Batch:- 2020-22 (MA sem 1)
Paper 4:- literature of Victorian period
Topic name:- The picture of Victorian Society in Hard Times
Roll no.:-17
Enrollment no.:-3069206420200001
E-mail Id :- snehaagravat2000@gmail.com
Submitted to:- S.B.Gardi Department Of English Maharaja krishnkumarsinhji Bhavngar University
The picture of victorian society in Hard Times:-
Introduction:-
Hard Times generally means a period of economic depression with food shortage, low wage and unemployment. Hard Times means a general situation in which the lives of people are restricted. In such situation, people cannot have a free and spontaneous growth of their natural feelings and sentiments.It shows a situation in the novel, where mechanization and industrialism leads to slavery to routine and calculation.Hard Times by Charles Dickens is set in the Victorian age predominantly attacking on the then existing social problems, educational system, caste system, economic system and many more. The Victorian era was dominated by an aristocratic group of people whose power later slowly faded away and lost its influence.
Let's throw some light on this novel and his author:-
Charles Dickens:-
Charles John Huffam Dickens FRSA was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.
Charles Dickens was a British novelist, journalist, editor, illustrator and social commentator who wrote such beloved classic novels as Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.
Dickens is remembered as one of the most important and influential writers of the 19th century. Among his accomplishments, he has been lauded for providing a stark portrait of the Victorian-era underclass, helping to bring about social change.After suffering a stroke, Dickens died at age 58 on June 9, 1870, at Gad’s Hill Place, his country home in Kent, England. Five years earlier, Dickens had been in a train accident and never fully recovered. Despite his fragile condition, he continued to tour until shortly before his death.Scottish satirical writer Thomas Carlyle described Dickens’ passing as “an event worldwide, a unique of talents suddenly extinct.” At the time of his death, his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was unfinished.
Hard Times:-
Hard Times, novel by Charles Dickens, published in serial form (as Hard Times: For These Times) in the periodical Household Words from April to August 1854 and in book form later the same year. The novel is a bitter indictment of industrialization, with its dehumanizing effects on workers and communities in mid-19th-century England.
Louisa and Tom Gradgrind have been harshly raised by their father, an educator, to know nothing but the most factual, pragmatic information. Their lives are devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination, and the two have little or no empathy for others. Louisa marries Josiah Bounderby, a vulgar banker and mill owner. She eventually leaves her husband and returns to her father’s house. Tom, unscrupulous and vacuous, robs his brother-in-law’s bank. Only after these and other crises does their father realize that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, retired merchant in the industrial city of Coketown, England, devotes his life to a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and fact. He raises his oldest children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy and never allows them to engage in fanciful or imaginative pursuits.
In this novel we find many themes which is used by Dickens very significantly.
Themes:-
Philosophical Viewpoints: Utilitarianism and Classical Economics:-
In Hard Times, the ideas behind Utilitarianism, statistical economics, and the way they may shape government and educational policy all run together to present a bleak future for the children raised under them. Those who idealize these social sciences imagine a logical world run according to the dictates of the marketplace. In this novel, Dickens presents us with some children raised and educated under this system.
Philosophical Viewpoints: Creativity and the Imagination:-
Paradoxically, in Hard Times, play and pleasure turn out to be a kind of work that is just as difficult as factory labor. No job is more physically demanding than that of the circus performers, who are bruised and beaten daily in order to create an imaginative release for the otherwise mundane lives of their audience.
Education:-
There is a strong case made in Hard Times that education is not simply the classroom experience of memorizing facts. The novel expresses the view that having an emotional component to our education is crucial. It's also shown in the novel that this kind of learning can happen at any time in life.
Wealth:-Hard Times definitely has a specific view on wealth. In this novel, the gulf between rich and poor is vast and cannot be crossed, despite the myth created by the rich that the poor can lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Those who rise do so at the expense of others, and even then their progress is slow, painful, and does not reach much higher than where they started – and anyone who says otherwise is telling self-serving lies.
Power:-
Power comes in several forms in Hard Times. On the one hand, the numerous factory workers represent a tremendous force, both in terms of their ability to operate machinery and produce goods, and in their ability to band together to form a union and go on strike. On the other hand, in their collective form they are viewed by their employers as disposable and almost non-human.
Women and Femininity:-
In the Victorian ideal, a woman was the repository of family morality – the one who would not only nurture the bodies of her children and husband, but also their minds. The educational experiment Gradgrind undertakes is to our eyes quite progressive – teaching his girls and boys the same things and removing the burden of ideal femininity from his daughter.
Family:-
Hard Times expresses the opinion that even an ad hoc, somewhat messily organized family is the best kind of community structure, as long as there's love present. This is shown in the descriptions of Sleary's circus, easily the warmest and most caring of the novel's many groups. In this novel, when families are close emotionally, they provide a moral education that centers on self-sacrifice and altruism.
Love:-
In Hard Times, love itself can be a positive or negative emotion, regardless of whether it occurs between romantic partners or parents and children. There are examples of socially sanctioned and nurturing domestic love. There's also spiritually uplifting love that inspires better behavior and the improvement of the self.
