Most fans of time travel literature date the beginning of our genre to 1895 – the year H.G. Wells published The Time Machine. The word “seminal” is overused, but it’s appropriate for this novel, which introduced time travel as a branch of science fiction. Yet time travel literature predates even the time machine, and there are a few curious stories, novels and plays that antedate Wells’ masterpiece. These prehistoric artifacts of time travel, so to speak, are of a very different character from what followed in the 20th century.
Time travel in the form of a long sleep can be found in fairy tales like Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty” (1697) and Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), but conscious travel seems to appear for the first time in an anonymous curiosity published in the Dublin University Magazine entitled “An Anachronism, or Missing One’s Coach”. The narrator, while waiting for his train in Newcastle, climbs a hill and somehow manages to enter the 8th century, falling into easy conversation with the Venerable Bede. The phenomenon behind this feat is not explained, leaving us to conjecture that it must have been a dream.
Actually, time travel as a device occurs quite as often in Victorian fiction as in our contemporary literature; the difference is that in the 19th century, instead of transporting travelers into a romance set in the Scottish Highlands, it was used to illustrate a utopian society.
In Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), thirty-year-old Julian West, an insomniac, is mesmerized by a doctor in his subterranean Boston bedroom in 1887. When he wakes, it is the year 2000. The 
house had caught fire while he was in a trance, and he was presumed dead, though his cellar vault was not disturbed. So yes, he was in a trance for 113 years! Aside from the corny premise, Looking Backward is actually a serious book, illustrating Bellamy’s vision of a socialist utopia where labor (and the fruits of that labor) are shared equally. And people can retire at 45. Alas, my recollection of the year 2000 is rather different! Though much of the book might be termed wishful thinking, Bellamy did predict credit cards (though they are made of pasteboard and work more like gift cards). J. McCullough’s Golf in the Year 2000 (1892) has a similar plot line, with Alexander Gibson falling asleep in 1892 and awakening in 2000, whereupon his host takes him for a game on the links. Whacky as it sounds, Golf in the Year 2000 actually did better than Bellamy in the prediction category – 
McCullough correctly anticipated television, bullet trains, digital watches and women’s lib. And he got the golf right, too.
On the other side of the coin was William Morris, the gifted architect, designer and medievalist. In A Dream of John Ball (1888), Morris narrates an account of waking from a dream to find himself outside a country village in the year 1381 – the year of the Peasants’ Revolt – and having an interesting conversation with one of the leaders of the revolt, the Lollard preacher John Ball. The late Middle Ages, a time when guilds protected workers and crafts and pastoralism was at its height, is depicted as a finer era than the ugly and exploitative technologies of the 19th century. This fervent medievalism – along with British snobbery about breeding and bloodlines – was the target of Mark Twain’s time travel satire, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, published a year later.
Utopias aside, there were some writers interested in time travel for the sake of time travel. Though even the idea of a time machine had not yet been invented by Wells, Edward Page Mitchell manages to transport his characters into the past via a timekeeping device in “The Clock that Went Backward”, a story originally published in New York’s The Sun, where Mitchell worked as a journalist, in 1881. The narrator and his cousin Harry tote their great-aunt Gertrude’s clock from Maine to Leyden to pursue their university studies. The clock is from the 16th century and does not run, but when one of their teachers, Professor Van Stopp, pops in their rooms for a visit, he winds it up and they see it running backwards. This – with the addition of some lightning – transports them back in time to 1574, where the boys lend their hand defending the town during the Siege of Leyden. Just how a backward running clock might enable time travel is not explained – but 19th century writers, not yet bound by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, tended to talk time in metaphysical terms, as we see in this mini-lecture from the Professor:
“I thought you Hegelian enough,” he continued, “to admit that every condition includes its own contradiction. Time is a condition, not an essential. Viewed from the Absolute, the sequence by which future follows present and present follows past is purely arbitrary. Yesterday, today, tomorrow; there is no reason in the nature of things why the order should not be tomorrow, today, yesterday.”
Equally whimsical is Tourmalin’s Time Cheques (1891) by F. Anstey (a pseudonym for Thomas A. Guthrie). Bored on a sea voyage from Australia back to England, Peter Tourmalin is approached by a bank manager by the name of Perkins and offered a chance to deposit his excess time in a “time bank”, the Anglo-Australian Joint Stock Time Bank Limited to be precise. The time can be withdrawn later on by writing a check and presenting it to any clock. As Perkins explains:
“I daresay you have heard that ‘Time is Money’? Very well, all our operations are conducted on that principle. We are prepared to make advances, on good security of course, of time to almost any amount; and we are simply overwhelmed with applications for loans. Business men, as you may know, are perpetually pressed for time, and will consent to almost anything to obtain it. Our transactions in time, sir, are immense. Why, the amount of Time passing through our books annually during the last ten years, averages—ah! about sixty centuries! That’s pretty well, I think, sir?”
Tourmalin buys into the proposition, and his sea voyage is complete that much the sooner. Once home, and coping with a rather high maintenance fiancée, Tourmalin decides to “cash” one of his checks – only for fifteen minutes, you understand. He finds himself back on the ship, and in the midst of conversation with a certain Miss Tyrrell:
“Yes, I forgive you, Mr. Tourmalin,” she was saying, with an evident effort to suppress a certain agitation; “but indeed, indeed, you must never speak to me like that again!”
Now, as Peter was certainly not conscious of ever having spoken to her at all in his life, this was naturally a startling and even embarrassing beginning.
Complications, as they say, arise between Tourmalin and Miss Tyrrell, as well as another young lady on board, Miss Davenport. The setup is one that P.G. Wodehouse would have delighted in, and one can just imagine Bertie Wooster freely spending time cheques and getting himself into a tight spot, only to be rescued by Jeeves spouting something about temporal paradoxes (Tourmalin’s Time Cheques, by the way, is credited with being the first story to invoke them).
A survey of
time travel prehistory wouldn’t be complete without H.G. Wells himself. His story “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888) is a prequel of sorts to The Time Machine – and it is here that the notion of a machine for traveling in time is first introduced. Inhabitants of a Welsh town witness strange phenomena from a manse after it is occupied by the mysterious Dr. Nebogipfel. The villagers suspect witchcraft, but it turns out the good doctor is an inventor and is experimenting with a time machine, and he takes a friendly neighbor, the Rev. Elijah Cook, for a spin in it. Later, Cook gives a glimpse of some of their travels:
He was silent and thoughtful for a while. “I have a deposition to make. Will you take it? It concerns the murder of an old man named Williams, which occurred in 1862, this disappearance of Dr. Moses Nebogipfel, the abduction of a ward in the year 4003 —-“
The author stared.
“The year of our Lord 4003,” he corrected. “She would come. Also several assaults on public officials in the years 17,901 and 2.”
So it turns out the 19th century was not such a quiet backwater for time travel after all. Bellamy’s Looking Backward was a phenomenal bestseller, and Bellamy clubs sprung up across the United States. And A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court remains a popular classic. It was to be another forty years or so before the genre was revived, by authors like H.P. Lovecraft, C.L. Moore, Lyon Sprague de Camp and Robert Heinlein.
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Great overview Joel, even I learnt something new!