Character guide

The Time Traveller

major

Also known as the Time Traveller, himself

He is the host of a dinner party of skeptical professional men — Editor, Medical Man, Psychologist, Filby — who humor his paradoxes about a fourth dimension until he arrives at his own table late, coat dusty, appetite of a tramp, and insists on telling his story without interruption. His defining tension is between the need to be believed and the knowledge that most of what he has to say will sound like lying; he tells it anyway, wearily, because he cannot sleep until it is out. The early arc belongs to him entirely: his voice, his white sincere face in the lamplight, and the question of whether his hearers will credit him, carry the reader into the future he describes.

Weena

supporting

Also known as little Weena, Little Weena

She attaches herself to the Time Traveller among the Eloi, becoming his companion and the one creature in the future who shows him uncomplicated affection. Her terror of the dark and of what lives below sharpens his own dread and makes the Morlocks' threat intimate rather than abstract; when he carries her, wraps her in his jacket, and watches her sleep on the open hill, his scientific detachment gives way to tenderness and responsibility. She matters because she gives the future a face worth protecting, and because her fear is the reader's first true measure of what the night hides.

The Morlocks

major

Also known as Morlocks, No Morlocks

They live beneath the ground the Eloi walk on, and the Time Traveller's first descent into their world turns curiosity into a scramble for survival — clinging hands, a skull that rings under his head-butt, matches that will only strike on the box. Their theft of his Time Machine makes them not just a menace but a lock on his only way home, and their patient, murmuring pursuit defines the middle of the story. They matter because they invert the reader's expectation of who the future belongs to, and because their darkness is the thing Weena's fear has been pointing at all along.

Filby

supporting

Also known as himself

Filby is the Time Traveller's sharpest foil at the table, the man who interrupts the fourth-dimension lecture with 'There I object' and 'Don't follow you,' and who finally declares that you can show black is white by argument but you will never convince him. His stubborn common sense gives the reader a place to stand while the Time Traveller's paradoxes unspool, and his skepticism is the exact resistance the Traveller's story must eventually overcome. He matters because he voices the doubt the whole frame narrative is built to answer.

Mr. ⸻

minor

An unnamed dinner guest who questions the Time Traveller's theories.

Hillyer

minor

Another dinner guest who listens to the Time Traveller's story.

Mrs. Watchett

minor

The Time Traveller's housekeeper who witnesses his departure.

The Eloi

supporting

Also known as These Eloi

They are the future's inheritors on the surface — beautiful, idle, and incurious, feeding on fruit and living in great ruined palaces they did not build. Their childlike gentleness is also a flaw: they have no memory, no fear they can act on, and no defense against what comes up from below at night. They matter because their placid, diminished humanity is the first shock of the Traveller's arrival, and because their helplessness reframes the Morlocks from monsters into something closer to a verdict.