A well-read, eccentric inventor and scientist who hosts a weekly dinner and salon, the Time Traveller builds a time machine that takes him more than 800,000 years into the future. His adventure is the main story of the book, an experience that he relates to his disbelieving salon guests after his return. The character is a variation on a popular type in the 19th-century imagination and popular fiction, inspired by real life exemplars of explorer-scientists such as Charles Darwin and David Livingstone.

The Time Traveller also stands in for the author, full of earnest inventiveness and eager ambitions, as well as beliefs about social reform and human evolution. The Traveller’s report on the future decay of civilization serves as a warning to Wells’s 19th-century audience that a robust society needs to keep alight the fires of passion and determination that might otherwise be lost in a culture that prizes comfort over achievement.

One of the small and pretty Eloi people, the Traveller meets Weena when she nearly drowns in a creek and he rescues her. The two become friends. Her name expresses the child-like quality of her people. Like the rest of the Eloi, Weena is sweet and gentle, but she lacks intelligence and willpower.