The setting of the novel is primarily composed of two worlds, which are distant from one another in time: the Time Traveller's home in 19th century England, and the distant future to which he travels. The shifts between these two settings serve to create a contrast between the familiar and the unknown, and highlight the themes of scientific progress and its consequences.
The Time Traveller's present day is depicted as a world of social inequality and rapid technological development, in which the distinction between capitalists and laborers is stark. The Traveller owns a comfortable home at which he hosts dinner parties, entertains friends, and develops his time machine. This comfortable setting contrasts with the future landscape the Time Traveller arrives at, in which he encounters a civilization in the last stages of decay. He observes:
As I walked I was watchful for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I found the world— for ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for instance, was a great heap of granite, bound together by masses of aluminum, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumbled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda-like plants—nettles possibly—but wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves, and incapable of stinging.
The future world that the Time Traveller observes displays numerous signs of decrepitude, including "crumbled heaps" and "ruins." This imagery demonstrates humanity's descendants' inability to maintain the features of the civilization they built. Though their world is overgrown with vegetation and with crumbling buildings and statues, the "harmlessness" of the plants and the "splendor" of the ruins still proclaims the ingenuity and technological success of their predecessors.
This future setting is depicted as a world in which humanity has failed to maintain its achievements and has allowed its social structures and architecture to deteriorate. While the future setting shows evidence of technological advancement, it is nevertheless more dangerous and less civilized than the 19th century England home from which the Traveller set off. By using both 1800s English suburbia and a future landscape as his setting, H.G. Wells warns the reader of the fragility of modern technological successes and the consequences that may be incurred if current societal trends continue.
