Charles Dickens' Hard Times Novel

The description also speaks to our testify age and shows that deuce found in the industrialized metropolis problems we encounter today, problems with pollution and dehumanization. Coketown is a "town of machinery and t completely chimneys, stunned of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a ghastly canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast slews of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of trouble madness" (18). The streets atomic number 18 seen as all the same, and the people were all alike as well. Every years is the same as the last, and life never changes. The sameness of the brick on the buildings is carried through in others ways so that the observer cannot tell from the outside what persona a building serves, whether it is a school or a jail or an infirmary.

In this novel, social class is important, as it was in England in the last century, and class is used as a defining issue to determine not just what place people occupy now but what possibilities are and are not open to them. Members of the working class are members of the working class forever for the most p art, though Dickens shows the belief that this situation could be changed with education. The member

s of the upper class, such as the industrialists in the novel, dumbfound a different view, seeing the working class as an exploitable mass that is necessary and that has to be maintained for the support of industry.

The moving-picture show Dickens creates of education in England at the time is unmatched showing that it has been structured to keep the lower class in its place, offering lone(prenominal) as much as noesis as the worker needs to do his job and no more. The head of the school is Mr.

Gradgrind, and he has particular antipathy toward any(prenominal)thing that he believes excites the imagination. He is described as a man of realities, a man of fact and calculation, and he starts the novel with a confabulate for facts and noting but facts:

Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder" (40).

Teach these boys and girls aught but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. full treatment nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only fashion model the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them (1).

The society pictured by Dickens in this novel is a society that is strangling itself in pollution, inter-class tensions, and greed. Coketown is only one town, but it is representative of the economic structure of England at the time and shows how the Industrial Revolution had left in its waken a changed system that benefited a few and enslaved the many. The novel speaks to the States today, a
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