Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth, but soon the family moved to London
where they began through a very difficult period. His father was imprisoned for debt and at
the age of 12 he was sent to work in a blacking factory, and this traumatic experience marked
his life forever. After his father position improved, he went back to school, becoming first a
parliamentary reporter and then a journalist. He published 14 novels, adventure stories like
Oliver Twist, short stories like Christmas Carol and the autobiographical David Copperfield,
which marks the high point of Dickens’ Victorian social optimism. He published all his books
in instalments. After this his novels gradually moved towards a savage condemnation of
Victorian society.
We can say that Dickens represent the Victorian Age both in his life and works: first he was poor
but then he became rich, and this great change in both his financial and social status is
symbolic for the age of progress. Also the fact that he made a fortune through writing
demonstrates the popularity of the genre.

Hard times
Written in 1854, Hard times, is a powerful critique of the social injustice of his time, set in the
industrial city of Coketown. The novel begins with the description of the setting: a polluted
and crowded city. The protagonist is an “eminently practical man”, a school teacher called
Thomas Gradgrind who believes only in figures and facts, and he strongly suppresses the
promising imaginations of the children he teaches at school. For him pupils are only
containers to be fill by facts and learning is only receiving this facts: he considers them as
enemies, and he wants to storm away their imagination and emotion. He has also two children
and he’s going to crush their feelings and suppresses the imagination of his pupils, but only
later in his life he will realise the disaster he had created.

In this novel Dickens demonstrates his talent for portraying unforgettable characters which
he often drew from real life but transformed through comic exaggeration. A brilliant example
of this is the character of Gradgrind, probably based on the utilitarian leader James Mill.
Utilitarianism was a political, economic and social doctrine, a sort of philosophy, which based
all values on utility and so only material object are considered useful.
Dickens’ sense of humour is once of the most modern aspects of his writing, in fact he tended
to use comic exaggeration presenting his character (Gradgrind, Bitzer) like monster. Although
the reality is frequently the starting point for the settings of Dickens’ novels, his writing
transforms the environment through imagination into a vivid symbol of the type of life it
represents. Coketown for example is quite realistic, being modelled on the monotonous
environment of industrial towns, but at the same time it is a symbolic portrait of the poverty
that oppresses the working classes. Finally with this novel he criticised the society using
figure of speech, saying that they were going backward not forward, and he criticised also the
education system, and his style is inimitable, full of imagination and paradox, repetition,
exaggeration and juxtaposition
Hard times was written to to teach and entertain, but mainly to shake some people from a
terrible mistake of these days that was the philosophy of fact. This novel deals with the effect
of the Industrial Revolution and the Utilitarianism, man and environment (the monotonous
life, people are like machines).

MERITS:
 The use of humour in dialogue (characters)
 The setting, which is based on the actual environment of the Victorian Age, but with
Dickens became a symbolic representation of Evil
 Character: figures are drawn from reality but are transformed by comic exaggeration.
FAULTS:
 Sentimentalism and sensationalism

Finally Dickens was a critical and reformer, no revolutionary: he only denounces the evil. The
solution is the generosity of middle classes