Free A Man of Parts by David Lodge

races: the Eloi, an effete, pastoral people who live an apparently idyllic life of graceful indolence on the surface of the earth, and the cannibalistic Morlocks, workers who labour in underground factories by day and emerge only at night to cull the Eloi, whom they rear as cattle, for meat … It’s a kind of dark satire on the socialist dream of overthrowing industrial capitalism: the proletariat have become the dominant class but exploit the upper class in a peculiarly horrible way. What happened to make you turn, in the space of five years or so, from that nightmarish vision, to the confident prediction in Anticipations of a benign social system, attainable within a century, when everybody would be middle class and inhabit a suburban paradise of motor cars and labour-saving domestic appliances?
    – The short answer is that I started to make some money – thanks to The Time Machine . That book was written out of thirty years of poverty, poor diet and bad health, and if it projected a bleak view of the long-term future that was because my own short-term future seemed bleak to me. I had a defective lung with suspected TB and a damaged kidney. Jane wasn’t in much better shape. Neither of us expected to live more than ten years. When The Time Machine was a success I exploited it for all it was worth, turning out novels and short stories like a man possessed, to make the most of the time I thought I had left. In that same year, 1895, I published another novel, The Wonderful Visit , and a book of short stories. Two more novels the following year, The Island of Dr Moreau and The Wheels of Chance. The Invisible Man and another collection of short stories in ’97 and The War of the Worlds in ’98. Not to mention countless journalistic articles and reviews. Some of the fiction was as dark and frightening as The Time Machine – I still enjoyed putting the wind up my readers, disturbing their complacent trust in things-as-they-are, showing how thin and fragile the veneer of civilisation would prove if some completely unforeseen catastrophe happened, like an invasion of aliens from Mars, or a huge comet which enters our solar system and threatens to collide with the earth, as in my story, ‘The Star’. But I always reprieved the world – the comet just misses the earth, the Martians are killed off by bacteria – and there’s a suggestion at the end of these tales that a new human solidarity comes out of the horror and suffering.
    Meanwhile our lives – Jane’s and mine – were improving rapidly. My divorce came through in the same year that The Time Machine was published, so we were able to marry and quickly raised our standard of living, moving from house to house and place to place until we ended up in Sandgate. In a few years I had made enough money to build a house there on a prime site, but I still didn’t expect to enjoy a long life. I had it designed with some of the bedrooms on the same floor as the living rooms because I was sure that fairly soon I would have to lead an invalid existence in a wheelchair and be unable to manage stairs. It’s true! But by the time the house was built Jane and I were feeling the benefit of a few years of good food, sea air, exercise and domestic comfort. We walked and cycled long distances. We learned to swim and play badminton and tennis. We grew strong and healthy. Gradually it dawned on us that our lives were stretching out ahead of us much further than we had ever envisaged, full of pleasing possibilities. I thought to myself – not in so many words, but it was the underlying drift of my thinking: if I can transform my life in this way by having a bit of luck as a writer, why shouldn’t the majority of men – and women – have their lives transformed by a more rational arrangement of society? It’s poverty, bad diet, bad health, that keeps them crawling along the drainpipe till they die, and makes them die sooner than those in more privileged circumstances. My escape