The Time Traveller’s matches are a reminder of this Promethean undercurrent to much science fiction, particularly in the nineteenth century when religion still played a more central part in the Victorians’ everyday lives. For the Greeks, it was Prometheus who defied the gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to man he was punished by the gods for this.Ī novel often considered the first science-fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), carries the subtitle The Modern Prometheus, continuing this tradition of seeing scientific experimentation as a dangerous way of playing God, and one that can only end in disaster. Indeed, at the time of Wells’s novel a popular name for matches was ‘lucifers’, from the Latin for ‘light-bearer’ Lucifer is also, aptly, the Devil. Man’s ability to create fire might be considered the starting-point of his technological development, but it is also often considered profane. Fire is everywhere in this short book.īut those matches are worth pondering. This heat-light relationship is one which Wells, with his scientific training, would have known well.Ĭonsider the many references to suns, fires, flames, and bright lights in The Time Machine, such as the literal sunset and the way that it puts the Time Traveller in mind of the metaphorical ‘sunset of mankind’, as well as the sunset of the far future which the Time Traveller witnesses towards the end of the novella, and, let us not forget, his trusty matches which he uses to keep the Morlocks at bay.Įven just in the first few pages of the book, we have the narrator’s reference to the Time Traveller’s eyes which ‘twinkled’ (like a star?), his ‘flushed’ face, Filby’s ‘red hair’ (flame-haired, we might say), the ‘incandescent lights’, a very young man attempting to light his cigar over a lamp, and the Medical Man ‘staring hard at a coal in the fire’.

Every artificial light-source we’ve yet invented, from the incandescent light-bulb to strobe lighting or the laser, involves generating heat in order to generate light. This entails not just images of heat but images of light: one of the laws of physics is that we cannot generate light without heat. The image I wish to focus on is fire, and representations of fire. But there are other, even more pervasive images in The Time Machine which are worthy of analysis, and I’d like to consider one such image in particular, as a way of reading the imagery of the novel in its late Victorian context.

Stories by hg wells