What did Charles Dickens say about industrialization?

Question

In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens (1812-70), perhaps the most serve contemporary critic of the horrors of industrialization for the poor, wrote a fictional account of an industrial town he aptly called Coketown. ‘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. 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 stare of melancholy madness.’ 

(a) What did Charles Dickens say about industrialization? 

(b) What were the ill-effects of industrialization on this town called ‘Coketown’? 

(c) What is your experience about industrialization?

Answer 1

(a) (i) Hard Times is the tenth novel written by Charles Dickens and published in 1854. 

(ii) The process of industrialization and its effect on the labour force was the main theme of the novel. 

(iii) He focussed on the life of industrial workers and terrible conditions of urban life. 

(iv) According to him human beings were reduced into simple instruments of production due to industrialization. 

(v) Industrialisation led to the misery of workers. 

(b) (i) He described Coketown, a fictitious industrial town, as a grim place full of machinery, smoking chimneys, rivers polluted purple and buildings that all looked the same. 

(ii) Here workers are known as ‘hands’, as if they had no identity other than as operators of machines. 

(c) Student will write his/her own views on industrialisation.