Hard Times, by Charles Dickens

The characters of Charles Dickens’ fictional english city, Coketown, mirror the relationships and cross-class understandings of class in mid-nineteenth-century England. The influence of both enlightenment and romantic tendencies are evidently portrayed in the Upper and Lower classes of Coketown, and speak to the respective understandings of the characters view of society being relative to their own station within society. Coketown’s social identity is revealed through the restrictions and advantages of the different levels of society and how they contribute to the relationships and understandings between upper and lower classes.

The upper level of society, although bearing power and influence, experiences several forms of restriction relevant to it position within the social hierarchy. Falling prey to the stifling tendencies of obligation and expectation its participants present an inability to relate to issues concerning the lower class. The cause of disconnect between social circles stems from an overall absence of common understanding. The world occupied by Mr. Grandgrind is one of mathematics and “fact”. A man associated with the mass production of square children of fact and his own “square” and “inflexible” nature, Grandgrind is disadvantaged by his failure to see past his own doctrine. He lives in a cold and overly symmetrical home, Stonelodge, with a doormat of a wife and children possessing “an air of jaded sullenness” having been single-mindedly educated in his unbalanced curriculum, void of creativity and life (p.17). There are many shortcomings in an all “fact” education, manifested in the over-obedient and confused existence of his daughter Louisa and the haphazard lifestyle of his son Tom. Tom is detrimentally dra...

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...lure of the upper to identify with the daily life of the lower also making it impossible for the upper to understand the anger supporting the motives of the mill men. The Hands of Coketown seek to overcome the mechanized, industrialized, and dehumanized notions of their class and recognize themselves as victims in an unbalanced system.

The men and women of all classes with in Coketown are instruments by which Charles Dickens’ documents the social and industrial understandings of mid-nineteenth-century England. The text shows evident the direct correlation between the limitations and liberties relevant to each class and the social understanding supplementary to the upper and lower classes. The trend marked in both classes is an inadequate knowledge of how the other half lives, and in both cases the divide of understandings perpetuates the divide in society.