The Time Machine

One would think with a classic this well known I couldn't suffer from ‘should have read the synopsis' letdown, but oh, I very much am .
Honestly more than a century of literature and other media meditating on the idea of time travel has probably spoiled me for the place this holds in the pantheon in early sci fi. 
It feels like the rough draft for a novel I'd like to read, after many revisions and some expansions.  There's a kernel of a fascinating analogy/cautionary tale about class structure and existing political and economic systems, seemingly pushing a perhaps naively optimistic Communist agenda; the relative dangers of basing a society on expectation of certain human traits as desirable; there's tidbits about the nature of time as a dimension and how one might travel, and I'll be honest, I was expecting something drier based on such discussions than the sci fi pulp action that bulked out two-thirds of the story, and in retrospect, would have preferred more discussion and speculation and less action. 
Recommend accidentally getting the large print edition from your library, something about seeing those words blown up the twice their average size per page makes nineteenth century English more approachable. 
Fellow vegans prepare for that same ‘ol cognitive dissonance: the Time Traveler befriends a sentient species and abhors their being food for another sentient species specifically described as monstrous, going so far as to relate it to cannibalism, and the very first thing he wants wehn he gets back is lamb (mutton). 🤷🏼‍♂️
Discussion of distinctions between the ‘savage or an animal' and the ‘civilized man' by page 6, 😬 which upon closer inspection seems to boil down to ‘because privilege', definitely outdated terms in use.
Probably someone or many someones have described this as a colonizer narrative, (come to think of it, how many adventure stories of the nineteenth century were about some white guy having a good time shoving his way into another people's lands, looking for treasure or excitement?) 😑 Dude arrives in a time/world not his own, disdains to judge the locals by anything but his own standards, the standards of a particular time rather than culture/place, sets shit on fire, kills a number of people/gets one killed and then leaves without any kind of responsibility taken for his impact.

Not a fan of: the subjugation of nature being the proposed end goal of human civilization; the insistence that conflict is necessary for strength, energy, intelligence; that procreative/protective drive is required to form intimate bonds; or the binary of strong and weak that gets put forth as a value judgement. 

⚠️ Period typical racism