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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His manifesto begins with discussing how, “In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders.” Marx viewed the epoch that he lived in as one of two distinct and hostile classes, the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. He stated that “the bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” Marx’s discussed that the proletariat was viewed as a “commodity, like every other article of commerce.” The Bourgeoisie grew in power, viewing the proletariat as just another piece of machinery in the factories, and were becoming were more concerned with making money then the well beings of their factory workers. Marx saw that the bourgeoisie were now locked in the same class struggle with the proletariat in the nineteenth century, that they had previously struggled with, and came out victorious, in the late eighteenth century over the