Unseen Appreciation Essay, Research Paper
Two Extracts From ?Hard
Times? by Charles Dickens ????????? These two extracts describe a very
significant point in the history of Britain, the industrial revolution. This
was not in any sense a revolution that occurred overnight but the gradual
warping of acres of beautiful countryside into barren industrial wastelands as
those portrayed in these extracts. Many people believed that the revolution put
Britain on its feet and was a very positive and resourceful change to occur in
our nation but there were also the people who thought negatively about this
whole rapid change sweeping through the land. Dickens was not sceptical about
the influx of machinery that was beginning to dominate our countryside; in
these two extracts he is only trying to show that these industrial towns were
changing peoples way of life. I believe that his main aim is to emphasise the
fact that this change was awful and it ruined lives and vast tracts of
countryside and I think Dickens has described these cities and people in a very
atmospheric and menacing way using a lot of description but mainly metaphors
that compare the shapes of the town to various hellish imagery. ????????? The
passage does exaggerate the bleakness of the city in some points of the extract
such as the river running black with dye but maybe this is an insight into the
future of cities such as Coketown? The people seem to progress from being happy
farmers to drones, stuck in the monotony of industrial life, entrapped in the
life that they lead. Hellish imagery seems to be a recurring theme throughout
the two extracts. In the first three lines the word red is repeated three times
to emphasise the heat. The metaphor concerning the face of the savage makes the
chimney seem aggressive and hostile. The smoke that churns out of the chimneys
trails on for ever like a serpent signifying the fact that this town could stay
the same for ever, with generations living and dying with the same chimneys
burning the same materials and producing the same smoke for centuries into the
future, the town seems to have continuity but it offers no variation to the
workers lives. It seems that the future of these people who inhabit this
dreadful town is set in stone and they are bound to their relentless lives by
the sinister factory owners who have no face. ????????? Coketown
is so full of activity any time of the week, night or day, that it has taken on
its own mystic personality in the way that Dickens refers to the city as ?it?,
assuming that it has some kind of underlying life force that powers it from
deep within. The extracts are written in a way that is very sensual; there are
stimuli within the extracts for sight, sound, smell and touch that make the
poem more vivid and immediate. The piles of buildings that rattle and tremble
seem to be alive with the commotion of the workers inside. These ?24-7?
factories are very unnerving because they show that unlike the traditional
countryside, if you want peace and quiet you wait till the evening and go for a
walk, but in Coketown even the night offers no peace for the workers
desperately in need of rest. ????????? The last sentence of the first extract arouses pathos in
the reader who is explained the meaninglessness of the workers lives who, had
they no watch or calendar, would not know how old they were or what day it was
because they couldn?t differentiate the days in their own lives because they
were all the same. Individuality is killed off by the need for work and the
workers lose their backgrounds, their families, their patriotism, their morals,
their beliefs, everything that may have made them a ?person? and not a ?hand?
has been swallowed up by the gluttony of Coketown. ????????? In the beginning of the second extract we can see that
simple things that bring us pleasure or make it a ?good? day for us can make
the day so much worse for the people of Coketown. For example, the sunshine
does not make the day ?nice? or ?happy?, it beats down on the haze surrounding
the town and heats up the streets to almost a hellish extent making the
occupants lethargic and lazy, but the workers cannot slack because they are
tired, they must work to feed their families and so the sun brings no
relief to the people of Coketown. ????????? Dickens?s bleak descriptions show that
nature has been eradicated and it no longer has a place in our ever-expanding
society. Through the passage the immediate, simple and direct statements get
through to us one after the other in a long sequence that makes up the passage,
at the end we begin to contemplate our place in society and these two extracts
give us a very good insight into Dickens?s feelings about people stuck in a
never-ending cycle and they leave us thinking about ours. ????????