Setting in Charles Dickens' "Hard Times"

Karsten Tischer

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2007
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783640090532
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,7, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: The Social Novel in 19th Century England, language: English, abstract: Charles Dickens was born on the 7th of February 1812 and the British Empire was about to become the greatest empire on the planet. Unfortunately not all citizens have profited from this development. Dickens himself had to quit school and started his work in Warren's Blacking Factory, a period in his life which had – by his own comments – a huge impact on his lifetime and on his works thus, too. His biographer and friend John Forster also points out this factor. This assumption correlates with the sociology of the Frenchman Hippolyte Taine (1828 – 1893) who has said that each individual is determined by the three factors: race, milieu and moment. Stronger related to literary criticism Wilhelm Scherer (1841 –1886) had searched explicitly in the lives of authors for reasons which explain their works. Especially Hard Times which was written in 1854 is strongly suitable because it mirrors these bad experiences Dickens made during his life. It reflects firstly the current conflict between the class of the working people (proletariat) and the smaller class of the manufacturers (bourgeoisie), secondly the sympathy for the first group resulting from his own youth. In a letter to Charles Knight (17th March 1854) he wrote: "The English are, so far as I know, the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. […] They are born at the oar, and they live and die at it." Hans Ulrich Seeber adds that English society decayed into two parts which know almost nothing about each other. Dickens wanted to give a signal which should wake up both sides to stop this development before a revolution would destroy much more. To guarantee an impact on his readers it seems obvious that he has to describe the milieu and the moment of the story in a prominent way. Thus, especially the setting of Hard Times is worth to take a closer look at. Besides the economic discrepancy between the two classes Dickens adds the contrast between the world of the people who see only facts as the only reality and the world of the group of people who hold up another than the real world – the realm of fancy. With the aim to characterize and separate the antagonists from each other Dickens uses among other things the setting which offers him the opportunity to do so in an indirect way. This transfers the task of interpreting the hard times and their causes to the reader's mind.