In The Time Machine, the dinner party is a key event which depicts class inequality. This event is directly referenced in Chapter 2 and Chapter 12 of the story and takes place at the Time Traveller's home. The dinner party demonstrates the wealth and privilege of the Victorian middle class in a number of ways.
Firstly, the guests at the dinner party represent some of the most respectable and well-paid professions in Victorian society: there is an editor, for example, a psychologist and a doctor.
Secondly, in this "warm and comfortable" dining room, the guests enjoy a meal prepared by a cook and are served by the Time Traveller's "man-servant;" both representative of the working classes who here symbolise subservience and inferiority.
After dinner, the guests then go the "smoking-room" where they have cigars and talk further on the subject of time travel. This room represents middle-class wealth and privilege; it is a room that is far removed from the poverty and deprivation of late-Victorian England.
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