Within the book we see that the Subbies are prejudiced against the Chippies because they often steal from them: “You let a Chippie stay the night he’ll rip off all you’re stuff and maybe cut you’re throat for an encore.” This prejudice is still true of today’s society in certain countries even in England. It seems to me that the rich are in a way living in fear of the poor, because the rich have a lot of hi-tech security gadgets, they even have bouncers securing their homes. “They mite well larf wiv ther hi fences and dazzlers and bouncers garding them and al that.” This also is very true of modern society in the way that rich have become very untrusting towards poor and vice-versa. Swindells shows this divide in society very well throughout the book.
We also get this sense of fear of the poor in the ‘The time machine’ during the day time the Eloi are happy to dictate to the morlocks, but in the evening the tables turn on the Eloi when morlocks attack “Freshly shed blood was in the air, there was a table with meat on it.” The time traveller is also very wary of the morlocks and is very taken back with their discruntled bodies: “I saw a small white, moving creature with large bright eyes. It was like a human spider.”
Both poor parties in the two books try and obtain power through violence, we can best see this with the Chippies: “1 man 1 woman 1 kid thay come out this guy waiting for them wiv his mates kill the subbies and nik there stuff.” This is sadly true of today’s society e.g: IRA, Saddam Hussain and other terrorist organizations.
Another fact of the two books seems to be that both rich parties are living a high standard of life at the expense of the poor, in the way that instead of treating the poor as equals they have cast them aside and society has slowly forgot about the poor people: ”The only Chippies we saw were those who had passes to come into a suburb to work.” This strongly relates to many peoples views on the third world countries. The Subbies in ‘Daz 4 Zoe’ also have very nice suburban homes:
“We work and have showers and nice houses, they don’t, they hang out and live in crummy apartments.” Again we get this sense of prejudice with “they hang out and live in crummy apartments.” We also know that Subbies and Zoe in particular are very well dressed, we know this because it states that she has to ‘dirty’ herself up in Chippieland so to speak.
In the other book we can also see that the rich (Eloi) have a high living standard aswell. The Eloi live on the surface in a totally different world to the Morlocks or so it seems, it is like a tropical paradise very much like the Victorian rich had it. The Eloi also eat fruit of the most lavish kind: “These were heaps of fruit some I recognised as an extra big raspberry or orange but in the most part they were strange.” Exotic fruit have also been the choice for rich Victorians.
In my personal opinion the Eloi and the Subbies are just weak. The Chippies inflict fear into Subbies via guns and knifes etc… The Morlocks also take advantage of how frail the Eloi are by using them as cattle. Although the Subbies and the Eloi are in totally different time zones and different civilizations there
Are not that many differences between them e.g: They are both vunerable to the poor, both have a high living standard and both are slowly getting their ‘just desserts’ so to speak.
But however the differences that they do share are major ones like how the Eloi have forgotten how to make a fire. This shows just how much man has drifted from his natural beginnings.
The Eloi also lose their general knowledge quite a contrast to the Victorian beliefs at the time that knowledge/ education was power: “A gallery of technical chemistry it looked hopeful.” The subbies have retained their knowledge, and they try to gain power through it. This is very true of today’s society because that is what Tony Blair is trying to do e.g: He thinks that because he is Prime Minister he can go against the wishes of the country and still go to war with Iraq just
because we can “afford it.”
In conclusion of this essay I believe that the two books have more in common than they do differences. I also believe that the concerns of society in the 1890’s were far less great than the society concerns of our modern day, for instance back in Victorian times there was not chemical warfare or fear of it at least and there was also no global warming, times have changed considerably since then, and we will continue to change.
