CHARLES DICKENS

Hard times by Charles dickens

Hard times by Charles dickens

Introduction

Hard Times is essentially a didactic satire upon the Victorian social, industrial and educational systems, like Charles Kingsley and Elizabeth Gaskell before him Charles Dickens ponders the "condition of England". Unlike some of his contemporaries Dickens never directly criticises mill-owners, so as to keep his middle-class audience, and this is sometimes highlighted as a limitation of Hard Times. Dickens chooses to take the easy route, by bowing to the pressure to not appear supportive of working-class revolutionary behaviour and to not antagonise mill-owners.

However, Hard Times was published in instalments in Dickens's magazine Household Words, by publishing his book in this environment it gains more significance due to the fact that it is taken it context, when surrounded by other fictional and non-fictional works and the two worlds begin to merge. This allows Dickens to avoid blatant attacks upon industry, whilst enhancing the framework of his message by accompanying it with more descriptive and damning reports and accounts.

Discussion

Though Dickens never depicts the horrific scenes of the factories and the dangers of the mills run by self-interested owners he originally did have a section of the novel devoted to it. This section told of Rachael's sister and how she had been mutilated by poorly guarded machinery in a mill. This speech held massive similarities with an article by Henry Morley, published alongside Hard Times in Household Words, Morley wrote: "There are many ways of dying. Perhaps it is not good when a factory girl, who has not the whole spirit of play spun out of her for want of meadows, gambols upon balls of wool, a little too near the exposed machinery that is to work it up, and is immediately seized, and punished by the merciless machine that digs its shaft into her pinafore and hoists her up, tears out her left arm at the shoulder joint, breaks her right arm, and beats her head'. However, by first removing the footnote linking the article and the speech, and then by removing the speech all together Dickens confirmed that he was not prepared to follow through his condemnation of the mill-owners.

In early society and presently, the indifference and unfairness to women exists among us in different ways. Men believe that they are superior to the female. This injustice probably stems from Biblical times. Eve was created from Adam's rib. They were sent out of the Garden of Eden, when they committed sin. Adam had to toil the ground to feed his family. Eve had to conceive and born children that was her job. This early model of mans domination over woman sets the stage for a long-standing belief that continues to this day.

A startling example of this way of thinking is Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwin theorizes that women are naturally inferior to men because of their role in reproduction (Schechner 20). A woman's natural role is to born and cares for children, while man's natural role is to support and protect his ...