دراسة الفكرة المحورية لرواية أوقات عصيبة

**د. عبد الله بن محمود** · 27/Mar/2010, 12:08 PM

الباحث: أ / جمعان عوض الله السلمي

الدرجة العلمية: ماجستير

الجامعة: صنعاء

الكلية: الآداب

بلد الدراسة: اليمن

تاريخ الإقرار: 2006

Preface
Never before did Charles Dickens receive as much ovation from literary critics as he has during the last few decades. It has, in fact, considerably increased in recent times. Some of his sincere faithful descendants, family members and admirers have pooled their human and material resources together for keeping him alive through his heritage. Sadly, the news of the death of his last grandson, Cedric Dickens, a couple of months ago has deprived Dickens’s admirers of one of the leftover threads leading to Dickens’s world.
His works are not only read all over the world, but have been an integral part of university curriculum. So much has been written on Dickens that he is the centre of a thriving corpus of academic knowledge. Among the most cited authors of all times, he is ranked immediately after William Shakespeare. In his writings, he emerged as a liberal reformer of his age who was concerned with the problems arising out of the industrial revolution. He appealed to various classes of society from aristocrats to labourers. He appealed to intellectuals and simple people, at different levels of emotion. He is one of the great pivotal authors of England, embedded deeply in the national consciousness, and expresses the milieu of the people of England, especially of the middle and lower classes, in a way that is very widely admired.
masterpiece. Its readers are grateful to F. R. Leavis for highlighting the principal merits of this novel which it deserves. He gave the novel a very high prestigious rank and since then, his appreciation has attracted a great deal of attention of critics, reviewers and research scholars alike.
This research work is an attempt to analyze, interpret and evaluate the novel; and most specifically the central theme of the novel. The entire work has been divided into six chapters where each chapter deals with a binary theme and ultimately the fifth chapter discusses industrialism as the central theme which is the source, the fountain head, of all the themes.
It is hoped that this thesis will add a new dimension to the understanding, appreciation and evaluation of this novel.
Concluding Remarks
This concluding chapter is intended to summarize, highlight and inter-relate the observations made in the earlier chapters. At the outset, the first chapter presents an introduction with a description of Hard Times, a short biography of its author Charles Dickens, the motives behind writing the novel, a brief idea of the contemporary historical circumstances to Charles Dickens himself and the publication of that novel. It also attempts to have a survey of scholarship and delineates what the critics have said about Dickens, the novel and its themes.
Hard Times is one of the greatest novels authored by Charles Dickens. He is one of the most popular and beloved writers who ever lived. After Shakespeare, he is the most written-about author in English literature. His novels and tales catered to a vast and intensely loyal audience. More than just an entertainer, Dickens used his enormous popularity to attack injustice and strengthen the sympathies of his readers towards the poor and the helpless, for orphans and outcast persons. He lent his active support to a variety of philanthropic endeavours. The problem of the education of the poor, particularly children, engaged his attention. The evils of industrialism shed their light upon the entire system, including education, society, values and even the way of thinking. That makes industrialisation the major theme of Hard Times.
Victorian England was the scene of enormous, far-reaching changes, in the nature and organization of work, in population growth, and changes in the very landscape itself, brought about by the railway and the growth of entirely new industrial cities and towns, like Coketown, the melancholic gloomy industrial town described in Hard Times.
When Dickens was born in 1812, England had, by and large, an agricultural economy. The great majority of the population passed their lives in the country, working in the fields and farms as their ancestors had done before them. A small class of landowners held much of the political power, presiding over a small electorate of propertied men. England was in continuity with the England of past ages, a hierarchical society based on hereditary privilege with unquestioned traditions, beliefs, and a settled order.
By 1854, however, when Dickens published Hard Times, conditions were quite different. Half of the people lived in towns or cities due to the exodus from the suburbs and rural areas into industrial towns to look for new jobs. Marvellous new machines, like the power loom operated by workers such as Stephen Blackpool, replaced many tasks formerly performed by hand, increasing the country’s productivity but also causing unrest and unemployment. For the toilers in the factories, traditional rural ways were being left behind for repetitive, monotonous, and often health-destroying new routines of work.
Whenever humanitarian objections were raised to conditions in their factories, the new class of industrialists - caricatured in Hard Times in the person of Josiah Bounderby - often turned to the doctrines of political economy, especially the idea of the ‘hard-headed’ outlook of Utilitarianism. In Hard Times, Bounderby’s friend and ally Thomas Gradgrind is shown upholding some of the views, heavily satirized by Dickens, of political economy and Utilitarianism.
By 1854, portions of England’s working class had formed into ‘combinations’ or unions, which used strikes or the threat of strikes as a way to force employers to improve wages and conditions. Working-class militancy in England had its nineteenth-century origin in a movement called Chartism, to which Dickens’s response was ambivalent. He sympathized with the sufferings and the hunger that motivated workers but feared the potential for violence and social disorder accompanying Chartist agitation. The rhetoric of the leaders of such unions is mocked in Hard Times in the speeches of Slackbridge.
