The middle class slowly started to disappear and “for many skilled workers the quality of life decreased a great deal in the first 60 years of the Industrial Revolution” (“Effects of The Industrial Revolution” 1). For example basket weavers were no longer employed, they lost their jobs to factories. The air was not as clear as it once was because of the pollution being put into the environment, and there were high volumes of people moving to the city with no place to put them. Which resulted in living conditions becoming worse. It became a dog-eat-dog world and “in the first sixty years of the Industrial Revolution, working-class people had little time or opportunity for recreation. Workers spent all the light of day at work and came home with little energy, space, or light” (“Effects of The Industrial Revolution” 1) to play outside or socialize with other people. H.G. Wells uses the Morlocks to represent this class of industrial workers. Much like the industrial workers, the Morlocks were underground the entire day working and never saw the sun and because of that, they had “abnormally large and sensitive eyes” (H.G. Wells 20) and developed some sort of reaction to sunlight. Seeing what humanity had come to the time traveler grows disappointed in his discovery of the men of the future, he states that “(he) had started with an absurd assumption that …show more content…
The reason being is that the upper class had the money to buy factories, land and hire employees, whereas the lower class had to sell their land to make money and had to apply for factory jobs to survive. As time went on the upper and lower classes started becoming like night and day. The upper-class citizens would completely rely on their servants, slaves and employees to do their dirty work much like the Morlocks did for the Eloi. The Time Traveler points out that in the future there had been a class system in place and the contentment of “the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs”(H.G. Wells 45).
In The Time Machine, H.G. Wells uses the Industrial Revolution to portray the degeneration of humanity because of technology. He accomplishes his goal through the use of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Wells points out the fatal flaws in each creature and compares it back to the industrialized world in which he lived. Wells takes the discussion further and gives examples of how degeneration can come in the disguise of progression. Humanity constantly tried to make life easier for them. The world became caught up in living for themselves no one took the time to think about how it would affect the