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How Did Charles Dickens Face During The Industrial Revolution

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In the novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens highlights the exploitation, oppression, and desperation experienced during the start of the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the novel, the reader gets a balanced view of how this time of transition affects individuals no matter their gender or economic status. The characters within the novel face internal conflicts, unacceptable working and living conditions, and all around “hard times”. The first problem faced in industrial society in the story is the opposition between fact and fancy. In the time of the industrial revolution many individuals looked at life with a utilitarian mindset. This meaning that nothing was left to the imagination, but rather all explanations stemmed from logic and fact. As stated in the book “you can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” (Dickens ,9) By looking at the world with a utilitarian view, individuals became self-serving or motivated only by the actions that would produce the most pleasure for himself or herself. The character that illustrates this characteristic perfectly is Tom Gradgrind. Throughout the novel, Mr. Gradgrind commits every …show more content…

The obsession with facts and lack of emotion paired with the emphasis on production solidified the reason that the working class was referred to as the “hands”. The working society is described in the novel as, “the subject of a nameless, horrible dread, a mortal fear of one particular shape with everything took. Whatsoever he looked at, grew into that form sooner or later. The object of his miserable existence was to prevent its recognition by any one among the various people he encountered. Hopeless labor.” (Charles Dickens) The workers had the mindset that if they wanted to survive the mechanical era, they had to become

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During the late 18th through the19th century, the industrial revolution created many changes in regards to labor. Many people of the working class were affected positively in the way of new jobs, better quality products, and quality of life (Doc3, Doc4, Doc 5). While others lost family or experienced a decrease in the quality of life (Doc1, Doc2, Doc7). Some workers soon became dependent on technological machinery (Doc 6, Doc 8, Doc 9). Many workers lives during The Industrial Revolution were changed for the positive as many people such as children had a chance to enrich their lives because they were given a purpose (Doc 3).

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Mr. Jaggers notes Pip’s clothes as “working” and that he needs “new clothes” (Dickens 141). Pip’s working clothes marks him as a member of a lower class society. By replacing his old clothes, Pip isolates himself from his old society. With Pip’s moral degradation from isolating himself from his old society, Dickens shows the regressive effects of isolation from society. With the removal from one’s society, he loses the support network the society provided along with teachings from that society.

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Workers in industrial factories were treated harshly. They suffered physically and mentally, as they were born into a position of working young without a steady supply of food. According to Flora Tristan’s journal, workers had more needs than just food. Workers lived miserably, with a lack of “clothing, bed, furniture, fuel… they live suspended between an insufficiency of food, and an excess of strong drink” (Document 4). Without basic necessities, a fulfilling life was nearly impossible.

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For Instance, one of his best novel was “A Christmas Carol”, which was written in a third person narrator, also he explains with precision why the industrial revolution turned off the sense of humanity of some people in Great Britain. Dickens, was one of the authors that were affected by the industrial revolution in good way, because this event helped him as an inspiration to his work and helped him think about his moral values. He used this period in his novel to recreate and portrait the attitude of rich people towards others with necessities. So his goal was to make others think about their moral values again. To take case in point, this novel is about a man called Ebenezer Scrooge, that was a selfish and self-centered person.

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The working conditions were hazardous and many men, women, and children died from accidents that would happen with the machinery. “If the English worker died of starvation or was injured by accident in the mills, it mattered not to the employer, for he was not legally liable, and the worker’s place could be supplied from among the thousands ready to work for even a bare subsistence.” Men and women would have to work hard for long hours and receive only a low wage. Adult men were paid more than women or children, but their wages were still not enough to support a

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Not only did families actively send their children to work in factories, but orphanages would also “apprentice” children in factories in order for them to learn a particular trade (). However, the reality of child labor during the Industrial Revolution is disturbing. Children worked twelve hour shifts amid dangerous high-powered machines and were often mistreated with “punishments” (). Elizabeth Barrett Browning specifically addresses this oppression of the children of the Industrial Revolution who were forced to work in these terrible conditions in her poem “The Cry of the Children.” In this poem, Browning attempts to exhibit the perspective of the children working in the factories by portraying what could be their inner dialogue.

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in Greenblatt 1018). The most remarkable reactions to contemporary industrial society came in the Condition of England novels of the 1840s and early 1850s. Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others, tried to stimulate social reform through their depiction of social problems. Dickens’ Hard Times and Gaskell’s North and South both include an industrious town in which, using the words of Friedrich Engels; “barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other” (25) are an everyday event. Remarkably, both novels feature an intolerant masculine character; mill owner John Thornton in North and South and teacher Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, respectively.

