The Time Machine

Flowers, gigantic and plentiful, decorate the Eloi world, and the people enjoy picking them and giving them to each other. Weena presents her beloved Time Traveller with flowers that she places in his pockets. These flowers later become the only evidence of the Traveller’s adventure in the time machine. The flowers represent the love shared by him and Weena. They also symbolize the Eloi’s chief virtue, loving kindness.

The time machine contains two levers—one to move the machine forward in time, and one to send it backward. Without the levers, the machine cannot work. The Time Traveller always keeps these levers with him, attaching them to the machine only when he means to travel through time, so that the machine cannot be driven by anyone else into a different era and lost to him. The levers represent the power of technology, a power that, unless shepherded carefully, can be misused, or lost altogether.

Matches are the only useful objects, outside of the time machine itself, brought on the adventure by the Traveller—who, in his enthusiasm to visit the future, overlooks things he might need for such a trip. He uses them to light his way in the darkness of the Morlock tunnel world and to deter the creatures when they threaten.