Scaling Down: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Tono-Bungay (1909), and the Uppark Dolls House

Abstract

In H. G. Wells’s semi-autobiographical novel, Tono-Bungay (1909), he recounts playing with the eighteenth-century dolls house at Uppark, a country estate in West Sussex where his mother was the housekeeper. Drawing on Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978), I argue that Wells remakes his fictional worlds in Tono-Bungay and The Time Machine (1895) from the Uppark dolls house. To unpack the function and symbolism of the dolls house within Wells’s texts, I refer to work by dolls house experts, cultural historians, and Wells scholars. When read together, Tono-Bungay and The Time Machine reveal the material dimensions and history of the dolls house that are at work in both novels. As a small-scale country house, the Uppark dolls house puts into perspective the antiquated paradigms that continue to exert control over the physical, social, and cultural landscapes of England. This is most clear when we consider the dolls house as an off-shoot of the curiosity cabinet, which evolves into the public museum – an evolution reflected in both novels. The dolls house, curiosity cabinet, and country house relate to the potent yet obsolete ideology of the microcosm, which Wells critiques explicitly in Tono-Bungay and implicitly in The Time Machine. The concept of play and the miniature are serious matters for Wells, who knows that small-scale objects can exert great influence on the ‘real’ world, clarifying and amplifying the material conditions that they model. Miniaturization is a high-stakes game – giving us the ability to control, comprehend, and remake our world into a rational paradigm.