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

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I'm aware of two examples from the late 19th century, as follows:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain.

Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1891) by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (which is apparently the first story to play with the paradoxes that time travel could cause).

But the very fact that the first of those is comedy and the second has got as far as thinking about paradoxes tells me that they can't possibly be the earliest examples. There must be earlier, simpler forays before these.

[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.)

[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!

[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. :-)

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

A dispute as old as any and a matter of definitions to start going backward with; I remember heated discussions among old fhans from (Scandinavian but very anglophile) SF-club days. Personally I´d have thought of the Yankee at King Arthur´s Court, too (I´ve always admired it for its dystopian satire, what with the knights dying in their armour on electric fences in the drenches that seem to foresee the horrors of the Great War that was soon to follow) but I agree, there must be earlier examples, so here are two of my present favourites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herla the role model of Goethe´s creepy Erlkönig and most of all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_in_the_Year_2000 for its sportsmanship though I can´t find any explicit answer to the Q. as posed. Not that I mind, I love this!

[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).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'd come across Herla as part of the Wild Hunt tradition, but missed the fact that he had made one of those pesky Otherworld excursions.

[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.)

[sheenaghpugh]

Does Odysseus's descent to the underworld to see famous people of the past count?

[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."

[katherine langrish (from livejournal.com)]

Herla moves forward in time, though, not backwards. Like Rip Van Winkle, or Oisin, he has been in the fairy world and lost track of time. No one from fairyland moves back in time, in folklore at least.

[katherine langrish (from livejournal.com)]

Nice question, though. I've cheated and wikied backward time travel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#Backward_time_travel

[heloise1415.livejournal.com]

I *think* that it is The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) in which one chapter features a Victorian character who finds himself back in the 18th century. Certainly Dickens, however.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

"The Story of the Bagman's Uncle."

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Would Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) count? Most of the book is satirical alternate history, but the bookend device is an angel coming back from 1998 to 1728 to drop off some future letters. Angels I suppose can go where and when they please.

My first suggestion was going to be The Blazing World, (1666) but that's travelling between worlds, not times.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I love the sound of that Russian one!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I don't think so, because he doesn't move back in time to do it - he just goes to where those famous people are now.

[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]

I've never heard of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century - how fascinating! I'd love to read it - though it sounds as if it doesn't quite fit the bill, since (like The Time Machine) it's really about imagining the future and has someone coming back to the present only to give reports of what's to come.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

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

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks - another book I've never read, shamefully!