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dickens and the industrial revolution
Industrial revolution and it's impact on literature
20th century english literature history
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Charles Dickens' Hard Times and David Lodge's Nice Work
----“Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town;
fact, fact, fact everywhere in the immaterial.” – Charles Dickens
In the early 1851, London staged the Great Exhibition to show the
world, the achievements and inventions of the Industrial Revolution.
Many people believed that this showed how much better, safer and
healthier Britain was than its neighbours in Europe. People living in
mansions amid lawns and fountains, with horse drawn carriages
certainly felt that life couldn’t be better. However behind the
publicity and the royal occasions there was another England, not so
glorious. Benjamin Disraeli wrote that Britain was really “two
nations”, Dickens wanted to show his readers what was behind the
glittering façade of Victorian industry. He wanted to show his readers
the factual monotony behind the sulky blotch towns of industrial
Britain.
As the essay title suggests, both Lodge and Dickens have portrayed
their format of an industrial landscape. Both authors’ coddle in a
crestfallen environment of the industrial world: one at the height of
a revolution, the other at the height of a decline. Dickens is keen to
depict his Victorian contemporary world of Coketown in an essentially
satirical context. It is emblemed with certain thematic issues
including religion, the nature of employment and education, which
follow course throughout the book. This surreal caricature of the
Victorian landscape contrasts with Lodge’s realistically styled piece.
Lodge’s passage, which holds a fictional veil over the names of
“Rummidge and the Dark Country”, is clearly intended to represent
Birmingham and the Black Country.
In Hard Times it ca...
... middle of paper ...
...o hold no target. In his account he mainly adopts
an educational style prose to mirror the thoughts of his subject Vic
Wilcox whilst also using a slightly more creative passage towards the
end of the description to reveal political opinion and sentiment.
Overall it is credible to say that the sources examined are quite
detached in similarity. This maybe due to the large disparity of time
between time periods. In view of success I think though Lodge’s modern
style of writing should be recognized as playing games with the
reader, I judge that the tone is overtly mundane and dreary. It is
impossible to give a comprehensive argument on Lodge’s point of view
due to his modern isolated style from the writing. Dickens is
appealingly aggressive, motivating and quite favourably figurative. He
leaves his readers without a shadow of a doubt of whom he is
attacking.
a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon
Born in 1812 Charles Dickens grew up in a small town in London. Dickens grew up in a poor family. His family, sent to debtors∙ jail before he became old enough to fend for himself, convinced him to find work and stay out of the jail. Dickens worked anywhere, from law offices to newspapers as a young child. (∜New Standard Encyclopedia∠D-155) A Christmas Carol, written by Dickens, has changed many things in the world today, especially Christmas traditions and religion.
... and his associates, the working environment and the social implications of the working class had a huge effect on the everyday lifes of the working classes; which are seen via these two texts by Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Charles Dicken’s Bleak House showed that a darker side still existed despite all the prosperity within England. That a major amount of reforms had to be endured by the likes of Frederick Engels to help improve working conditions and the living conditions for the Working Class to going forward, but sadly it didn’t come soon enough for many people who died because of substandard living conditions, ill health resulting from various fevers that did the rounds, lack of sanitation. But these issues did not just exist in London or Manchester alone, these problems and issues knew no boundaries, as they reached the length and breath of England.
Another man - we are not told who the man is or why he is present, are
9. Ashbury, M (2001) Representation of Industrialization in Dickens’ Hard Times [Online]. Available: http://www.colourpurple.com [Accessed 25th April 2005].
In many novels, the society created by the author is surrounded by wealth and corruption. Numerous amount of times these settings are produced based on the life in which the author lives. Charles Dickens is no different. In the midst of most of his novels, Dickens exposes the deception of Victorian England and the strict society that holds everything together. In Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend, a satire is created where the basis of the novel is the mockery against money and morals. Throughout this novel, multiple symbols and depictions of the characters display the corruption of the mind that surrounds social classes in Victorian England.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Monod. A Norton Critical Edition. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001. 5-222
The novel, Great Expectations, presents the story of a young boy growing up and becoming a
Dickens knew how hard-pressed life was for thousands of English families in mid-ninteenth century England, and he knew the legal side of such desperation--a jungle of suspicion and fear and hate. He was especially attentive [if] . . . hungry, jobless men, women, children with few if any prospects became reduced to a fate not only marginal with respect to its "socioeconomic" character but also with respect to its very humanity. (575)
The death of God for many in the Victorian era due to scientific discoveries carried with it the implication that life is nothing more than a kind of utilitarian existence that should be lived according to logic and facts, not intuition or feeling – that without God to impose meaning on life, life is meaningless. Charles Dickens, in Hard Times, parodies this way of thought by pushing its ideologies and implications to the extreme in his depiction of the McChoakumchild School.
When considering representation, the ways in which the authors choose to portray their characters can have a great impact on their accessibility. A firm character basis is the foundation for any believable novel. It is arguable that for an allegorical novel - in which Hard Times takes its structure, Dickens uses an unusually complex character basis. The characters in Hard Times combine both the simplistic characteristics of a character developed for allegorical purposes, as well as the concise qualities of ‘real’ people (McLucas, 1995). These characters are portrayed to think and feel like we as readers do and react to their situations in the same way that most of us would. Such attributes are what give the characters life and allow us to relate to their decisions.
after by his sister Mrs. Joe as both of his parents had died and he
Charles Dickens uses satire in his novel Hard Times as he attempts to bring to light social issues such as class division, education, and industrialization in nineteen-century English society. Hard Times was originally published in weekly segments in Dickens’ magazine, Household Words, from April 1854 to August 1854 (Cody 1). In order to better fit into the Libraries at the time, Charles Dickens divided Hard Times into three books: Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering. Each book with its own theme, guides us through the lives of the characters living in the fictional city Dickens calls, “Coketown.”
Charles Dickens believes that the key to a quality education is the inclusion of creativity and imagination in the structure of learning. At the time of writing the novel Hard Times, Dickens was extremely dissatisfied with the education system in place in Victorian England. He believed that education was a big part of a person’s life and contributed to their outcome as human being in society. The education at the time severely emphasized utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is when actions are considered good and right if they benefit a majority. The concept of utilitarianism, eliminates the need for individuality and creates anonymity. Throughout his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens shows the inadequacy of an approach to education, as well as life, that only pays attention to facts and ignores the importance of the imagination and the human heart.
While the novel does act as a social commentary on the disparaging treatment of the poor in England, Dickens fails to do more than comment on the situation. The fact that the social classes are fighting for survival against one another provides for the establishment of a further embedded social caste system of us against them. The very poor in David Copperfield, are at times overlooked by even the middle class characters in the novel. While some of the middle class characters do look out for a few of the lower class characters, these actions are taken as a result of their need to feel needed by others. My paper will examine the desire for the author to write a social commentary on class inequality, survival, and the search for happiness at all costs in David Copperfield.