H. G. Wells's impulse to revise is extraordinary. From The Time Machine (1894–95) through Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), at least, he is almost as obsessive as Flaubert, except that Wells's revisions have to do with governing conception far more than with le mot juste. Perhaps, however, ‘obsessive’ is a term which should be reserved to characterize a kindred, but also different, species of revisionary enterprise that Wells engages in. Especially in the years following the appearance of the Atlantic Edition (1924–27), he revisits certain of his early ‘scientific romances’ and reconceives them in the same way that he had all along been reconceiving works by various other writers. Returning, in effect, to his literary origins, he re-views those fictions of his virtually as if someone else had written them, giving new form and new expression to their meaningful content, and this in a manner which realizes the aspiration of Melville's Pierre: he becomes his own Alpha and Omega.

The Time Machine, in particular, offers itself as a case in point. Six years before proclaiming it to have been the book which ‘fairly launched’ him as a writer, Wells revis(it)ed it in Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928); and two years after identifying it, in other words, as his Alpha, he reconceived it again in The Croquet Player (1936). Each of those highlights aspects of The Time Machine's significance which might not be evident solely from a reading of that (in some measure because The Time Machine does not accord them the same emphasis). By way of getting to a demonstration of this matter, I begin with the published incarnations of The Time Machine proper and argue that the fiction as Heinemann printed it in the spring of 1895 already has inscribed within it a tendency toward the sort of revisionary project that I shall be trying to describe – the project that essentially defines Wells as a writer. The Time Machine is usually said to originate with The Chronic Argonauts. In fact, however, the resemblances between those two do not go much beyond the bare notion of time-travel and some verbal carryovers of its theoretical basis in the idea of a Universe Rigid.