In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the Time Traveller visits a museum. The episode does little more than supply the Time Traveller with a new box of matches, yet the text is structured to suggest that the Palace of Green Porcelain will provide important information. A vast museum, the Palace houses paleontological, geological, chemical, military, ethnographic, and classical collections, as well as a colossal library. Universal survey museums like the Palace were the dominant form of museum after the mid nineteenth century and were intended to display the totality of human history. This was supposedly achieved through the application of the structures of literary narrative to the museum, in order to construct a bildungsroman of the world. This narrative was intended to provide complete and universal knowledge of the past, but also to allow that “the Present and the Future be interpreted or guessed at,” according to Thomas Carlyle. A universal collection like the Palace, therefore, should contain vital information about the past, the present, and the future. The fact that it doesn’t is key to understanding The Time Machine. The Palace represents the foibles of Victorian historicism, with its claims to cohesion and universality, and is a material testament to its result: mere fragments left behind.

在 HG Wells 的《时间机器》中，时间旅行者参观博物馆。这一集只是为时间旅行者提供了一盒新的火柴，但文本的结构表明青瓷宫将提供重要信息。宫殿是一座巨大的博物馆，拥有古生物学、地质学、化学、军事、民族志和古典学收藏品，以及一个巨大的图书馆。像故宫这样的万能博物馆是十九世纪中叶以后博物馆的主要形式，旨在展示人类历史的全部。据说这是通过将文学叙事结构应用于博物馆来实现的，以构建世界的教育小说。这种叙述旨在提供关于过去的完整和普遍的知识，根据托马斯·卡莱尔的说法，还允许“解释或猜测现在和未来”。因此，像宫殿这样的通用收藏应该包含有关过去、现在和未来的重要信息。事实并非如此是理解的关键时光机。宫殿代表了维多利亚时代历史主义的弱点，它声称具有凝聚力和普遍性，并且是其结果的物质证明：只是留下的碎片。