Coursework On Hard Times

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Coursework On Hard Times

Title: How does Dickens present the education system in Hard Times?

How does this reflect life in Coketown?

Hard Times reveals Dickens' increased interest in class issues and

social observations. Dickens was extremely concerned with the

miserable lives of the poor and working classes in the England of his

day, and Hard Times is one of several of his novels that address these

social problems directly. On hearing the name, Hard times, an

imagination of people going through a difficult and hard way of life

is revealed. This novel also reminds us of the hard times in the

Victorian Times when children did not go to school; when education was

varied according to social class- factory like schools for the poor

and private tutors for the rich. Those that were able to have the

so-called education suffered in the process. They were forced to learn

a lot by heart because everything was formal and mechanical. They were

put through a factory-like process, hoping to produce children that

were possessed of nothing but facts. Not even a sense of fancy and

imagination. They were educated to get the basics of life because they

were going to be pushed into the outside world at a very young age of

12 and above or even below. At the end of the day, the education was

worthless because most of the children died in the workhouse.

Dickens used Hard Times to criticise the society for failing so many

of its children. Dickens argues against a mode of factory style,

grad-grinding production that exterminates the fun out of life. He

believes that education should not be a thing of going through volumes

of head-breaking questions and being put through an immense variety of

paces. Hard Times not only suggests that fancy is as important as

fact, but it continually calls into question the difference between

fact and fancy. Dickens suggests that what constitutes so-called fact

is a matter of perspective or opinion.

The lack of education for children and factory like process of

education has resulted to 'vast piles of building full of windows

where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long' in Coketown.

Coketown is portrayed in Hard Times as an industrial town with

polluted atmosphere and place where people have the same lifestyle.

Metaphorically, Coketown means carbon town. In science the word coke

is another name for carbon. Dickens has described it as

'a town of machinery and tall chimney, out of which interminable

serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got

uncoiled.'

In the above quote, the word 'smoke' is the carbon produced from the

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