Charles Dickens Research Paper

Charles Dickens, Hard Time Paper Assignment The Industrial Revolution was a time period of great change across the globe and without it the world could not be where it as at today. In the novel Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, he analyzes society of Mid-19th century Victorian England during the Industrial Revolution and looks at the changes industrialization brought with it. The Industrial Revolution was the transition a new manufacturing process and where rural societies of Europe became industrialized. It began in Britain in the 18th century when James Watt created his version of a steam engine which transformed the manufacturing world. Industrialization brought about great change in the 18th and 19th century, but it came at the costs of

The Industrial Revolution did have great costs but some would argue that the costs were worth all the great mechanical advances and processes that also came with industrialization. It is impossible to know where we would be if this wave of change in the way people lived and worked did not occur but we can know the negatives that could have been avoided. Brought with the Industrial Revolution was a change in the way people thought because industrialization encouraged people to be more logical and to act in their own self-interest. For the most part, people in this time period usually thought about one thing, which is how a situation can work out best for them. A perfect example of this is in Charles Dickens book, Hard Times, when Bitzer says, “I am going to take young Mr. Tom back to Coketown in order to deliver him to Mr. Bounderby. Sir, I have no doubt whatever that Mr. Bounderby will then promote me to young Mr. Tom’s

Working class people in this era perform the same task every day and must follow a strict time schedule and a lot of rules. This made people very simple and one dimensional as seen from this passage Hard Times, “It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the pavement, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counter the counterpart of the last and the next” (Dickens 29). Every common person in Coketown is viewed as identical because they all stick to the same strict schedule and live the exact same way to the point that it is hard to even see them as people and not machines, who perform the same function over and over again. This was one of the biggest social costs of industrialization because it got rid of the freedom of originality and action that makes us human. Another rule from the rule book of the Berlin factory states, “Workers arriving 2 minutes late shall loose half of an hour’s wages; whoever is more than two minutes late may not start work until after the next break, or at least shall lose his wages until then” (“Rules of