Marriage:-
There are no happy marriages in Hard Times. In Stephen's case, it focuses instead on a missed opportunity for true companionship. In the case of the Gradgrinds, you've got an entirely intellectually unequal match where spouses are indifferent to each other. Then there's a loveless disaster where husband and wife grow to hate each other in the case of Louisa and Bounderby.
Morality and Ethics:-
In Hard Times, the key moral attributes that the villains lack are empathy, generosity, and altruism. For Dickens, these are the foundation of human relationships. There is no getting around them with any other quality, however positive. Those who possess these qualities are much better equipped to handle the world, however hostile it may be.
Let's see how Hard Times reflect the Victorian Society:-
Hard Times by Charles Dickens is set in the Victorian age predominantly attacking on the then existing social problems, educational system, caste system, economic system and many more. The Victorian era was dominated by an aristocratic group of people whose power later slowly faded away and lost its influence.The condition of fading aristocracy has been represented through the characters, Mr. Gradgrind and Bounderby in the novel.
Dickens clearly states his hatred towards the divorce law which remains a privilege of the rich people. Stephen Blackpool, a ‘hand’ in an industry had a drunk and brutish wife, wanted a divorce from her, but can’t because of his poor financial condition and was not able to afford the costly fee of divorce law. The oppression of poor working class by the rich industrialist is the main point of indignation in the novel. The hard workers are just termed as “Hands” without any emotions, which shows that they are counted only in terms of work, production and manufacturing. Except that they are not human beings. The novel is a radical criticism against the economic disparity of the age where the rich are extremely rich and the poor have abject poverty, they can’t even have a square meal. All the system is against the blue collar workers. The ‘Hands’ were always suppressed by law, trade union and their employers.
The workers in the industries are underpaid and do not receive ample and decent facilities to run life, who ultimately go to the protest against industrialists. Dickens exposed his anger towards the developing system of industrialism in England.
The novel is a great example of “attack on the utilitarian’ of the Victorian era, where emotions and sentiments were not counted but only the working efficiency, facts, number and calculations were given more importance. The facts have replaced the love and sentiments. For Gradgrind “Love is misplaced expressions”. The Victorian era was marked with the same features. This situation has been distinctly shown by Dickens. The children of Grandgrind were not given permission to wander, to imagine, to ask questions related to emotions and even they were not told any stories and were not made hear any rhymes. For, Gradgrind the fact is all and everything. He even converts the relations into numbers and facts and convinces his daughter Louisa to get married to a man double of her age.
The educational system too was satirized by Dickens in the novel. The curriculum, the school environment and teachers were deeply, influenced by the utilitarian values. The students were taught to follow what the teachers told, but not to think or wonder upon the teaching given by them. For instance, Tom faced a problem and he was not able to deal with the situation, though he was highly educated at that time and Louisa can’t understand her own emotions because of the poor education system of the Victorian era.
The minds of human beings can be formed only upon facts. Children are considered as empty vessels to be filled with facts. Gradgrind is a man of realities, an eminently practical man, a man of facts and calculations.
The whole education system was based on pragmatism or on practical qualities, and does not touch the imaginative or emotional side of life. Gradgrind is disappointed at his metallurgical Louisa and mathematical Tom becoming curious about the circus. Mrs. Gradgrind asks her children not to waste their time in wandering at things, but to go and be something logical. The element of utilitarianism is seen in Bounderby the manufacturer and banker. He is a practical minded man and there is no touch of humanity in him, especially in his relationships with other people.
The Society of England was getting industrialized and machinery occupied the top priority in national life. Industrialization gave rise to conflict between the capital and labor due to which the trade unionism was rising. There were snobbery and hypocrisy in the minds of the upper middle class people. The aspects of Victorian life and some other evils and abuses are described in Hard Times. Mrs. Sparsit is the representative of this class of hypocrites. For such people, money is the only important thing in life. Mrs. Sparsit always mentions the fact that her husband was a “Powler”. Bounder always mentions the fact that Mrs. Sparsit has been an aristocrat just to prove that he himself has risen up from the bottom and is a self-made man.
Coketown is described as a town of machinery and tall chimneys, with similar streets, similar people, and similar boring life. It is a mode of industrial pollution. The workers working in the industries are not supposed to have any soul. This neglect of workers gives rise to union leaders like Slackbridge, who only want to continue their agitation against the manufacturers and do not really care for the welfare of the workers.
Conclusion:-
In nutshell we find that Dickens very significantly described the Victorian Society of that time. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. By the end of the novel, Gradgrind has reversed course.Dickens's primary goal in Hard Times is to illustrate the dangers of allowing humans to become like machines, suggesting that without compassion and imagination, life would be unbearable.
References:-
1)“Charles Dickens.” Collins Philip, 2021, www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Dickens-British-novelist.
2)“Hard Times.” The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2021, www.britannica.com/topic/Hard-Times-novel-by-Dickens.
3)"The Picture of Victorian Society in Hard Times"
www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/victorian-society-in-hard-times.html#.YCXm4XlN2Nw.
4)"Dickens's Hard Times as a Social Novel" www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/hard-times-as-a-social-novel.html#.YCXmrHlN2Nw.
Word count:-2184
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