Chapter Scientists and Gentlemen of The Time Machine - Study Guide by H G Wells

as a contrast to the fantastical nature of the story about to be told, and in part to highlight the comfort of the upper classes from which man's future evolution begins. The Time Traveller journeys to the future not in a safari suit and pith-helmet, but in a tail-coat. And he goes ill-equipped, surmising that "the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances. I had come without arms, without medicine, without anything to smoke... If only I had thought of a Kodak!" Respectability, along with progress, goes up in a puff of a paradox.