Time Travel to the Past

[steepholm]

"What is the first example of a story in which people travel in time to the past?"

This question came up in a seminar today, and I was embarrassed not to be able to give a better answer. I couldn't think of any example from folklore. There are plenty of people who have an enchanted sleep and wake at some point in the far future - something that resembles time travel - but of course they never travel into the past that way. The only way of seeing (and perhaps conversing with) figures from the past is to summon their ghosts, or to visit the underworld.

H. G. Wells came to mind, of course, but neither in the "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888) nor in The Time Machine (1895) does the protagonist travel into the past of his own world. The most he does is to return to the present from his future travels.

It's been said that the first time-travel stories for children are Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill and Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet, both published in 1906. I'm inclined to award Nesbit the bays here, since Kipling's is really just a particularly fancy and extended example of ghost-summoning. But when Nesbit invented travel into the past for children, no doubt taking a hint from her friend Wells, whom she credits with a name-check, was she also inventing it tout court? I find it hard to believe.

I'm sure the SF buffs here will be able to put me straight.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Connecticut Yankee I should of course have thought of immediately! I'd not come across the other. Thank you.

It does seem strange to me that it's such a modern phenomenon (if it is). Did something happen to the way people conceptualized time around then? (I agree about the simpler forays, though.)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Actually, having cribbed those two examples above from a note which I left myself some years ago in Yahoo notepad, I find that another note from the same treasure-trove possibly throws some light on where this all came from, too. It's a quotation from Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chapter IX, which I cut and pasted as I was reading it a few years ago:

On the cultural significance of writing: "let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties."

This is a full century earlier than our previous examples, and isn't quite talking about full-blown time-travel, but it is comparing the act of reading and writing history to being able to 'live in distant ages' - i.e. it is characterising historiography as a form of (what we now call) time-travel. So I wonder if the impetus to write fantastical narratives about actually being able to do that follows from the same growing curiosity about the past and understanding that it was very different from the present which also gave rise to the emergence of history as a serious academic discipline?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Interesting quote! But I think I'll see your Gibbon (first time I've ever written that) and raise you a Machiavelli:

"When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off the muddy, sweaty clothes of everyday, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death; I pass indeed into their world." (Letter to Francesco Vettori, 1512)

Thanks for reminding me of this empathetic form of time travel! I'm not sure it counts, but it's certainly part of the story.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes! That is a considerably stronger articulation of the same idea, and much earlier too. I think I will now copy and paste it into the same note where I have been keeping my Gibbon. :-)

[owlfish]

I just checked Wikipedia article on the time travel novel which came out in Spanish the year before Wells'. The summary features this sentence which may be of interest to you (i.e. strange_complex) in particular:

"In the third act, after a stop in Pompeii at the time of Vesuvius' eruption in the year 79, they arrive in the 30th century BCE, the time of Noah."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Gaspar_y_Rimbau

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

All the stories mentioned in this thread sound fab, but yes - it is particularly nice to learn that Pompeii makes such an early appearance in the genre!

[owlfish]

Macchiavelli is also around the time that artists start to use more historical clothing for their historical subjects, rather than clothing them in present day wear. (I'm estimating the date for this - no more than a century earlier in any event.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

This is true - and may indeed suggest a change in historical sensibility. (But now I want even more to see a Renaissance time travel story! Ariosto would have rocked it. But their fantastic voyages are all into space, and the New World.)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Also, just a little later (http://www.wayoflife.org/index_files/ignatius_of_loyola.html), Loyola was directing Catholics to imagine themselves in events from the Bible.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you - that's a great example. (And it's almost as interesting to read the American Baptist on such imaginative exercises as heretical.)

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a pretty venomous piece. Those awful, awful Catholics! And God forbid (literally, I guess) that we should engage in "interfaith dialogue."

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

A Christmas Carol has visions of the past, if not exactly journeys to the past, but it's things Scrooge has experienced already, so it may not exactly count. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel has some more obscure examples. I like the sound of this one: "In 1836 Alexander Veltman published Predki Kalimerosa: Aleksandr Filippovich Makedonskii (The Forebears of Kalimeros: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon), which has been called the first original Russian science fiction novel and the first novel to use time travel.[10] In it the narrator rides to ancient Greece on a hippogriff, meets Aristotle, and goes on a voyage with Alexander the Great before returning to the 19th century."

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I love the sound of that Russian one!

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

I think it should count. Scrooge didn't alter anything, but the trip did change his life.