Hard Times

Literary works often portray or allude to the society in which they are written. Characters take upon social statuses, and whose positions and characterizations are determined by those statuses. Social statuses, in any context, are hard to change. It is the American Dream to move from a lower class to the upper class, and the American Dream is hard to obtain, although easy to wish for. These social classes provide easy identification of characters, but also prove to be barriers within the society. The construct of social classes in Hard Times by Charles Dickens provides context for the inability to easily change classes within a structured society. Each character provides detail into the description of their social classes, and also provides for the definite standing of their status within society as a whole.

Historical conditions in Hard Times portrayed a society “in which there was an unbridgeable chasm between employers and the employed” (Sutherland, Para. 25). There was an economical and social difference between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” which led to class antagonism within the work (Sutherland, Para. 25). The social classes further split during this time to include a lower class, middle class, a rich middle class, and the upper class. The development of the rich middle class, or the “noveau riche” was determined by wealth through the ownership of factories (Sutherland, Para. 17). Dickens uses the construct of this Victorian society as a basis for the characters in Hard Times.

The majority of the population of Coketown were the “Hands,” or the workers and laborers. Dickens often wrote about “less-fortunate members [of society], day laborers and the poor” (Brackett, Para 2) because of his own experiences working in...

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...iculty faced by those in society who wish to achieve something greater than what they have. This literary work, among others, portrays the reality and difficulties of society.

Works Cited

Brackett, Virginia. Facts On File Companion to the British Novel: Beginnings through the 19th Century. Ed. Harold Bloom. Bloom’s Literary Reference Online. Facts on File, 2006. Web. 10 May 2010. .

Davis, Paul. Critical Companion to Charles Dickens: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Ed. Harold Bloom. Bloom’s Literary Reference Online. Facts on File, 2007. Web. 10 May 2010. .

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. 1854. New York: Penguin Group, 1980. Print.

Sutherland, Helen. Literary Contexts in Novels: Charles Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’. Literary Reference Center. EBSCO Host, 2006. Web. 10 May 2010. .