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

[mary919.livejournal.com]

Oh my gosh, what an interesting question. I was thinking that maybe when times were still (relatively) hard, people didn't write about going back to when they were harder still. Although I can't imagine a world where there's no nostalgia for the past. And then I thought about "Land of the Lost" and thought I'd better stop thinking about this :)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think nostalgia must be pretty universal. Thomas Browne notes the tendency to think that past times were better as one of the general foibles of the human mind in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, and there's plenty of evidence for it: look at the idea of historical decline embedded in such notions as the Golden Age, for example. In fact, I'd go out on a limb and suggest that the nineteenth century was relatively innovative in its Enlightenment-fuelled optimism about the future.

This seems like the kind of question that someone - probably everyone - should just know the answer to!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Certainly when I read Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind as an undergraduate, we were told that this eighteenth century text was the first to propose the idea of 'progress' as improvement, things getting better (rather than just progressing, moving on).

[owlfish]

The concept of progress develops in the 15th century, and the word's use in that sense as well.

Presumably Cordorcet contributes something important to the use or promulgation of the concept, but it was certainly widespread in Europe by then.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Looking through the OED citations, my impression is that the concept of progress becomes increasingly detached from any particular endeavour ("Having made no farther progress in his Business"), gradually assuming the character of a principle of the world/history in general.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

They just did it differently--you get dream sequences and divine visions of the past rather than actually travelling there. Breuddwyd Rhonabwy has the narrator falling asleep, spendign some time in a satire version of the Good Old Days of King Arthur, and then waking up. Or you just get immortal Taliesin-type figures who manage to exist everywhere, so talk about the past as a place they once lived.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. (And of course puts me in mind of T. H. White's Merlin, who's living backwards.)

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Yes, that Merlin is genius, really. Though I keep waiting for him to turn up on Doctor Who.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I'd be a bit surprised if Merlin-- though perhaps not White's Merlin-- had not appeared on Doctor Who at some point in the past 50 years.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

If not, they've missed a trick.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

The Doctor _is_ Merlin:
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Battlefield_%28TV_story%29

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Well, that makes a lot of sense.