Hard Times as a Moral Fable Essay

The creative part is the fairy bilgewater which often involves animals rather than humans. It speaks to our hearts as it entertains us the ending is the logical, virtuous conclusion that satisfies our logical brains and seems right. The problem with all good manufactures is that in that location be often 2 sides to the alike(p) story things argon seldom so black and white in reality so there could be more than champion ending e. g. here atomic number 18 generation when speed is necessary over steadiness of course, there likewise has to be good judgement.Although it is non appropriate to describe a work of art, which voiceless multiplication undoubtedly is, as a incorrupt fable or a morals play, yet the fact remains that there is a tender moral intention place this allegory. Hard time is a satirical attack on some of the evils and vices of straight-laced society. Satire has forever and a day corrective purpose and is therefore basically moral in its access to the subjects it deals with.Apart from that, there are passages of direct moralising in this novel. Hard generation is a novel which from the moment of its publication aroused really diametric sentiments in the reading public. daimons reasons for writing Hard Times were mostly m whizztary. Sales of his weekly periodical, Household Words, were low, and he hoped the inclusion of this novel in instalments would increase sales. Since publication it has received a mixed answer from a diverse range of critics, such as F. R.Leavis, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Macaulay, primarily nidusing on Dickenss treatment of trade unions and his post-Industrial variety pessimism regarding the divide between Capitalist mill owners and undervalued workers during the Victorian era The novel was written as a weekly serial story to browse through five months of his magazine, Household Words, during 1854. Sales were highly responsive and encourage for Dickens who remarked that he was Three pa rts mad, and the fourth delirious, with perpetual hotfoot at Hard Times.Dickens had to force his story to decease the exigencies of a Procrustean bed and, in doing so, sacrificed the abundance of behavior characteristic of his genius. That, at whatsoever rate, was the general view of Hard Times until in 1948 F. R. Leavis, in his book The Great Tradition, suggested that it was a moral fable, the hallmark of a moral fable universe that the intention is peculiarly insistent, so that the representative consequence of everything in the fable character, episode, and so on is immediately apparent as we read. By seeing it as a moral fable, Dr. Leavis produced a brainy rereading of Hard Times that has changed almost every critics begin to the novel. Yet a difficulty still remains the nature of the post of Dickens satire. Both Gradgrind and Bounderby are emblematic, to the point of caricature, of representative early-nineteenth-century attitudes.Dickens tells us that Gradgrind has an unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face and the novel has been taken as an attack on the philosophical doctrine known as utilitarianism, the doctrine that the greatest mirth of the greatest number should be the guiding principle of conduct save utilitarianism can also mean the doctrine that utility must be the standard of what is good for man. Perhaps the twain meanings come together in the famous Victorian phrase, enlightened self-interest, the meaning of which entrust turn wholly upon the definition of enlightened.Utilitarianism in the philosophical sense, as taught by the noble-minded put-on Stuart Mill, has had a profound and abiding influence on Western vivification and thought, and Dickens was originally not competent to criticise it as a philosophical system. But if he was no philosopher, nor even a proficient mind, he was something as valuable an astonishing diagnostician of life, as D. H. Lawrence has been called. His bare-ass nose could smell utmost stag e a mile away. And it is precisely those elements of nineteenth-century scotch thinking that denied life which he is attacking in Hard Times.He is, in other words, continuing his attack on what may be called the statistical imageion of man, on human relations evaluated in equipment casualty of arithmetic, on what Thomas Carlyle called the cash nexus that he had launched at the number one of his career in Oliver Twist. there he had traced its consequences in official attitudes towards exiguity and in the working of the New Poor Law In holy order to give a concrete shape to his moral purpose, dickens in this novel uses the characters here as symbolisations.Almost every character in this novel is an embodiment of a certain idea or concept or principle, good or bad. In fact, there are ii groups of symbolic characters one group symbolizing certain objectionable features of Victorian life, and the other group symbolizing certain moral qualities, of which we heartily approve. The se two groups of characters, symbolizing opposite principle, are confronted with each other and it is this confrontation that constitutes the focus of interest in the novel.The characters here are therefore like the dramatis personae in a ethical motive play there is an allegorical intention behind the character-portrayal. However, this novel is different from a moral fable or morality play in one striking respect. While the characters in amoral fable or a morality play are purely embodiments of certain qualities, good or bad in this novel the characters, in step-up to their function as symbols of certain good or bad qualities, are also individuals