Coketown

Dickens uses the needs and wants for people to get an image in their head about what life was really like before the French revolution. "Cold, dirt,

In Book the First: Sowing, Dickens introduces the destructiveness of the wrong kind of education on innocent minds. The schoolmaster Mr. Gradgrind refuses to face reality by insisting on addressing Sissy Jupe by her formal name and changing Mr. Jupe’s occupation to one less involved with “fancy” (Dickens 7-8). The classroom, “a plain, bare, monotonous vault” and Mr. Gradgrind’s rigid, square, and dry appearance reflect the stringent, detached teachings of his philosophy (Dickens 6). The name Gradgrind epitomizes what his beliefs have made of him: a “fact machine,” a grinder of fact. In Chapter 2 “Murdering the Innocents”, Dickens compares Gradgrind to a loaded canon “prepared to blow [the children] clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge” (Dickens 7). The metaphor reiterates the damage Gradgrind’s philosophy can cause, including slaughtering the imagination of children. Gradgrind’s ideology sickens his wife, a “little, thin, white, pink−eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness,

Dickens’ experiences of living in abandonment and working in Warren’s Blacking Factory, coupled with his

Throughout history, a divide has always existed between the rich and poor in society. However, during the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England, this rift reached its peak. The working class labored for long hours and received miniscule wages, whereas the bourgeoisie grew abundantly wealthy through the labor of the working class. Published in 1848 and 1854 respectively, Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times both comment on these troubles. While Hard Times is a novel which tells a story and The Communist Manifesto is a short publication which tries to bring about social change, both writings offer a sharp critique of the class antagonism brought about by capitalism at the height of the Industrial

This book may be analyzed as a story of two totally different cities, London and Paris, as Charles Dickens writes in this book, “Every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” where he describes how isolated

Since its introduction as a state in 1803, Ohio has developed a rich history of economic success until the late 20th century. Ohio over the 20th century has been a major victim of deindustrialization. Youngstown, Ohio like most towns in the rust belt was hit hard during the 20th century by deindustrialization. In their book, ‘Steeltown USA Work and Memory in Youngstown’ does a fantastic job of telling the story of this historical town that was one of the leaders in steel producing that believed in hard-work turned into a town that was at the top on the crime boards.

Naturally, the boom of the separate Gold rushes in Western Canada was attractive to the common people for the possibility of attaining large profits in a smaller time period. Thus, the possibility was exciting to many, bringing over a plethora of people who formed communities centred on mining. As such, the large populations of people coming into the area and gaining land was more than enough to enrich and establish a new type of town-structure, this aptly labelled as mining towns. Ultimately, the fate of these types of towns are definite as each of them reach a fate that is reminiscent of the nature of the gold rushes; temporary fads that attracted many, but wouldn’t last long.

It is ironic that the comforter which should provide warmth and comfort, bears little protection from the cold and suffering. Similarly, Bob Cratchit is not permitted to replenish his fire because Scrooge withholds the coal box inside his own office. This coal symbolizes the basic necessities of life which the gluttonous upper class individuals withhold from the working-class, in a complete disregard for their well-being. Therefore, having seen poverty first-hand, Dickens implies via the poor salary, the harsh working conditions, and through the lack of heat that the capitalists willfully abuse their workers as to retain extra capital for their personal use.

Western literature is historically and inherently rooted in a masculine bias largely as a part of the past millennium of patriarchal order. Amongst the abundance of works of which can be attributed to reflect this bias, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is most suiting. Written in the Victorian Age, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities seems historical, as to the plot revolves around the French Revolution, with its bloody guillotine blade, the poor, starving bourgeoisie, and the indifferent aristocrats of whom inevitably fall. Yet, from a critical perspective, Dickens’ seems to be critiquing society. Throughout the work, he encompasses the idea that as long as violence and inequality exist, human suffering will notoriously subsidize as a contemporary

The non-historian scholar wouldn’t even draw the connection between the industrial revolution and the workhouses, but many of those individuals who inhabited those dreadful places ended up there due to improvement of machinery that rendered them expendable. Which is why this work is so important because readers see the side of the industrial revolution that goes against the common thought that being everyone benefited from the advancements in machinery. The content itself isn’t the work of fiction and can be authenticated by other works of literature that convey the same themes that one Mr. Charles Dickens elaborates on.

Within both Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, there marks a time of social tension between the upper and lower classes; the bourgeoisie and the first and second estates of France dehumanize the proletariat and third estate, respectively. In contradiction to Marx’s belief that the bourgeoisie exploited art and literature to advocate capitalism, Dickens created A Tale of Two Cities to caution his own time period on the dangers of a stratified society through his use of motifs such as wine and the guillotine that foreshadow the coming revolutions. Because of Dickens employment of wine, he is able to warn the bourgeoisie of his time. For example, in the novel, Dickens suggests the coming war when a man “scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees–BLOOD” (Dickens 30).

The principles of the ‘dismal science’ led to the formation of a selfish and atomistic society. The social commentary of Hard Times is quite clear. Dickens is concerned with the conditions of the urban labourers and the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. He exposes the exploitation of the working class by unfeeling industrialists and the damaging consequences of propagating factual knowledge (statistics) at the expense of feeling and imagination. However, although Dickens is critical about Utilitarianism, he cannot find a better way of safeguarding social justice than through ethical means.“In place of Utilitarianism, Dickens can offer only good-heartedness, individual charity, and Sleary’s horse-riding; like other writers on the Condition of England Question, he was better equipped to examine the symptoms of the disease than to suggest a possible cure” (Wheeler,

Along with this modern era came harsh realizations of few or no jobs, ruthless working environments, unsanitary living conditions, polluted homes, unfair distribution of wealth, and false hopes--these were very hard times. In Charles Dickens classic novel Hard Times, Dickens paints for the reader a picture of urbanization in the nineteenth century, "Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun's rays. You only knew the town was there because you knew there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town. A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly tending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of Heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth, as the wind rose and fell, or changed its quarter: a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness—Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen." Dickens shows that the murky smoke stacked city is a place of depression and at the heart of it all is industry.

Class systems throughout British society are visible in each book of Hard Times. In Book One: Sowing, the first distinctions of class discrepancy are evident in the relationship between schoolmasters and students. Education and educators were deemed higher up in society than most people. The school masters of Coketown, Mr. and Mrs. Chokeumchild, and Mr. Gradgrind. The children who were the stories center focus were Louis, Tom, Sissy, and Bitzer. The

In a lifetime, life will drag us down to the deepest, darkest, caverns, where the darkness suffocates any sign of hope or light, but with hard work and dedication there will be a chance to submerge into a new age of opportunity. This English historical fictional novel has evolved English composition, A Tale Of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens demonstrates the birth of a new, changed life. Some of the most successful people to ever live have been re-born from losses of money, or moral. People like Bill Gates, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, and many more have dropped out of school, lost money, been rejected by their families and companies only to rise and to crush the darkness with their hope. “There’s beauty in the