In the intellectual and cultural spheres, the England of 1854 was very different from the one Dickens was born into. New and disturbing challenges to old certainties were in the air; Darwin’s evolutionary ideas were soon to undermine religious faith, and new ideologies like socialism questioned the entire basis of the social order. In the arts, the movement called Romanticism had entered into the feelings, and changed the outlook, of many who believed - Dickens was one of them - in the importance of cultivating the imagination and in the central place, childhood holds in human development. For them, the Romantic poet William Blake’s image of the “dark Satanic Mills” appeared frighteningly apt for places like Coketown.
The second chapter of the research talks about the first binary theme introduced in this thesis. The binary theme of fact and fancy is represented by one of the major characters in the novel - Mr Thomas Gradgrind. His utilitarian philosophy is centred in what he believes and excludes the others’ beliefs and affections. It makes him the founder of an abstract philosophy with its executants and victims. In that sense, he is a victimizer and his children and students are the victims. The executants and the followers of his views are the schoolmaster, his wife Mrs Gradgrind and his student Bitzer. All these characters are analysed in the second chapter and their roles in the plot of the novel are pinpointed therein. Literary speaking, it can be argued that all these characters, including Mr Gradgrind himself were victims of inapplicable theory. Some of them have realized the inaccuracy of such a philosophy and some have not.
The founder of the utilitarian philosophy in the novel, Mr Gradgrind himself has discovered his follies in applying a single sole piece of mind. When he discovers his mistake, he feels remorse and decides to undergo atonement. To do that, he protects his daughter by keeping her home as soon as she seeks his shelter although he is aware of her being a wife and her husband seeks her return to his house. Furthermore, Mr Gradgrind decides to protect his son Tom by fleeing him away out of justice although he is aware of his being a thief and that he is wanted by law. Briefly, due to the drastic change, some critics have argued that there are two Gradgrinds in the novel; the hard-headed utilitarian harsh inadequate character at the beginning of the novel who sees to it that everything should go along with his principles and beliefs and the other is the sympathetic adequate human character after the confession of his daughter to him. Such dramatic change makes the readers unsympathetic to the old ways of thinking of Mr Gradgrind and more sympathetic to his character and his newly humanitarian household perspectives.
Mr Gradgrind sets up a school for his own children and the children of his town, where his philosophy is taught by the schoolmaster M’Choakumchild aided by his wife. That system of education is another failure of the Utilitarian industrial system and concepts. But the idea of establishing a school for teaching children is a sign of the good intuition that Mr Gradgrind has and an anticipation of his ability to change and be altruistic to his family and the others around him. That anticipation came true later in the novel when he changes completely to the opposite.
The way of combining ‘fact’ and ‘fancy’ in one binary theme, in the second chapter of this work, shows that life can not go with either one of them without the other. They are integrated and interrelated. The industrial influence on the characters, such as Mr Gradgrind, the beliefs and systems is apparent. The Victorian period was the period of drastic changes and instability in human behaviours, thoughts and laws. For that, Mr Gradgrind positively changes and abandons his old way of thinking.
The third chapter of this research deals with the binary theme of manufacturers and labourers in Hard Times where the first are represented by Josiah Bounderby and the latter by Stephen Blackpool, Rachael and their fellow workers. Mr Bounderby is a rich snobbish egocentric person who thinks of himself as the ideal person to be imitated or followed. He frequently talks about how he was born in a ditch and the unauthentic story of his mother’s abandon to him. He boasts that he raised himself of an indigent childhood into a very successful manufacturer to make an example of himself for the self-made man. He disowns the grace of his parents and other people who favoured him to become a glorious person. Like Mr Gradgrind (the one at the beginning of the novel), he believes and applies his own thoughts and principles and neglects the others’. On the other hand, unlike Mr Gradgrind, he does not change or even reviews his beliefs.
Mr Bounderby understands neither himself nor the others. He is intolerable and pitied by his surroundings. He is selfish in the sense that he misuses and misunderstands others and their affections. Moreover, he misjudges all the people including his parents and wife. Bounderby appreciates his industrial town – Coketown – and factories more than humans. People to him mean more steam-engine power and the workers are people who venture to gain more wealth of his. They are ‘thinged’ and described as ‘hands’ to signify that what is important to him is their hands and not their intellects.
The workers such as Stephen and Rachael are other victims of the industrial revolution. They indulge in donkey work from the early morning in a very gloomy atmosphere where they produce much money to be used by the others. They receive pennies and their masters earn loads of income. Labourers are neither appreciated nor given their own rights, even the civil or social rights such as, the divorce of Stephen from his drunken wife or his remarriage to his beloved Rachael. Life is made complicated for them and they have no choice of changing the existing situation. The industrial impact on this theme is obvious in creating the class distinction of manufacturers or the high rich class and the labourers or lower class. It is also manifested in the rights which both of them receive. Industrial revolution weakens the social ties and strengthens the materialistic utilitarian aims.
