Time

Rod Taylor in George Pal's 1960 film of The Time Machine

The screenwriter Zack Stentz mentioned recently on Twitter how strange it is that there aren't really any time travel stories before HG Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895.  In Classical myths the heroes sometimes visit the Underworld and meet the shades of their ancestors and great men of the past, but they never actually return to the past itself, or have any chance to influence it. Nor do the heroes of Mediaeval romance, although they encounter all sorts of magic. It seems the notion of stepping into the past or future just didn't occur to storytellers of those times or, if it did, didn't seem to appeal. Which is a shame, because wouldn't a Shakespeare time travel comedy be great?

Anyway, I pondered this paradox for several whole minutes, and developed the following half-baked theory.

In pre-modern times, the pace of change was very slow. Innovations were comparatively rare, and the world most people lived in was recognisably the same as that which their grandparents had inhabited. A writer of the 15th or 16th Century, if they imagined travelling back or forward a hundred years, would expect to find themselves in a society much like their own - God in His Heaven, a King on the throne, everyone else knowing their place, and life largely governed by the turning of the seasons.

With the coming of the industrial revolution, all that changes. Suddenly the pace of progress becomes visible. By the 19th Century, people inhabited a world very different from that which in which their parents had lived, and they could reasonably expect their children to experience one that was as different again. So the past and future start to be viewed as very different from the present. When Rembrandt or Breughel painted Biblical or mythological scenes, they peopled them with characters who looked and dressed like their own friends and neighbours, and used settings drawn from the world about them. But when Victorian artists paint the past they emphasise how different it is, striving to get the costumes and architecture right. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's popular paintings of Greek and Roman life function in one sense as archaeological illustrations - he's obsessively concerned with getting the details right. But the verisimilitude extends only as far as the physical details - the characters who inhabit his pictures aren't really Ancient Greeks or Romans, they are polite Victorians in fancy dress (or sometimes titillatingly but not too titillatingly nude). They are time travellers, and the pictures' elaborate gilded frames are portals through which Alma-Tadema's polite Victorian viewers can step into those long ago Mediterranean afternoons to join the fun. The past has become as exotic and interesting as an unknown country. And, like an unknown country, people want to imagine what it might be like to go there...

A Kiss, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1891

So that's my theory about Why Time Travel Suddenly Became A Thing in 1895. But then I thought about it some more and realised there actually are examples which pre-date The Time Machine. I'd be tempted to point to the book of Revelations, for instance, with its detailed spotter's guide to the kind of unpleasantness we can expect come the Apocalypse (St John is a witness to events rather than a participant, but then that's mostly true of Wells's time traveller too, especially when he reaches the end of the world.) On firmer ground, I'd mention Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge gets to revisit scenes from his past and travel into the future. He can't interact with or change the past, which plays out before him like a series of tableaux, but he certainly changes his future.

And then there's Foggerty's Fairy, by WS Gilbert, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame. My friend Brian Mitchell of the Foundry Group theatre company is a big Gilbert fan, and a few years back adapted several of his short stories for a show called Gilbert (no Sullivan). In Foggerty's Fairy *AKA The Tale of a Twelfth Cake, a deserter on the run from the army meets a fairy who offers him the chance to go back and change some of the bad choices which have landed him in his current predicament. Unfortunately, each change he makes has unforeseen consequences which end up making things even worse. I don't think he physically travels in time, but he definitely finds himself in alternate timelines, changing history much as the protagonists of classic time travel stories do - and this was in the 1870s, twenty years before The Time Machine.

Here's a promo for Gilbert (no Sullivan) featuring Brian himself and the late, great Dave Mounfield - and how completely ridiculous it feels to type those words, as if we ourselves have blundered into the wrong timeline. (The 'late' bit, I mean; everyone who ever saw Dave perform knew he was great.)

* Confusingly, Gilbert used the same title and the same central idea for a play with a completely different plot a few years later.