1894

1

Ed. Note: “Jane” was Wells’s very personal name for Catherine Robbins. They were living together and would be married as soon as Wells’s divorce from his first wife, Isabel, became final.

2

Ed. Note: Prince Albert apparently caught influenza during a recent visit to his son, Edward, at Cambridge University.

3

Ed. Note: The cause of the famous Windsor Castle Fire of November 1992 has never been conclusively determined. Nor is it certain that Captain Banning emerged on that occasion.

4

Ed. Note: William Ernest Henley, 1849–1903, famous London editor and poet, known to American readers best for his great self-paean, Invictus.Ed. Note: In August 1894 Wells, “Jane” (Catherine Robbins), and her mother departed from Charing Cross Station by train for Tusculum Villa, 23 Eardley Road, 7 Oaks, Kent, for a two week vacation. The vacation was overdue. Mrs. Robbins was ill and Wells was exhausted for reasons never adequately explained before the discovery of this document. He spent those two weeks rewriting The Time Machine, following Henley’s suggestion to “cycle in on time to the end of the world.” (In the prior rewrite Wells had stopped with the Traveler’s escape from the Morlocks.) He wrote the last pages of the final revision at an open window at night, while down below the landlady loudly proclaimed the sinful morals of her new tenants to her neighbors. (Wells and Catherine were still unmarried.)

In June 1894 The Time Machine was published as a book in the form we know it today. Since 1888 it had been revised and/or rewritten six times and printed in various forms four times, with extensive revisions each time. As of its Centennial The Time Machine remains the most widely read of all Wells’s novels. Probably only the Bible has been translated in more foreign languages.

5

Ed. Note: William Ernest Henley, 1849–1903, famous London editor and poet, known to American readers best for his great self-paean, Invictus.