Question

How did charles dickens novel depicts the terrible conditions of industrialization?

Answer 1

In Hard Times Dickens sharply criticizes the poor living conditions of the working class in industrial towns. He depicts life in a fictive industrial town Coketown as a symbol for a typical industrial town in Northern England of that time. It is a place full of exploitation, desperation and oppression. Soot and ash is all over the town; it is a dirty and suffocating place. The workers have low wages and work long hours. The work begins before sunrise, the production is important and there is no regard for the rights and suffering of the low class. Children in school are taught according to Utilitarianism philosophy – they should accept and live according to facts and facts alone, they are not allowed to fantasize or think for themselves. In Coketown, machines cause great pollution. The industrial workers have no chance of progress in life. The upper-middle class ignores their misery (Bounderby) and denies imagination and creativity (Gradgrind). Utilitarianism exerts mechanization of society and human mind. The character of Sissy Jupe represents the personification of fact vs. fancy conflict, she tries hard to learn facts, but is unable to, she freely thinks and imagines. She is the most stable character because she succeeds to find balance between the two. Dickens points out the flaws and limitation of the newly created industrial society and the necessity of social reform.

Answer 2

Charles Dickens was the first English novelist of the Victorian era. He inscribed about the awful effects of industrialization on people's lives and characters. His novel Hard Times and Oliver Twist became world-renowned,

(i) Hard Times: His novel Hard Times (1854) describes Cocktail, a fictional industrial city, which is a serious place filled with machinery, smoking fireworks, rivers polluted, and purple buildings are understood. Here workers are known as 'Hands', as if they had no identity other than the machines operators. Dickens not only criticized the greed of profits but also criticized those ideas which would make humans down to simple tools of production.

(ii) Oliver Twist: In other novels, Dickens focused on the terrible conditions of the city. Life Under Industrial Capitalism His Oliver Twist (1838) is the story of a poor orphan who lived in the world of small criminals and beggars. Bring to a brutal workhouse, Oliver was eventually adopted by a rich man and later left happily.