Volume 1

Table of Contents

Charles Dickens

• A short bio

• Hard Times

• Themes

• Coke Town

A short bio

Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. During his lifetime, his works enjoyed unprecedented popularity. He is now considered a literary genius because he created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. Dickens was born in 1812  in Portsmouth. His father, was a naval clerk who dreamed of becoming rich and his mother, aspired to be a teacher and school director. But the family’s financial situation had grown worse because John Dickens used to spend too much money. Consequently, John was sent to prison for debt in 1824, when Charles was just 12 years old.

After his father’s imprisonment, Charles Dickens left school to work in a factory. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children’s rights, education, and other social reforms.

Dickens’s literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humor, satire, and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.

Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age.

His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted, and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction.

Hard Times – For These Times (commonly known as Hard Times) is the tenth novel by Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirises the social and economic conditions of the era. Hard Times is unusual in several ways. It is the shortest of Dickens’ novels, only 37 chapters. Also, Hard Times has neither a preface nor illustrations. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London. Instead the story is set in the fictitious  Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though smaller. Coketown may be partially based on 19th-century Preston.

Themes

Dickens wished to educate readers about the working conditions of some of the factories in the industrial towns  to “strike the heaviest blow in my power”, and as well to confront the assumption that prosperity runs parallel to morality. This notion he systematically deconstructed in through his portrayal of the moral monsters, Mr. Bounderby and James Harthouse. Dickens also believed in the importance of the imagination, and that people’s lives should not be reduced to a collection of material facts and statistics. The description of the circus, which he describes as caring so “little for Plain Fact”, is an example of this. One of Dickens’s reasons for writing Hard Times was that sales of his weekly periodical were low, and it was hoped the novel’s publication in instalments would boost circulation – as indeed proved to be the case. Since publication it has received a mixed response from critics.

Coke Town

We are introduced properly to Coketown, the major setting of this excellent Dickensian novel, in Chapter 5 of Book 1. It is described in a way that forces us to see the link between Mr. Gradgrind’s educational and utilitarian philosophy and Bounderby’s approach to work, as it is a triumph of fact.

Coketown is a brutal, uncompromising and fearful place. It is a town defined by its work and industrialisation, emphasised by the “interminable serpents” that endlessly coil upwards and also the monotonous nature of that work that is necessary to keep the fortunes of characters like Mr. Bounderby increasing.

Coketown is therefore essentially a symbol of the negative aspects of industrialisation and the mechanisation of the human soul. The description of Coketown makes it clear that it is not a place of enjoyment or pleasure , the only thing it encourages is dull, repetitive and endless labour. Dickens wrote this novel as a protest against industrialisation and how it was turning humans into machines, denying their creativity and imagination.  With the creation of this imaginary town Dickens show us this transformation in process: the workers are defined as “Hands”  – they are named only for the work they are able to do, and not for their individuality.

The End