‘Manufacturers’ and ‘labourers’ in this thesis are combined into one binary theme due to their correlation. They depend on each others for their wages and livings. Dickens drags our attention to the relationship between these two classes and how each one of them deals with the other. He criticizes the class-based distinction during the Victorian period and how people are drifted by materialism and industrialism.
The fourth chapter in this thesis discusses the other binary theme of individualism and socialism in Hard Times. Individuality is almost synonymous with selfishness and is represented by certain characters and deeds. In that chapter, the major characters are divided into two groups; a group of altruistic people who are of great benefit and help to their society and surroundings and a group of selfish individual people who think and act on their own. The first group is embodied in the characters of Mr Gradgrind, Louisa, Sissy Jupe, Stephen Blackpool and Rachael and the latter is embodied in the characters of Mr Bounderby, Tom and Bitzer. Mr Gradgrind is classified in the first group in spite of the fact that in the beginning of the novel he was moulding his children and students according to his own utilitarian philosophy, but for most of his acts, he is an altruistic. The first group symbolizes the sense of socialism rather than individualism. They tend to build up and keep the social ties and values. They are sympathetic, affectionate and helpful. The other group is the individualist selfish people who never sympathize nor bear any traits of help to their society. They run after their own businesses and self-interests. They exploit the others to fulfil their goals and never care for the consequences of their acts.
Other institutions discussed in the fourth chapter are the broad concept of family, the Sleary Horsemanship and the trade union. These three organizations represent cooperative people who contribute to benefit the community. In general, family is the origin of all institutions and in Hard Times, three outstanding families are introduced to the readers. They are the families of Mr Gradgrind, Bounderby and Stephen. The members of these families are effective and helpful only when they cooperate or coordinate, whereas the familial role is shattered by the individuality of these members. Throughout the novel, it is noticeable that the members of the three families are not inseparable and the families are not united. They do not cultivate the sense of taking care of each others or being united. That results from individual self interest of some members only. The horsemanship is an institution which is made up of a group of acrobat and entertainers whose main aim is to amuse normal people and workers who spend their day hours toiling in factories and industrialised, suppressed settings. They prove to be beneficial to the others when helping Tom to flee away from Bitzer’s hands. The third institution is the trade union, which is intended to defend the workers’ rights and obtain them. On the contrary, it is represented in the novel as an organization that scatters its members due to the conduct of an individual; namely the organizer Slackbridge.
In brief, throughout the novel, Dickens criticizes individuality and its consequences. On the other hand, he exalts the cooperative work which leads to the communal benefit. He emphasizes the industrial role in scattering the members of the society and weakening the social ties and values. According to his perceivable view, people were busy rushing after their own individual interests and neglecting all the other necessities.
The fifth chapter of this thesis focuses on industrialization as the initiator of the other themes in Hard Times. That chapter historically looks back at the circumstances which led to and accompanied the industrial revolution. That revolution created many drastic changes at the level of politics, economy, social values, population and living. The novel portrays the evils of industrialism in the form of the industrial town – Coketown, the industrial mill-owners and manufacturers in the embodiment of Bounderby as well as the effects of the industrial revolution upon education, social ties and values.
In the novel, Coketown is given a depressing gloomy dusky description where it is a place for work and individuality only. Workers have headed for it from several other areas to look for job opportunities. Thus, they are not connected or acquainted with each other. Families have become scattered because they toil in factories for most of the day and everybody looks after his own self-interests. The gap grows wider, either between the family members, neighbours, workers or their employers.
On the level of education, students are taught figures, economics, materialistic elements and so forth. The old ideologies have been put aside or margined. The necessities of that time require learning such principles and sciences. Money and finance become more sacred than human or social issues. It is the industrial revolution which created and kindled such a trend of materialistic and utilitarian concepts.
Hard Times is not the only novel by Dickens to criticize or attack industrialism, but it is the harshest in representing the negative part of it. As it has been mentioned earlier, Schwarzbach states that:
The industrial system, which encompasses the philosophy of the masters as well as the process and routine of factory work, is identified as a prime source of social evil, and represented as root cause of England’s collective and individual social and spiritual malaise.[فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ]