in their own right.Each character here is do to live as a separate individual, sharply distinguished from the other yet their symbolic roles cannot be questioned. Coketown itself is treated as a symbol in the novel. This industrial town represents the industrial ugliness, industrial callousness, the mechanical and flat life which the w orkmen or the transfer are compelled to lead under a system governed by utilitarianism and laissez faire. All the passages which describe this town or its nation are written in an ironical vein and have an diaphanous moral purpose.In the main, however, the best writing in Hard Times is a result of this tour-guide mentality, as his wonder, horror and awe lead to promising evocations of the landscape. Many critics have made the link between Coketown and a sorting of Dantesque Inferno, and his vision of industrial society is full of horror, save possessing also a weird beauty. The key to the weird beauty latent in the horror are the melancholy mad elephants of machinery Dickens was as fascinated by industry as he was repulsed by it.The industrial artefacts of Coketown are endowed with all the life drained from its inhabitants, the dehumanised hands. Like Marx, Dickens could see an inverted world characterised by the personification of things and as a result the inanimate object s of Coketown abound with vitality, while the raft within it are cogs in a machine, state equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom everyday was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next .Treating the manufacturing plant as a living thing leads to mental links being forged between the ever coiling interminable serpents of smoke and the smokescreens that people use to hide themselves from the world, or indeed the world from them, most notably Gradgrinds inability to see past his system, and Bounderbys deliberate hiding of his past. there are also links made between the fire in the fairy palaces and the fire of human passion, and aptly it is the mechanical Louisa who notices this, most promising fascinated at how a non-living thing has more life than she does at that place seems to be nothing merely languid and monotonous smok e. Yet when the shadow comes, Fire bursts out, father I, xv. Not only is this reversal of death and life hellish, but these descriptions of zombie workers in a living factory are written in a prophetic style which almost invites one to place an Abandon hope all ye who enter here stigma on the factory gates.All of the images of smoke, ashes, and fire suggest that death is present in the hell of Coketown, as does the reference to the black ladder so often in use in the working class quarters I, x. Michael Wheeler points to the significance of Biblical imagery in the text, stating that the New testament is the yardstick by its modern usurpers are measured and found scatty, and that this is the ultimate condemnation that Dickens can heap upon it.However, I cannot service of process but feel that passages proclaiming that all those subtle essences of humanity which will get away the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded will blow even algebra to wre ck , while suggesting that Gradgrindery and the interlocking forces of industry are to be judged and condemned, they also make it clear that they will be left(p) well enough alone until the Judgement Day.Coketown is painted as a hell on earth, consuming the lifeblood of its inhabitants, and the fact that it itself will be ruined in the end is of monumental insignificance for the countless generations who will have to savvy there until then. On the other hand The Circus is represented as a symbol of Humanity as Well as Art. The carnival is very important as a sybol in the scheme of this moral fable. The circus people symbolize not only art but also humanity they are embodiments of those simple virtues of sympathy and helpfulness to others for which gradgrinds philosophy has no use and Bounderbys hardened heart, no room.There is a remarkable gentleness about these people, a special inaptitude for any grade of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another. T he moral of this novel as a whole is put by dickens in the mouth of Mr. Sleary of the circus. After giving an account of the death of sisss father to gradgrind, Mr. Sleary comes to the conclusion that there is a kind of love in the world which is not self-interest afterall, but something very different, and that this love has a way of its own of calculating or not calculating.This is the supreme message which the novel has for us. In these few words we rein a condemnation of all that Gradgrind, Bounderby, and Mrs. Sparsit symbolize, and an acceptance and approval of what Stephen and Rachel, Sissy, and Mr. Sleary himself, symbolize. There are, thus, strong grounds for calling this novel a Moral fable or a morality play with the characters functioning partly as individuals but chiefly as symbols. Finally, there are passages of direct moralizing which alter to the novel the character of a novel fable or morality play.At one point, for instance, dickens warns the commissioners of fact and the utilitarian economists that if they do not attend to the instincts and emotions of the poor people, reality will take a vulturous turn and make an end of everything. At another point Dickens offers an ironic commentary, with an obvious moral, upon the effects of Gradgrinds system of education on Bitzers outlook. And then, of course, there is a plain and straightforward maoralizing in the final chapter when the author comments upon the ultimate fate of each of the characters.