Question

Why did Charles Dickens write about the terrible effects of industrialisation on people’s lives

and characters'? Give one reason.

Answer 1

(i) Charles Dickens wrote about the terrible effects of industrialization on people's lives and characters. (ii) His novel 'Hard Times' describes Coketown, a fictitious industrial town, as a grim place full of machinery, smoking chimneys, rivers polluted purple and buildings that all looked the same. (iii) Here workers are known as 'Hands' as they had no identity other than as operators of machines. (iv) Dickens criticized not just the greed for profits but also the ideas that reduced human beings into simple instruments of production.