Paper 1 Set during the Industrial Revolution in the commercial backdrop of Coketown, England, ‘Hard Times’by Charles Dickens highlights the harsh conditions of industrial society, mainly the intensified gap between the rich and the poor, in other words the middle and working classes, and the factory owners’ exploitation of the workers due to their economic self-interest. By depicting the miserable conditions of the working class to a great extent, Dickens criticizes the effects of industrial society and could be advocating radical socialist and revolutionary ideas. ‘Hard Times’should not be published as its critique of industrial society resonates with the ideas promoted in Marx’s‘The Communist Manifesto’in the way in which industrial society benefits only the rich and oppresses the poor, rich factory owners exploit their workers, and how members of the lower class cannot overcome poverty. In the novel, industrialization exacerbates the socio-economic conditions of Coketown as it benefits only the rich middle class and oppresses the poor. Industrial society has created a miserable environment that the poor are subjected to live in. Coketown is depicted as being “a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled… and vast piles 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 melancholy madness” (Dickens, 36). The repugnant depiction of Coketown reveals what Dickens’ considers to be the literal effects of industrialization on the physical environment. The ‘serpents of smoke’ from the chimneys not only illustrate the excessive pollution caused by industrialization, but also provide an ominous depiction of society. The connotation of ‘serpents’ as being something that is corruptive suggests that the ‘serpents of smoke’ is a metaphor of the moral corruption of society 1
caused by industrialization. The polluted environment could therefore be a sympathetic background reflecting the polluted and corrupted morality of its inhabitants, referring to the factory owners’ oppression of their workers. Stephen Blackpool, a worker at Josiah Bounderby’s factory, explains the workers’ poor living conditions as well as their miserable situation, “look round town – so rich as ‘tis – and see the numbers o’ people as has been broughten into bein’ heer, fur to weave, an’ to card, an’ to piece out a livin’, aw the same one way, somehows, ‘twixt their cradles and their graves. Look how we live, an’ where we live, an’ in what numers, an’ by what chances, and wi’ what sameness; and look how the mills is awlus a-going, and how they never works us no nigher to onny dis’ant object – ‘ceptin awlus Death. Look how you considers
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