Understanding "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens

Understanding "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens

  • Submitted By: gentile1
  • Date Submitted: 12/17/2009 10:54 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1548
  • Page: 7
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Understanding Hard Times

Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, is a portrayal of life and society during the British Industrial Revolution. Charles Dickens describes in great detail how the Industrial Revolution had changed the lives of the people of that era, by demonstrating its effects on several fictional characters. In Hard Times, Dickens gives his vision of how Utilitarianism affected factory life, by describing labor relations, and how it affected education, by portraying a school in which free thought and voice were tyrannically suppressed. In a factory, Utilitarianism views the workers as units of labor, "Hands" from whom the maximum work must be extracted at the minimum cost. In a Utilitarian school, students are viewed as "Vessels" to be filled with the maximum number of facts at the minimum expense. The same powerful man might own both the mill and the school, and thus both became viewed as nothing more than business enterprises. The pupils presented in the novel attend a school know as “model school”. From early childhood the students are taught to disregard feelings and deep thought for facts and numbers. This apparent disregard for all things poetic, that is to say imagination and aesthetic appreciation seems to have struck Dickens with a certain morbid fascination. One can almost hear his barley suppressed horror at the description of the individuals for whom this philosophy of Utilitarianism is a guiding factor. It is possible that Charles Dickens wrote a certain measure of autobiography into this work, and that the characters, events, and locations, although satirical, correspond to actual people and objects in a very real way. “…But especially Hard Times should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions” (Forester, pg. 410). Understanding the themes of Hard Times, despite having been written for a very specific period of English history, is still applicable today, and begins with an appreciation of the events...

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