The Time Machine an Invention: A Critical Text of the 1895 London First Edition, With an Introduction and Appendices

The Time Machine is one of the most enduring works of the English language. A hundred years after it was first published, the book continues to be studied.

The 1895 London first edition is used as a basis for the exhaustive annotations and other critical apparatus of the world’s foremost Wellsian scholar. The widely reprinted version of 1924 is also fully accounted for. For most students, one of the chief points of interest is what the novel signified to readers when it was first published and how it relates to Wells’s later works. Accordingly, the annotations focus on these questions. The introduction gives in great depth the background of the work and its complex bibliographical history, and a synopsis of the literary conventions that Wells used.

The late Leon Stover, professor emeritus at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was the first to bring science fiction to the college curriculum and was the author of numerous landmarks of intellectual history. He lived in Chicago.