Hard Times is a novel by Charles Dickens that was originally serialized from April 1, 1854 to August 12, 1854. The novel is set in the industrial town of Coketown and portrays the hardships of the working class in the Victorian era. The novel itself is divided into three books each named Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering respectively. Each book focuses on a different aspect of these characters' lives. In book one Dickens establishes morals and status of the characters as well as what society is like in Coketown. We see characters like Mr. Gradgrind whose character is based around facts over anything with no nonsense personality. We also meet a representation of the 1% in Mr. Bunderby who is described as “A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility.”(Dickens). We also get a representation of the lower class in the character of Sissy Jupe who lived with the circus and was abandoned by her father. We also meet one of the workers in Bounderby's factory, Stephen Blackpool. With these two characters Dickens gives us two perspectives of the lower class, with Sissy we get a naive look at the world and with Stephen we get a more grim realistic look. In book one we also see the condition of Coketown, the place where the characters and the factory reside. We see it described as “a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it,”(Dickens) with this we can see just how dirty industrial towns like this one were in the Victorian era. Book two further dives into the relationships between these characters and others while they live their life in Coketown. Book two is really where everything is crafted and laid out for the reader to latch onto. One of the main things Dickens focuses on is that of the working class highlighting both sides that of the factory owners and of the workers themselves. We can see just how the owner of the factory Bounderby views the workers based on his reaction to the strike they are having. He states that “we couldn’t improve the mills themselves, unless we laid down Turkey carpets on the floors,” and that “it’s the best-paid work there is.”(Dickens). This was the thought process of factory workers at the time, they thought that the workers were getting the very best when in actuality they had the worst conditions. The strike in the novel was actually inspired by a real strike that Dickens observed known as the Preston strike. In this strike cotton workers demanded a ten percent wage increase, this strike lasted seven months and it only stopped when workers ran out of funds to support themselves. Strikes over pay and working conditions have become increasingly more common around this time and even bleed over to today. For instance, recently there has been a lot of controversy over the working conditions of the fast fashion clothing company Shein. The conditions like many factories from the Victorian era such as Coketown have workers working very long hours for little pay. Some reports are showing that these Shein workers are working 75 hour shifts with little pay(Time). The only difference is that there are no strikes as seen in Hard Times being made about it. Even though it's been almost 200 years since Hard Times came out its topic and social issues are still very much seen today.

Citations:

“Historical Glossary.” Discovering Dickens, 2005, dickens.stanford.edu/hard/issue6_gloss.html.

Dutton, H. I., and J. E. King. Ten per Cent and No Surrender: The Preston Strike, 1853-1854. Cambridge University Press, 2008.