Hard Times Literary Essay

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.”

Much like the sowing of seeds in a garden, Dickens uses Book the First: Sowing, to plant the characters and storyline of Hard Times. First, we are introduced to the industrialized Capitalist city of Coketown (Dickens 19). Dickens describes Coketown as one that “lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays” (203). Coketown is dominated by a society of ruthless, materialistic, rich capitalists. In Book the First: Sowing, we are introduced to the main characters, the first of which is Thomas Gradgrind (5).

Mr. Gradgrind was a prominent school head that believed in “realities, facts, and calculations.” He is described as a cold-hearted man that strictly forbids the fostering of imagination and emotion, especially in his two children: Tom and Louisa (Dickens 5). Mr. Gradgrind raises his children in Coketown, a Capitalistic industrial town that Dickens calls, a waste-yard with “litter of barrels and old iron, the shining heaps of coals, the ashes everywhere, shrouded in a veil of mist and rain” (128). In this town that seems to be impenetrable to the sun’s rays, his children grow up lacking social connections, mor...

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...ing father and of her husband. Louisa seems to be the only one to get a seemingly happy ending as she is loved by Sissy’s children.

Charles Dickens used the themes sowing, reaping, and garnering in his fiction to criticize the social, moral, and economic abuses in his era. In his novel, Hard Times, Dickens provides a clear illustration of the English class system by examining the lives and motivations of both the rich and the poor. The characters from both ends of society are used by Dickens to show how the class system works, and through his overt social criticism, and satire, Dickens ultimately concludes that this system is unjust and unfair to the poor.

Works Cited

Cody, David. "Dickens: A Brief Biography." Dickens: A Brief Biography. The Victorian Web,

2004. Web. 2 Nov. 2013.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishing, 1854. Print.