Charles Dickens' Hard Times
When we think of hard times in today’s world, our thoughts might consist of the number of days before we get paid, an argument with our spouse, or simply that our car is not operating so great these days. Most people today can not begin to imagine what hard times were like during the Industrial Revolution. In nineteenth century England, hard times to the factory workers may have consisted of watching one’s nine-year-old child tied to a machine in the mill for fourteen hours a day. It is no wonder why the writers of this period protested society through the voices of their writings. One of the greatest of these writers was Charles Dickens, who made his voice of protest through a literary masterpiece known as Hard Times. There are many aspects of Hard Times, and Dickens manages to capture what life was like for all of the social classes of his day through each individual character with his protests against the horrible ways in which people were treating one another in the times that truly were hard.
Dickens put a great deal of thought and research into all of his works, just as he did in Hard Times. As one writer states, “He visited Preston to get material for the industrial and trade-union aspects of the novel; a few weeks latter he began to collect circus slang” (Collins 29). He latter obtained the Educational Board’s series of questions for the examination of teachers in schools. On April 1, 1854, Hard Times appeared in a weekly journal, Household Words, which Dickens edited.
Some people believe that Dickens “was determined to create a means where he could communicate his ideas on social reform so in 1850 he began editing Household Words” (Ford 16). One author states that “by 1851 the twenty-four page Household Words was selling 40,000 copies a week” (Gray 2). The weekly journal included articles on politics, science and history. To increase the number of people willing to buy Household Words, it also contained short stories and humorous pieces. Dickens also used the journal to serialize novels that were concerned with social issues such as Hard Times.
The scene is a factory driven English town known as Coketown. The novel begins in a classroom where we meet Mr. Gradgrind, a wealthy parliament member, to whom the school belongs.
Dickens used his great talent by describing the city London were he mostly spent his time. By doing this Dickens permits readers to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of the aged city, London. This ability to show the readers how it was then, how ...
Dickens as a well-known newspaper reporter wrote his first books which were mostly a work of sketches or short stories. When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol he did it mostly because of the decline of traditions and religion around the holid...
Another man - we are not told who the man is or why he is present, are
Mr. Bounderby is a factory and bank owner in Coketown, the industrial town in which the novel is set. He claims that he came from nothing to riches and has no problem exclaiming the trials and hard times that he went through to get to where he is now. While the people who hear these stories have no reason to doubt Mr. Bounderby, they later learn that he was actually making up all of these stories of his grueling childhood and upbringing. This is very significant because if the comparison is made between Bounderby and the industrial revolution, there are many aspects that are in fact very comparable. It seems that Bounde...
A significant English novelist, Charles Dickens was born during the Victorian-English era on February 7, 1812 in Landport, now part of Portsmouth, England. He was the second child and the eldest son of eight children to John Dickens and Elizabeth Dickens. Theatrical and brilliant, his mother, Elizabeth Dickens, was a storyteller and an impersonator. On the other hand, Dickens’s father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. John Dickens was an unselfish, welcoming, and loved to live a high quality life, even though he could not often afford it. He put his family through continuous insatiability because of financial debt. This eventually resulted in him being sent to prison, “His wife and children, with the exception of Charles, who was put to work at Warren's Blacking Factory significant novelist, joined him in the Marshalsea Prison” (Victorian Web). Later after his release form prison, he retired form the Navy Pay Office and worked as a reporter. One can conclude that these problematical events in his early childhood made his life arduous because he had to pay of his father’s financial debt, but also he had to maintain a well education to become who he wanted to be.
12. Oldham, R. (2000) Charles Dickens’ Hard Times: Romantic Tragedy of Proletariat Propaganda [Online]. Available: http://www.pillowrock.com [Accessed: 25th April 2005].
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Monod. A Norton Critical Edition. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001. 5-222
If there is one common thread between his fictional and non-fictional writing, it is a deep obsession for crime and law. As Collins suggests, Dickens's "concern for crime was . . . more persistent and more serious than most men's" (1). He then adds that crime during the Victorian age, like today, "was an inescapable social problem" and that "Dickens is conspicuous among great novelists for his passion for dramatizing and commenting ...
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.
Swisher, Clarice, Ed. “Charles Dickens: A Biography.” Readings on Charles Dickens. San Diego, Greenhaven Press, 1998. Print. 21 March 2014.
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.”
Dickens lived a life full of events that would later influence his novels. Dickens grew up during a time of change for Great Britain. By the time he was born in 1812, the Industrial Revolution was in full force. Dickens grew up as a normal middle-class child in Portsmouth, Great Britain. It was around the age of twelve that his life took a drastic turn. Dickens was still a child when his father was imprisoned for debt. Families, at this time, lived with the father in prison. Charles did not live in prison, though. Instead, he was sent to live alone and become a laborer at Warren’s Blacking Facto...
Hobsbaum, Philip. A Reader’s Guide to Charles Dickens. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.
In the novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens connives a theme of utilitarianism, along with education and industrialization. Utilitarianism is the belief that something is morally right if it helps a majority of people. It is a principle involving nothing but facts and leaves no room for creativity or imagination. Dickens provides symbolic examples of this utilitarianism in Hard Times by using Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, one of the main characters in the book, who has a hard belief in utilitarianism. Thomas Gradgrind is so into his philosophy of rationality and facts that he has forced this belief into his children’s and as well as his young students. Mr. Josiah Bounderby, Thomas Gradgrind’s best friend, also studies utilitarianism, but he was more interested in power and money than in facts. Dickens uses Cecelia Jupe, daughter of a circus clown, who is the complete opposite of Thomas Gradgrind to provide a great contrast of a utilitarian belief.