About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. And this same widening gulf -- which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich -- will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along line of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. --H,G. Wells, The Time Machine (Signet Classics, originally published in 1895)
The main body of Wells's book is in quotations, as The Time Traveller (as he is called) explains the details of time travel and his visit to the year 802,701, where the world has evolved to the working Morlocks who live underground and the peaceful Eloi, who fear the Morlocks as cannibals. The Time Traveller returns to the Victorian era to tell his fellow scientists what will happen in the future, which the scientists are skeptical about until The Time Traveller shows them vegetation he brought back from the future and then disappears with his time machine three years later.
When I read this book as a child I missed out completely on its didactic quality; now Well's warning about increasing class differences seems more relevant than ever, as studies show it becoming more and more difficult to transcend the class one is born into and the so-called middle class is being squeezed out. One can still read this as an adventure story, as The Time Traveller examines the world of 802,701, dallies with Weena, a female Eloi, and finds museums devoted to the past, where everything has crumbled to dust, though the tone is indeed pessimistic.
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