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In Hard Times, Charles Dickens focuses on the rise of women and men over time during this period. One thing I learned in the past was that women were said to be pretty much “housewives” their duties were at home and to do the motherly and wife duties, the normal stereotypes in the past. Charles Dickens goes along with the time he was writing and gives the women a bit of a higher position on the spectrum. I would say that Dickens aims for a better perspective on women by portraying them to be able to have opinions of things, giving them more freedom of what they do and what they believe. Dickens makes sure to incorporate both woman from Queen Victoria’s time and also how femininity in the Victorian era was to show a contrast between them.

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Hard Times, written by Charles Dickens, in the mid 19th century tells a story of a man who raises his son and daughter under utilitarian ideals, which was an unconventional way of educating children at the time, especially for young girls. The societal restrictions and expectations of women at this time influenced Dickens’ opinions of female education. He believed women should be educated, however, without rigorous, serious academics. Hard Times, reflects the time in which Dickens’ lived and presents his own stance as he criticizes the practice of educating women with a utilitarian approach, by presenting two characters, Sissy Jupe and Louisa Gradgrind, the first of whom thrives when placed in a system that follows more traditional Victorian ideals while the latter is left feeling alienated and resentful following a utilitarian

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Consequently, from some of the problems of this era, ranged from brutal labor conditions and extensive poverty to the issue of women’s place in the world; authors were motivated to write every one with his unique writing style form. Rather, than turning inside or escaping into fantasy, novelists chose to directly address the persistent social problems of the day. The novels I have chosen for this essay are “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens, “Vanity Fair” By William Makepeace Thackeray and “The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins. In retrospect, during the Victorian era Charles Dickens writing style was compared as the father of all science fiction.

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Factory life was hard, especially on children who were hired because they could be paid less than their adult counterparts: “Their smaller size made children useful for certain tasks, such as mending broken threads or climbing on machinery to extract something impeding its operation.” From Dickens’ time spent working in a factory at a young age, it is easy to see where he got his ideas for descriptions of the factories and the people who worked there. Hard Times, shows the growing gap between the poor, the middle, and upper classes with descriptions of the working and living conditions of the poor compared to their richer counterparts. Dickens’ childhood trauma of working in the factories as a child can be read throughout Hard Times in the descriptions of the factory and

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Many admitted to being beaten when they were late as children, having only an hour off at noon to eat, and children had to work in the poor and often dangerous conditions. In the same interviews presented to Parliament, a worker reported working from six in the morning until eight at night, an average of fourteen hours per day for mere cents, and that was during the ‘normal’ production months. Long hours, low wages, and child labor were nothing new to the poor, but the conditions still took a toll on families. Hours and hours went into work, which left little time for a family to spend time with one another, and children not able to learn skills from their parents once the industrialization of the common world came into play, not only in Britain but also on a worldwide scale.

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Even before the Industrial Revolution started, people worked extra hard to keep themselves going. Farmers who tended the land lived simple but difficult lives, working day and night with their own handmade tools, nourished by their own food, and protected by clothes made on their own (Ellis 196). This hard work allowed rural villagers to sustain themselves while living an average life, but the villages they lived in soon grew to become large towns and cities, and the conditions that the working class then had to face got a little out of hand. An average factory day consisted of fourteen hours of tedious and sometimes painful work, with just one hour at midday for a short rest. Those who wished to rest outside of break time would be beaten, causing everyone else in the factory to work in fear (“Sadler”).

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(The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica) During the 19th century, industrialization brought an abundance of goods produced by machines in factories. For the high and middle class citizens, this new found technology was used to their advantage and improved their standards of life. However, for the working people and poor, it was quite the opposite. Factories and machines caused the workers to be placed in danger on a daily basis. If the workers hastened because of the danger, or did get hurt, they were easily replaced, but because of their lack of skills, they didn’t have much luck finding another job.

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THE OTHER SOCIAL PURPOSE The second social purpose of Hard Times is more difficult to define. It seems to be concerned with a radical criticism of the very structure of society. Dickens is opposed to the oppression of the poor and of the workers by the rich. But this attitude is partly obscured by his wish to attack, simultaneously, a particular school of economic thinkers, so that his conclusions in that direction remain indistinct.

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