CHARLES DICKENS: HARD TIMES
11(b) Select two episodes and show how far and in what ways they illustrate Dickens’s condemnation of Victorian England.· Explore and explain your own views of Dickens’s presentation of human evils; · Look closely at the production of emotional propaganda; · Comment on the place of relevant issues such as the Industrial Revolution. 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
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Words Morley, Inconvenient Troublesome, Stephen Blackpool, Stephen Rachael, Household Words, Times Coketown, Hard Times, Peel Britain, Carlyle Britain, Carl Marx, hard times, red brick, dickens comes direct, trampling pressing death, family shouldering, bird cage, trampling pressing, shouldering trampling, unnatural family, appalling conditions, family shouldering trampling, comes direct criticism, closest dickens, shouldering trampling pressing, household words,
Approximate Word count = 2052
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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