This blog is Assignment writing on paper no-104( Literature of the Victorians) assigned by Professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
Name: Gayatri Nimavat
Paper: 104 (Literature of the Victorians)
Roll no: 09
Enrollment no: 4069206420220019
Email ID: gayatrinimavat128@gmail.com
Batch: 2022-24 (MA Semester - 1)
Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English,Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Industrialism and its Evil in 'Hard Times'
"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage."
Introduction:
The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the eighteenth century, is the result of a long period of social and economic evolution extending into the late Middle Ages. Apart from its several favorable outcomes, the Industrial Revolution caused some undesirable outcomes for working life. The aim of this study is to inspect Dickens’s Hard Times which can be counted as one of the preliminary works that reflected on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on working life with a critical perspective within the scope of administrative mentality of that time.
Within this context, scientific works which focused on the intellectual foundations of the industrial era and Dickens' Hard Times are taken into consideration for the conceptual framework of the study. Qualitative research approach has been adopted to the study and through the inspection of the novel, the main perspectives which make up the foundations of management mentality has been evaluated. As a result of this study, it is seen that positivism, economy science and utilitarianism have been influential in the management concept and practices of the Industrial Revolution era. In Hard Times, Dickens propounds the negative effects of these perspectives which can be useful for humankind when used for good causes.
About Author:
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Born near Portsmouth, at Portsea. He was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era. His many volumes include such works as 'A Christmas Carol', 'David Copperfield', 'Bleak House', 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'Great Expectations', and 'Our Mutual Friend'.
Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity during his lifetime than had any previous author. Much of his work could appeal to the simple and the sophisticated, to the poor and to the queen, and technological developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very quickly. His long career saw fluctuations in the reception and sales of individual novels, but none of them was negligible or uncharacteristic or disregarded, and, though he is now admired for aspects and phases of his work that were given less weight by his contemporaries, his popularity has never ceased
Industrialism and its Evil:
The novel Hard Times contains vivid pictures of the ugliness of industrialism which was raising its head in the Victorian Age. Coketown is described as a town of machines since the people living in the same town are supposed to have souls. Instead they all go in and out at the same hours, with the same purpose upon the same pavements, to do the same work. These pictures express the monotony of the workmen’s life in the Victorian Age.
As the Victorian Age was assumed as an age of Industrialism and Capitalism, the workmen are not men at all; they are “hands”, so many hundred hands, “So many hundred horse steam power”. These men are not supposed to have any souls; they are hands who have to work upon “the crashing, smashing, tearing mechanisms, day in and day out”. Industrial towns now give importance to human beings for their competence to work and generate income, therefore the towns are like machines where materials are used, fuel is consumed and money is made. It is the fact that the man who makes money through the labor of these hands regards the smoke of the chimneys as meat and drink for the capitalist.
Dickens not only attacks the industrial evils of his time, but also portrays capitalism and factory owner inhuman. As a manufacturer, Bounderby adopts an arrogant attitude towards the workmen and does not feel the least sympathy for them in their troubles or in their desire for a better life. He always expresses the view that these workmen want “to ride in a coach drawn by six horses and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon”. His treatment of the workmen shows a mechanical mind; he looks upon the workmen as so many hundred “hands”, so many hundred horse steam power. Although Dickens tries to convey to us all the ugliness of the factories and the industrial town, he yet shows his awareness of the bright side of these factories when he writes: "The lights in the great factories, which looked, when they were illuminated, like fairy palaces".
The treatment of the workers in the factories of Coketown as nothing more than machines, which produce so much per day and are not thought of as having feelings or families or dreams. Dickens depicts this situation as a result of the industrialization of England; now that towns like Coketown are focused on producing more and more, more dirty factories are built, more smoke pollutes the air and water, and the factory owners only see their workers as part of the machines that bring them profit.
As the book progresses, it portrays how industrialism creates conditions in which owners treat workers as machines and workers respond by unionizing to resist and fight back against the owners. In the meantime, those in Parliament (like Mr. Gradgrind, who winds up elected to office) work for the benefit of the country but not its people.
