I Cannot Tell You All the Story: Narrative, Historical Knowledge, and the Museum in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine

In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the Time Traveller visits a museum. The episode does little more than supply the Time Traveller with a new box of matches, yet the text is structured to suggest that the Palace of Green Porcelain will provide important information. A vast museum, the Palace houses paleontological, geological, chemical, military, ethnographic, and classical collections, as well as a colossal library. Universal survey museums like the Palace were the dominant form of museum after the mid nineteenth century and were intended to display the totality of human history. This was supposedly achieved through the application of the structures of literary narrative to the museum, in order to construct a bildungsroman of the world. This narrative was intended to provide complete and universal knowledge of the past, but also to allow that “the Present and the Future be interpreted or guessed at,” according to Thomas Carlyle. A universal collection like the Palace, therefore, should contain vital information about the past, the present, and the future. The fact that it doesn’t is key to understanding The Time Machine. The Palace represents the foibles of Victorian historicism, with its claims to cohesion and universality, and is a material testament to its result: mere fragments left behind.