Specimen FL-01.0001
A Victorian scientist known only as the Time Traveller builds a machine that carries him along the fourth dimension into the far future. In the year 802,701 he finds humanity split into two species: the gentle, childlike Eloi who live among the sunlit ruins above, and the pale, subterranean Morlocks who labor below and prey on them. What first looks like a paradise reveals itself as a grim inversion of Victorian class relations, hardened across deep time into biology. Traveling further still, he reaches a dying Earth beneath a swollen red sun, watches the last life flicker out on a cold beach, then returns to tell a story his friends struggle to believe, before vanishing on a second voyage from which he never comes back.
The Fiction Laboratory pairs science fiction novels with structured reading packets for science and English classes. This is the companion page for this title: where to find the book, every source behind its packet with live links, and any correction made since the packet was printed.
Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org. Published in 1895 and long out of copyright, so the complete text is free and legal to download, print, and hand out. Plain text, ebook, and web formats.
Standard Ebooks. standardebooks.org. The same public domain text, typeset properly: real chapter breaks, proper punctuation, a usable table of contents. If you are reading it on a screen, start here rather than with a raw file.
LibriVox. librivox.org. Volunteer-recorded audiobooks of public domain titles, free. Useful for students who take in a book better by ear, and there is more than one recording to choose from.
Open Library. openlibrary.org. Scans of specific printed editions, which is what you want if you need the page numbers of a particular printing.
Your public library. Free, and the library edition often carries an introduction and notes that the public domain files do not.
Libby. libbyapp.com. Library ebooks and audiobooks on a phone or tablet, free with a library card.
Bookshop.org. bookshop.org/9780393927948. Orders send the money to independent bookstores. The text itself is free, so a printed copy is only worth paying for if you want the annotation: that link goes to the Norton Critical Edition, which carries the contextual essays and source documents the free files do not.
Your local bookshop. Any independent store can order an edition, usually within a few days.
Everything in the packet is built on real research, and most of it is free. If a claim sparks a question, go to the source and check it yourself. That is the whole idea.
Wells, H. G. The Time Machine: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, W. W. Norton, 2009.
The novel plus the actual Victorian documents behind it: Lankester and Huxley on evolution and degeneration, and Wells's own science journalism from the early 1890s. If you read one thing past the novel itself, read this.
Disraeli, Benjamin. Sybil; or, The Two Nations. Henry Colburn, 1845.
Source of the "two nations" line, the rich and the poor as two peoples who never meet, fifty years before Wells made the divide literal and buried one nation underground.
Hinton, Charles Howard. "What Is the Fourth Dimension?" 1880. Scientific Romances, Swan Sonnenschein, 1884.
Where the era's fourth-dimension craze comes from. Hinton taught readers to picture a fourth direction in space; Wells borrowed the machinery and pointed it at time, which Hinton did not.
Lankester, E. Ray. Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism. Macmillan, 1880. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59171.
The scientific argument underneath the Eloi: a species freed from struggle can evolve backward into something simpler and softer. Lankester was a friend of Wells, so this is a colleague's idea, not a distant one.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Friedrich Engels, Swan Sonnenschein, 1887.
The root of the class reading in the allegorical layer. Marx's image of capital as "dead labour that, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour" (ch. 10) is the metaphor Wells makes literal, then reverses.
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Translated from the second German edition, William Heinemann, 1895. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51161.
The fin-de-siècle panic in book form, a bestseller the same year The Time Machine appeared, arguing that modern civilization was sliding into decline. The cultural mood the Eloi make flesh.
Sherborne, Michael. H. G. Wells: Another Kind of Life. Peter Owen, 2010.
The standard modern biography. Comprehensive, readable, and clear-eyed about the man's flaws as well as his genius. Primary source for the biography section, with Wells's own memoir below.
Wells, H. G. Experiment in Autobiography. Macmillan, 1934.
Wells on his own childhood at Uppark, the draper's apprenticeship, and studying biology under Huxley.
Wells, H. G. Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. Chapman and Hall, 1901. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19229.
Free, and the reason the packet's author section says what it does. This is the forecasting book that made Wells a futurist, and Chapter IX, "Faith, Morals, and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century," is where he argues that his coming world state has no place for whole races and classes of people. Read the chapter rather than take anyone's summary of it, this one included.
Lankester, E. Ray. Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism. Macmillan, 1880. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59171.
Free. Already cited in the printed list for the biology, and worth a second look for the politics. Degeneration theory is the idea that a species, a class, or a people can decline as biological stock, and it is the soil both this novel's ending and the eugenics movement grew in.
Galton, Francis. "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims." 1904. galton.org, galton.org/essays/1900-1911/galton-1904-am-journ-soc-eugenics-scope-aims.htm.
Free. The paper Galton read to the Sociological Society in May 1904, and the one Wells argued against in the discussion that followed. Read it to see what Wells was rejecting, which was the breeding programme, and to notice what he was not rejecting.
Wells, H. G. A Modern Utopia. Chapman and Hall, 1905. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6424.
Free. Four years after Anticipations, the killing is gone and the islands have arrived: those judged unfit are removed from the population rather than removed from existence. Worth reading beside the 1901 chapter, because the distance between them is real and smaller than it first looks.
Wells, H. G. The Rights of Man: Or What Are We Fighting For? Penguin, 1940.
Not free, and the one entry on this page you will need a library for. Wells drafted it in the first year of the war; a committee under Lord Chancellor Sankey refined it into eleven articles. John Peter Humphrey, who wrote the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, counted it among the documents he consulted. Penguin keeps it in print, and any library can order it.
Roberts, Adam. "Bicycles and Tripods." H. G. Wells: A Literary Life, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26421-5_4.
Not free, so a library job. A book-by-book life that stays close to the writing, which is what makes it useful here rather than gossipy. The chapter on the Woking years, "Bicycles and Tripods," is where the packet's dates on his marriage come from, and it quotes Wells's own account of when his private life changed and why.
Nothing yet. When a link here dies or a finding is superseded, the correction is posted here rather than left wrong in print.
All ten documents: specimen record, both introductions, the reading companion, sources, three quiz variants, the answer guide, and the discussion guide. Free, no email required.
Specimen record, reader introduction, the reading companion, and the source list. This is what goes home with the book, without the quiz or the answer key.
Last reviewed 2026-08-26 · Specimen FL-01.0001