The Camphor Case: The Identity of H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller

Abstract

Critics have long speculated and disagreed over the identity of the anonymous Time Traveller in Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). Martin T. Willis argues that Thomas Edison was the most likely inspiration, but also admits that there is no general consensus as to the Time Traveller’s identity. ¹ Willis identifies three schools of thought, as it were, ‘those who see the Time Traveller as a poor example of the late Victorian scientist, those who view him as a scientific Everyman, and those who find him a reflection either of Wells himself or of some mythic precedent’. ² There is no doubt that Wells’s iconic novella grew out of a rich panoply of...