Probably the writer best known for populating his tales of the 1890s with beastly specimens is H. G. Wells. Often hailed as a prophetic figure, Wells is most firmly of his time, his texts born of attempts to come to terms with late nineteenth-century social and cultural anxieties. One can readily apply to Wells Rosemary Jackson's observation that:

The present chapter is concerned not only to identify the origins of the creatures that reside within Wells's writing, but to examine the form of the narrative vehicle in which they are transported. The focus is on three texts: The Time Machine (1895) and its metaphor of time travel; The War of the Worlds (1898) and its space travel (with Earth as the destination, rather than the departure point); and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) as a variant of the castaway voyage. I aim to show that the internal transformations that occur in Wells's tales (that is, the changes that are narrated within them) are complemented by the alterations that Wells effects to their external shape (that is, to the literary genres on which he draws for his scientific romances). Linda Dryden argues that Wells ‘took the fin de siècle Gothic a stage further by subjecting it to a scientific scrutiny’ and that ‘[i]n the modern Gothic, physical transformation from human to some bestial other is a central trope’. Wells explicitly relates his metaphors of bodily alteration to social conditions. His linkage of them combines with his experiments in literary form to produce shifts in narrative perspective.

Feeling his way among his words

Like several of Wells's works, The Time Machine is usually hailed as an early science fiction tale. In it, the Time Traveller remarks that: ‘Time is only a kind of Space.’ The discussion that follows takes up this implied invitation to examine it as a travel narrative and will focus on its beastly imagery.