· 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

Stephen shows how, despite the destructive nature of industry, individuality amongst the 'Hands' can be achieved with a struggle. Stephen does not symbolise the workers for in fact they ostracize him, this is supported further by the fact that he has survived unaltered by the lifestyle of the working-class, 'an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death' but in fact due to his domestic relations. Dickens uses Stephen to expose the inadequacies of life from the perspective of one of the many 'Hands'; for example, how much easier the 'great folk' can achieve a divorce, compared to Stephen's futile attempts to 'ever getting unchained' from his alcoholic, adulterous wife - this evokes great sympathy amongst the readers for Stephen and also for Rachael, his devoted lover, due to their personal dilemma. Once more Dickens avoids total condemnation, this time of the upper-classes, as Stephen does not go on to underline the disparities in the class system or the distribution of wealth, instead he says 'fair faw 'em a'! I wishes 'em no hurt!' the irony being that ultimately Stephen falls to his death down a coal shaft (owned by a member of the 'great folk'), deemed by the 'inspector' to not require 'boxing-in'. Stephen is destroyed by industrialisation; yet he is the one of the novel's few examples of a sympathetic and individual person, prepared to disagree with popular opinion, yet eventually destroyed by what he has (perhaps not ardently enough - from a critical perspective - because he is still highly sanitized) disagreed with. This industrialisation is the focus of life in Coketown and is the cause of much of Dickens's social indignation, especially due to its dehumanising nature.

The closest that Dickens comes to direct criticism of the mill-owners is in Book 2, Chapter 1 when he describes 'Coketown...shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun's rays...a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross light in it that showed nothing but masses and darkness'. Within this bleak description, highlighted with the use of light and dark imagery, Dickens focuses his attentions upon the egotistical mill-owners. He satirises their self-interest, using an ironic tone when describing how amazing it was that Coketown, and the mill-owners, 'had borne so many shocks...Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made'. Dickens's irony continues as he describes how the mill-owners claimed that 'they were ruined... they were ruined when...inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery'. Dickens emphasizes the self-interest of the mill-owners, attacking their greed and if one was 'not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts - he was sure to come out with the awful menace that he would 'sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic''. Dickens is not only attacking the mill-owners, he is also criticising the tende

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Approximate Word count = 2052
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)