Dickens reflected the working and living conditions of the working class, which included a tiring and deadly working environment, unionization struggles, employer's attempts to push down these attempts, work accidents and Poor Laws, and he portrayed life in industrial cities in the era after the Industrial Revolution.
Three separate stories which are connected to each other are told in the novel. The first one is the story of a little girl named Sissy who is left to Coketown and needs to work in a circus in order to go to school. The second story is the story of Gradgrind's children, Louisa and Tom. The third story is the story of a worker, Stephen Blackpool and his girlfriend Rachel. In these stories Dickens aimed to criticize the failing education system and portray the living conditions of the working class in Coketown.
The imaginative constraint of 'Hard Times' is the symbolic expression of Dickens's critique of the interlocking structures, economic, social, and political reflections of industrial capitalism. As a realistic description of the industrial city and the industrial worker, it has been compared to blue book reports, to the work of Friedrich Engels and other commentators on the emerging industrial society, and to Dickens's own journalistic description of the Preston strike. Dickens reflects his observations of industrialism after his visits to newly developing industrial cities and Preston in 'Hard Times' as:
“It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”.
Dickens reflects the sultry atmosphere of industrial cities through his observations. Inhabitants of industrial cities were badly affected by polluted air. For instance, the “Great Smog” was an extremely dense and polluted fog affecting the whole of the London area. It caused the deaths of a vast number of people.
There are several studies investigating the hospital records about this topic. Although this air pollution which was known as the Great Smog affected life in London in 1952, the conditions of the other industrial cities were not different. While describing the air pollution in Coketown in Hard Times, Dickens likens the industry city to a factory with its standardized lives of workers who had similar daily lives. Furthermore, the city has a factory-like shape with its working class slums which provides the fuel for the system. Dickens uses the metaphor of the society as a family to organize the novel. Hard Times uses the physical structure of the factory itself as both the metaphor for the destructive forces at work in its characters' lives and as the metaphor for its own aesthetic unity as a novel. As Johnson notices the slums are the habitats of the factory hands and “when they die, black ladders are raised to the windows to dispose of the dead, the sliding away of all that was most precious in this world to a striving wife and a brood of hungry babies, like coal down a chute”. Monotony in Coketown is described as:
“It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next”.
The machines of Coketown represent a monstrous life with their continuous clangs which sound like "melancholy mad elephants". The city provides a dreary death scene and the factory scenes are much more psychological with its cure lying on providing a natural harmony between workers and factory owners. According to Spectator Dicken’s assertion that Dickens’s generalized portrayal of the people of Coketown embedded in the metonymy of the city and its inhabitants is in fact his association of machine and labor which reinforces the workers' character.
Within this framework, Dickens's characterization of the labor and description of the city is unique. In Dickens’s criticism of the ugliness and monotony of the city, there is no hope of returning back to the preindustrial conditions or a utopia of a brighter future.Dickens portrays the present conditions as far as possible in order to show the necessary amendments that should be made. In spite of his dark criticism of the industrial city, Dickens is not against industrial revolution. He only stresses the need for a betterment of the present order. In the novel, the character Bounderby hardly suits the bloody tyrant character of the factory owner. Although he can be seen as a deplorable character, as a factory owner he aims to keep his factory working whatsoever that happens to his workers without having any sympathy for them. He does not care about the wages or conditions of his workers in his factory.
Here we find that the factory owners are mean and selfish people since they have too little trust and good will between them. While they are ready to pay high prices for machines, they do not show the same willingness for workers and try to keep their expenses as low as possible. The British workers had the pride to be the richest country in the world, they were forced to live with their wives and children in mines or factories under terrible conditions which were worse than slaves. The conditions of the workers of Coketown were the same. They were working for very small amounts under terrible conditions and they were very unhappy. However, according to the mentality in Coketown the poverty and unhappiness was their mistake:
“Any capitalist there, who made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousands nearest hands didn’t each make sixty thousands pounds out of sixpence and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do, why don’t you go and do it?”
