期刊名称：Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
电子版ISSN：0975-2935
出版年度：2012
卷号：4
期号：1
页码：35-45
出版社：Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
摘要：Hard Times, published in 1854, at the time of the initial 'textile phase' of the England's Industrial revolution, is a powerful indictment of the inherent exploitative and repressive character of the emerging industrial system that baseditself on the reduction and dehumanization of the factory workers as mere mechanical unitsof manufacture and production, devoid of any human sentiments and emotions. Rightly described as 'the socially conscious novel', or 'the condition of England' novel',Hard Times, offers to present, through its structural principle of 'the conflict of opposites', an extremely authentic and radical critique of the class exploitation in a newly industrializing England economy that in its overenthusiastic adoption of industrial capitalist ethos tended to threaten the very existence of human individual into a machine and that of the industrial worker into a mere unit of 'labor power.' This was soughtto be done at various levels ranging from public life in a factory toprivate existence in a family affecting crucial decisions of love and marriage andthrough the role of power in education system affecting the growth and development of children as thinking and imaginative individuals. The novel, through its two chief advocates of industrial capitalism-Gradgrind and Bounderby-provides a socio-economic critiqueof the times of early phase of capitalism when the processes of production were ideologically privileged over the inhuman existence of the workers and when a uniform monotonous life of facts found supremacy in privateas well as public life,institutional structures and value system that guided the middle nineteenth century England. The resultantcrisisreferring to working class reactions in the form of various militant actionshas aptly been described by one of the eminent historians of the Industrial Revolution: The most obvious evidence of this crisis is the high wind of social discontent which blew across Britain in successive gusts between the last years of the wars and the middle of the 1840's…Luddite and Radical, trade unionist and utopian socialist, Democratic and Chartist. At no other time in modern British history have the common people been so persistently, profoundly and, often, desperately dissatisfied. At no other period since the seventeenth century can we speak of large masses of them as revolutionary, or discern at least one moment of political crisis…when something like a revolutionmight actually have developed
