The Time Machine

The story

A Victorian inventor tells his dinner guests that he has travelled through time. In the year 802,701 he found the gentle, childlike Eloi living in a garden-like world — and soon discovered what lived beneath it.

His time machine is stolen, and to get it back he must go down into the darkness of the Morlocks before travelling even further, to the last days of the Earth.

Themes: time and evolution, social class, the future of humanity, science.

Why it's a good book for language learners

The Time Machine is short, and Wells's English is precise and modern for its age. It is a perfect first classic of science fiction, and its ideas about class and the future give you plenty to talk or write about.

How hard is the English in The Time Machine?

• Flesch Reading Ease72.2
• Flesch–Kincaid grade7.3
• Words per sentence16.5

Measured by PageWalker on the full English text of the book. Flesch Reading Ease runs from 0 to 100 (higher is easier; 60–70 is plain English) and the Flesch–Kincaid grade is a US school grade. These formulas only count sentence and word length, so they miss old-fashioned vocabulary, wordplay and style. That is why our CEFR level, which takes those into account, can be higher than the formula suggests.

What you'll practise

• Time expressions and tenses
• Scientific explanation
• Describing landscapes and creatures
• Hypotheses and speculation

Did you know?

The novel made the phrase “time machine” part of everyday language.

The Time Machine: a part-by-part guide

Contains spoilers. Read one part of the book, then come back to check you followed it.

Chapters 1–2: An Impossible Idea

After dinner, the Time Traveller tells his guests that time is a fourth dimension, just like length, width and height. Filby and the others argue with him. Then he shows them a small model machine. The Psychologist presses its lever, and the model disappears. The Traveller says it has gone into the past or the future. He also shows them a bigger Time Machine, not yet finished, in his laboratory, and says he intends to explore time. The guests do not know whether to believe him.

Chapters 3–4: The Traveller Returns

The next Thursday the guests meet again for dinner, but their host is late. At last he walks in, dirty, tired and limping. He eats hungrily and then begins his story. He describes starting the machine in his laboratory and watching days and nights rush past faster and faster. When he stops, the machine falls over in a hailstorm. He is on a lawn far in the future, beside a huge white stone sphinx. Small, graceful people come running towards him.

Chapters 5–7: The Golden Age

The future people are small, beautiful and friendly, but they are weak and lose interest in things very quickly, like children. They eat only fruit and live together in large old buildings. The world looks like a peaceful garden, and the Traveller thinks humans have solved their problems and grown weak from an easy life. Then, by moonlight, he discovers that his Time Machine has gone. After a terrible night, he finds marks showing that it was dragged into the bronze base of the White Sphinx.

Chapters 8–10: Weena and the Underworld

The Traveller saves a little woman called Weena from drowning, and she becomes his loving friend. She is terribly afraid of the dark. He sees pale, ape-like creatures at night and finds deep wells all over the land. He climbs down one and meets the Morlocks, who live underground among machines, and he sees meat there. He escapes back up. Slowly he understands that the Morlocks feed on the Eloi, and he decides to find weapons and a safe place before the dark nights come.

Chapters 11–12: The Palace and the Forest Fire

With Weena, the Traveller reaches the Palace of Green Porcelain, a ruined museum full of dust, old machines and rotten books. He breaks off an iron lever to use as a weapon and finds matches and camphor. On the way back they must cross a dark forest at night. Morlocks attack them. He makes a fire, but falls asleep, and wakes with Morlocks all over him. His first fire grows into a huge forest fire. He fights his way out, but Weena is lost.

Chapters 13–14: The Trap and the Further Vision

That evening the bronze doors of the Sphinx are open, and the Time Machine is inside. It is a trap, and the doors close behind him. His matches will not light without their box, but he fights off the Morlocks in the dark and escapes on the machine. By mistake he travels far forward. He sees a huge red sun over a quiet sea and giant crabs on the beach. More than thirty million years later, the world is cold and almost lifeless, and he watches an eclipse.

Chapters 15–16 and Epilogue: The Last Journey

The Traveller returns to his laboratory on the same evening and joins his guests. Most of them do not believe his story, though he shows them two strange white flowers that Weena put in his pocket. The next day the narrator visits again. The Traveller, carrying a camera and a knapsack, promises to bring proof and goes into his laboratory. Moments later, he and the machine have vanished. Three years later he has still not returned, and the narrator keeps the flowers and wonders where he went.

Main characters

• The Time Traveller: A clever English scientist and inventor who builds a machine to travel through time and tells the story of his journey.
• The narrator: One of the Traveller's dinner guests, whose name we never learn, who reports the evenings and the Traveller's story.
• Weena: A small, gentle Eloi woman whom the Traveller saves from drowning and who becomes his close friend.
• The Eloi: The beautiful, childlike people of the future who live above ground, eat fruit and are afraid of the dark.
• The Morlocks: Pale, ape-like people of the future who live underground, hate light and hunt the Eloi at night.
• The dinner guests: Filby, the Medical Man, the Psychologist, the Editor and others, who listen to the Traveller's ideas and mostly doubt them.

Words to learn from The Time Machine

Each example sentence is copied from the book, so you will meet these words in exactly this form.

Famous lines

Questions for discussion

Good for a book club, a class, or writing practice: answer one question in five sentences.

1. Why do you think the guests find it so hard to believe the Time Traveller, even when he shows them the model and the flowers?
2. The Traveller changes his ideas about the future world several times. What does this tell us about making quick judgements?
3. How are the Eloi and the Morlocks different, and what do you think Wells wanted to say about rich and poor people in his own time?
4. Why is Weena so important to the Traveller, and how did you feel when she was lost in the forest?
5. What does the Traveller's journey to the dying world, with its red sun and silent beach, make you think about the future of the Earth?
6. Where do you think the Time Traveller went at the end of the book, and would you choose to travel to the past or the future?

The PageWalker adventure

In the adventure you choose how to survive in 802,701 — and how to get your machine back. You can try the first page in your browser, and the adventure is available in 13 languages with click-to-translate.

The Time Machine in other languages

• EnglishThe Time Machine
• العربيةآلة الزمن
• DeutschDie Zeitmaschine
• EspañolLa Máquina del Tiempo
• FrançaisLa Machine à explorer le temps
• हिन्दीद टाइम मशीन
• ItalianoLa macchina del tempo
• 日本語タイム・マシン
• 한국어타임머신
• PortuguêsA Máquina do Tempo
• РусскийМашина времени
• TürkçeZaman Makinesi
• 简体中文时间机器

Questions about The Time Machine

Updated 16 October 2026