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. ????????