The rare first of edition of Enrique Gaspar’s El Anacronópete, widely considered to be the first novel to depict a time travel machine, preceding H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine by eight years - complete with the very rare and striking original publisher’s pictorial cloth.
Depictions of time travel in fiction prior to the late nineteenth century usually involved means such as Rip Van Winkle’s deep, alcohol induced sleep or the supernatural as with the spirits of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In this type of narrative, the characters have no control over the mechanism of time travel and are usually victims of an unexpected occurrence.
The earliest appearance of time travel by means of a mechanical device was in Edward Page Mitchell’s short story ‘The Clock That Went Backwards’, published in the New York Sun newspaper in 1881, in which a very old stopped clock, when wound, goes backwards rather than forwards. However, the protagonists in the story have no control over the time travel and the actual mechanics of time travel remain ambiguous. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was published in 1895 and coined the very term ‘time machine’ but was in itself based on an earlier short story by him titled ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ published in 1888, only a year after the publication of Gaspar’s El Anacronópete.
El Anacronópete therefore contains the earliest depiction of a mechanical vessel engineered to travel back in time. And yet, the appearance of several such depictions in quick succession is striking. There is no evidence that any of these authors would have been aware of one another’s work, and so the invention of the time machine in fiction might be seen an interesting example of multiple discovery much akin to the co-discovery of calculus by Newton and Leibniz.
El Anacronópete was written by Enrique Gaspar, a Spanish diplomat and successful playwright, while he was consulate in Macao and later Hong Kong. The first drafts of his story were formatted as a play, but Gaspar either put off by recent rejections or by the difficulty of staging such an elaborate production, subsequently re-wrote the story as a novel.
The time machine, the Anacronópete, is a very large cast iron box which is able to travel back in time by flying fast against the rotation of the Earth. The characters are protected from growing younger on their journey by ‘Garcia Fluid’ and the machine contains many other brilliant inventions which make domestic chores such as cleaning and cooking more convenient. The story focuses on four main characters, the Scientist don Sindulfo, his niece and ward Clarita, his friend and assistant Benjamin, and Captain Luis, Clarita’s betrothed. They travel through time and space, visiting Queen Isabella in Granada in 1492 and Ho-Nan, China in 220, where they find many innovations such as the printing press and iron ships have already been invented, they travel to Pompei just in time to observe the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and they witness the parting of the Red Sea by Moses, before finally crash landing at the very beginning of time. In the final paragraphs don Sindulfo wakes up to hear the sound of applause and realises that he had just slept through a play by Jules Verne.
Containing two other shorter novels by Gaspar, “Viaje á China” and La Metempsícosis“.
A near fine copy.
Rare. Underrepresented in libraries outside of Spain, OCLC lists only three copies in North American (NYPL, Texas A&M, and University of California at the Doe Library) and a single copy in the UK (BL).
