Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 1.pdf/29

 PREFACE TO VOLUME I

this first volume are some of the author's earliest imaginative writings. The idea of "The Time Machine" itself, a rather forced development of the idea that time is a direction in space, came when he was still a student at the Royal College of Science. He tried to make a story of it in the students' magazine. If the old numbers of that publication for the years 1889 and 1890, or thereabouts, still exist, the curious may read there that first essay, written obviously under the influence of Hawthorne and smeared with that miscellaneous allusiveness that Carlyle and many other of the great Victorians had made the fashion. "Time Travellers" were not to be written of in those days of the twopence coloured style; the story was called, rather deliciously, "The Chronic Argonauts" and the Time Traveller was "Mr. Nebo-gipfel." Similar pigments prevailed throughout. A cleansing course of Swift and Sterne intervened before the idea was written again for Henley's National Observer in 1894, and his later New Review in 1895, and published as a book in the spring of the latter year. That version stands here unaltered. There was a slight struggle between the writer and W. E. Henley who wanted, he said, to put a little "writing" into the tale. But the writer was in reaction from that sort xxi