Coursework On Hard Times :: English Literature

Coursework On Hard Times Title: How does Dickens present the education system in Hard Times? How does this reflect life in Coketown? Hard Times reveals Dickens' increased interest in class issues and social observations. Dickens was extremely concerned with the miserable lives of the poor and working classes in the England of his day, and Hard Times is one of several of his novels that address these social problems directly. On hearing the name, Hard times, an imagination of people going through a difficult and hard way of life is revealed. This novel also reminds us of the hard times in the Victorian Times when children did not go to school; when education was varied according to social class- factory like schools for the poor and private tutors for the rich. Those that were able to have the so-called education suffered in the process. They were forced to learn a lot by heart because everything was formal and mechanical. They were put through a factory-like process, hoping to produce children that were possessed of nothing but facts. Not even a sense of fancy and imagination. They were educated to get the basics of life because they were going to be pushed into the outside world at a very young age of 12 and above or even below. At the end of the day, the education was worthless because most of the children died in the workhouse. Dickens used Hard Times to criticise the society for failing so many of its children. Dickens argues against a mode of factory style, grad-grinding production that exterminates the fun out of life. He believes that education should not be a thing of going through volumes of head-breaking questions and being put through an immense variety of paces. Hard Times not only suggests that fancy is as important as fact, but it continually calls into question the difference between fact and fancy. Dickens suggests that what constitutes so-called fact is a matter of perspective or opinion. The lack of education for children and factory like process of education has resulted to 'vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long' in Coketown. Coketown is portrayed in Hard Times as an industrial town with polluted atmosphere and place where people have the same lifestyle. Metaphorically, Coketown means carbon town. In science the word coke is another name for carbon. Dickens has described it as 'a town of machinery and tall chimney, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.' In the above quote, the word 'smoke' is the carbon produced from the