Review of Jordan Kistler’s “I Cannot Tell You All the Story: Narrative, Historical Knowledge, and the Museum in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.”

Jordan Kistler's eloquently written article offers a compelling narratological reading and re-interpretation of a specific episode in H.G. Wells's science fiction novella, The Time Machine (1895): the Time Traveller's visit to the Palace of Green Porcelain, which contained paleontological, geological, chemical, military, ethnographical, and classical collections, in addition to a vast library.The reader's expectation about this seemingly climactic event is that the Palace's 'status as a universal survey museum' 'should contain vital information about the past, the present, and the future', and give answers to questions posed in the first half of the novella; the fact that it unexpectedly and rather disruptively fails to do so and only leaves the Time Traveller with a new box of matches, Kistler contends, is full of significance and demands scholarly attention (258).Behind this failure, Kistler adds, lies the novella's sceptical attitude 'towards the possibility and value of universal historical knowledge' (258), as well as Wells's sharpalbeit implicitcritique of Victorians' quest for the construction of a totalising, developmental historical narrative, and their efforts for its material translation in museums' spatio-temporal displays.Comprised of seven parts, Kistler's article develops its argument in the context of late-Victorian narrative expectations; the evolution of nineteenth-century museums; Victorian historicism; and ideas about time.Engaging in an illuminating close reading of the novella, Kistler notes the narrative limitations of the Time Traveller, himself admitting his own unreliability.His lack of a cicerone in the Palace is also noteworthy, especially when The Time Machine is compared to other utopian fictional works, such as William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), both of which equip their travellers with guides whose purpose is to explain the museum collections.Kistler links the absence of a museum guide in The Time Traveller to late nineteenth-century conceptions of the public museum as a repository of answersof serialised historical knowledge and displays, with the museum itself acting as a 'guide' to the visitor.The failure of the Palace and its ruined library to provide the Time Traveller with an understanding of nature, culture, and history, goes against 'both the expectations of the nineteenthcentury museum and the genre in which Wells writes', ultimately leading to a breakdown of the novella's narrative and to a deliberate subversion of the 'belief in the comprehensibility of narrative form more broadly' (261).Kistler's article formulates its cogent argument by building on, and extending, Harry M. Geduld's observation in his critical edition of Wells's scientific work, that the anti-climax of the Palace episode 'is merely another tactic of delay, to keep readers on the edge of their seats' (263).As Kistler convincingly demonstrates, something much more interesting is going on.Wells's Palace seems to exemplify the epitome of the mid-to late-nineteenthcentury museum: an institution predicated on the ideal of 'unified universal knowledge' which echoed the Carlylean ' "idea of the Whole" ' (266), and on a Victorian pedagogical ethos, much like a ' "latter-day South Kensington" ' or the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace (264).Victorian readers would expect this allencompassing space of gargantuan proportions to function as the ultimate source of