The workers are mentioned as "hands" in the novel and among the society of the age since they were not counted as real personalities who had hearts and souls. It was a difficult job to discipline these “hands" who did not attend church and were always ready to show ingratitude to their bosses. Coketown as a milltown showed the polarization between the industrialists and the working class people.
“So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions”
It is possible to observe the status gap between the factory owners symbolized by Bounderby and the workers in the novel:
“...Her own private sitting-room was a storey higher, at the window of which post of observation she was ready, every morning, to greet Mr. Bounderby as he came across the road, with the sympathising recognition appropriate to a victim.”
Throughout the novel, the unfortunate relationships between the workers and factory owners have been portrayed frequently. For example, Stephen’s case when he falls down Old Hell Shaft can be given as an example of an unfortunate relationship because the mine owners neglect to close up abandoned pits. Dickens writes about the employer-employee relationship which is frequently stressed in the novel in an article he penned for Household Words:
“I believe... that into the relations between employers and employed, as into all the relations of this life, there must enter something of feeling and sentiment; something of mutual explanation, forbearance, and consideration and is not exactly stateable in figures; otherwise those relations are wrong and rotten at the core and will never bear sound fruit."
Furthermore, in 'Hard Times' the trade union does not satisfy the demands of working class people for better wages, shorter working hours and more benefits. Dickens does not deal with a strike or the working conditions in the factories. He doesn't even go into the details of the misery of working class people. Bounderby's narrow minded selfishness shows itself as a sign of natural response to his workers by bullying them. In addition to this, Mr. Gradgrind’s utilitarianism and the circuses
Traditional humanism competes with each other. The steam engines which are the symbol of industrialism are very important for Dickens that he keeps the steam whistle party continue.
Dickens even wrote in one of his articles:
“there is a range of imagination in most of us which no amount of steam-engines will satisfy". As Bratlinger notices, Dickens hopes in the novel that the workers will get higher wages and better conditions, but they need fun more."
Study of Bollywood movies:
This whole story is about industrialism. Likewise, we have so many movies based on this theme.
Coolie:
In the 'Coolie' movie, leading actor amitabh bachchan has shown the condition of lower class. Here he plays the role of a laborer(Coolie). The upper class harasses the lower class and labor a lot. Labor is ready to give their lives for their rights. But no resistance is given by the upper class.
Mother India:
The classic movie 'Mother India' presented by Nargis and Sunil Dutt still holds a place in our minds. As in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Time, the lower class is neglected by the upper class, similarly in mother India, Nargis and her two children spend their entire lives paying debts. Only one character named Sukhi Lala has money, all other lower class people borrow money from him, besides, only Sukhi Lala is educated in the whole village due to which all lower class people are cheated.
K.G.F:
Masterpiece of tollywood K.G.F. In this movie we find Poor people are taken to work in the mines against their will by the villains who own the gold mines and are imprisoned there for centuries. They are subjected to unbearable torture. It is shown in the movie that the children born there never saw their own face in the glass, Which shows how miserable these people must be living. He does not allow the birth of a daughter in his house, the girl's parents kill the girl as soon as she is born. Many such tortures are inflicted on the lower class.
In all these movies, due to industrialization the lower class people have to face many problems.
Conclusion:
In short, industrialization creates an environment in which people cease to treat either others or themselves as people. Even the unions, the groups of factory workers who fight against the injustices of the factory owners, are not shown in a good light. Stephen Blackpool, a poor worker at Bounderby's factory, is rejected by his fellow workers for his refusal to join the union because of a promise made to the sweet, good woman he loves, Rachael. His factory union then treats him as an outcast.
The remedy to industrialism and its evils in the novel is found in Sissy Jupe, the little girl who was brought up among circus performers and fairy tales. Letting loose the imagination of children lets loose their hearts as well, and, as Sissy does, they can combat and undo what a Gradgrind education produces.
References:
https://www.berjournal.com/?file_id=507
Collins, Philip. "Charles Dickens". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Aug. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Dickens-British-novelist. Accessed 13 October 2022.
Collins, Philip. “Dickens and Industrialism.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 20, no. 4, 1980, pp. 651–73. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/450376. Accessed 4 Nov. 2022.
Word count: 3015
Images: 16
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