Hard Times And The Nineteenth Century

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society of Victorian England during this period. I will use the Norton Critical Edition of Hard Times, the Sources of the Western Tradition, and the Communist Manifesto to support my analytical interpretation of Charles Dickens Hard Times.
During this period Dickens wrote for a weekly publication called Household Words, each issue dealt with a different social problem of the period. Hard Times began as a serialization in this weekly publication. In Hard Times Dickens writes about the horrors of the industrial revolution and was sparked by what he had seen first hand in Manchester, England fifteen years prior to writing Hard Times and the present goings on of a labor strike in Preston, England while he was conceiving the novel. The novel is almost biblical in nature as it has three books sowing, reaping and garnering. Book the First, "Sowing," is the planting of the seeds. It provides a basis for the problems that will affect Stephen Blackpool, who is a factory worker in ...

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symbolizes the workers of this period, who put in long hours for little pay and lived under horrible conditions. Josiah on the other hand represents the greedy capitalist, who cares little for his workers. Hard Times illustrates the history of class struggles and is re-enforced by the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The struggle between the bourgeoisie, "the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and the employers of wage-labour" and the proletariat, "the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power to live." In Hard Times Josiah Bounderby ...

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