe and assured to them and
their children for ever," Wells realised that "we have to plan 4 a flexible com

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 Utopias of the Early H.G. Wells 67

mon compromise, in which a perpetually novel succession of individualities

may converge most effectually upon a comprehensive onward development'"
(5). He also understood that there was no endgame in human evolution, regard
less of how advanced our science and technology may become, as although
"We change from weaker to stronger lights, [. . . ] each more powerful light
pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opac
ities below" (14). If it were possible to create a world with advanced hous
ing, a sophisticated health service, high-quality education and full-employment
immediately, it would ultimately fail if it did not contain within it the seeds
of a more advanced society. As McConnell points out, "the environment will
inevitably change over the course of geological, cosmological time. And the
species that has become too at home in one phase of climate and ecology will
probably lose the resiliency to change and meet the demands of another
phase" (77). Thus, according to Wells, "The State is to be progressive, it is
no longer to be static, and this alters the general condition of the Utopian
problem profoundly; we have to provide not only for food and clothing, but
for initiative" (52). Kumar has observed that "A modern utopia realizes that
to refuse the claims of the individual is to condemn society to stagnation and
a potentially lethal rigidity" (192). It was through lack of individual initiative
that the Eloi degenerated and the world of The Time Machine became a
"lethal rigidity". In the philosophy of A Modern Utopia, Wells reverses that
situation and creates a Utopian formula providing a methodology for everlast
ing advancement.

NOTES
This essay was originally presented in a slightly different form at the Utopia 2001 confer
ence in New Lanark 28-30 June 2001.
1. For examples of other critics who consider The Time Machine to be more concerned with
Wells's present than with the future of 802,701, see Sommerville, and McConnell, 81-82.
2. Interestingly, Peter Beilharz has identified Wells's insistence on cultural competition in A
Modern Utopia and elsewhere as the possible model for Leon Trotsky's conception of compe
tition in a socialist society as laid out in his Literature and Revolution of 1924. Beilharz
writes of Trotsky's theory, "competition will not disappear under socialism, it will be subli
mated into culture. To the extent that political struggles will be eliminated under socialism,
the liberated passions will be canalised into technique, into construction and into art. Art will
only then become more general and mature, only then will it become the most perfect method
of the progressive building of life in every field" (32-33). Beilharz goes on to point out that
"Clearly this is not the utopia of Marx or Lenin. Rather its constituent terms are reminiscent
of H.G. Wells' Utopian science fiction, with the difference that we are spared the fictional
form?for this utopia of Trotsky is a real fantasy, neither a literary device nor an intellectual
goad but the symbol of a real imagined future" (33). I, of course, would argue that Wells's A
Modern Utopia is equally "the symbol of a real imagined future."
3. Contrast the coming of the Utopian age in Wells's In the Days of the Comet of 1906 in
which a passing comet miraculously changes human nature for the better, ends war, and
sparks major societal reconstruction and an age of free love.

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 68 UTOPIAN STUDIES

4. Wells again quotes Heraclitus, "There is no Being but Becoming", in The Future in Amer
ica (2) in a chapter entitled "The Prophetic Habit of Mind" (1-14) in which he explains that "I
am curiously not interested in things, and curiously interested in the consequences of things"
(2-3). It is upon this principle that Wells's Utopian philosophy is based.
5. Wells advocated negative eugenics explicitly from 1901, in Anticipations (279-318), to
1932, in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (677-80), before finally rejecting it
outright as a fundamental breech of human rights in 1940 in The Rights of Man (77-84).
6. For a detailed exposition of Wells's social, educational and welfare policies, see my article
in an earlier issue of Utopian Studies (Partington 2000).

REFERENCES
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bia UP, 1982.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. London: Blackwell, 1991.
McConnell, Frank. The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.
Partington, John S. "The Death of the Static: H.G. Wells and the Kinetic Utopia". Utopian
Studies 11.2(2000): 96-111.
Philmus, Robert M. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis God
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