This essay deals with the novel Hard Times written by Charles Dickens and the industrialization in that time. My purpose in this essay is to analyze the conditions of life in England’s industrial cities examining the novel. The author concentrates on the deforming and inhuman aspect of this new process. It is known that during the nineteenth century, with the Victorian age there is in England an overzealous adoption of industrialization. This causes a changing in the life of human beings, since they are threatened to turn into machines and that means they cannot develop more emotions and imaginations. The text offers an account of the most important conflict in that society, between capitalists and workers. There is a new class structure based on industry and commerce, with a society that is entirely urban. When using a Marxist approach to analyze this work we must know that the bourgeoisie is the upper or ruling class of a society. They have the power to rule and control over the “base”, because of this they will force their ideology on the proletariat, or working class. The bourgeoisie are the factory owners and operators in business for making a profit, but in order to gain that profit they use the cheap labor of the proletariat. All the people in the Victorian age are stuck in this life and they lead a monotonous, uniform existence where pleasure and amusement are not contemplate, with the consequences that their fantasies and feelings are dulled and they end to have mechanical behavior too. People are replaced by machines, now the machines have the main role into society. “For early Victorian thinkers, steam engines and living bodies followed similar principles, now the machines appeared as a vital body,exhibiting form…
…rnaces below”(Dickens,54). In one scene Louisa is described while gazing at the Coketown mills while her father offer her to marry with Mr.Bounderby and she replied “there sees to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes. Fire bursts out, father! ”(). According to the article “Melancholy Mad Elephants: Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times”, some critics view the machine’s hidden, bursting fire as an allusion to Louisa’s neglected passion.
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Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Epub book.
Fielding, K.J. & Smith, Anne. Hard Times and the Factory Controversy: Dickens vs Harriet Martineau. California: University Press, 2011.
Siroone, Tamara. “Melancholy Mad Elephants”: Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times. Indiana: University Press.
Jackson, Leonard. The Demateriaisation of Karl Marx. New York: Longman Press, 1994.