For that, as Schwarzbach believes, Dickens believes that the industrial revolution was the evil of all negative changes in the Victorian period. Hence, he severely attacked that revolution in Hard Times. The researcher depicts that aspect in the novel and focuses on industrialization as the central theme in the selected novel.
It is hoped that the observations made here will add a new dimension, however small, to the understanding of Hard Times and that the facts and arguments presented here will stimulate further research on the thematic structure and the other closely related aspects of this great novel.

[فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ]Schwarzbach, p. 143.

[فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ]
منتدى الإيوان
[فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ]

27/Mar/2010, 12:08 PM	#1 (permalink)
د. عبد الله بن محمود عضو اللجنة الاستشارية للمنتدى تاريخ التسجيل: Jan 2009 المشاركات: 457 Thanks: 102 Thanked 85 Times in 44 Posts معدل تقييم المستوى: 4	دراسة الفكرة المحورية لرواية أوقات عصيبة الباحث: أ / جمعان عوض الله السلميالدرجة العلمية: ماجستير الجامعة: صنعاءالكلية: الآداببلد الدراسة: اليمنتاريخ الإقرار: 2006 Preface Never before did Charles Dickens receive as much ovation from literary critics as he has during the last few decades. It has, in fact, considerably increased in recent times. Some of his sincere faithful descendants, family members and admirers have pooled their human and material resources together for keeping him alive through his heritage. Sadly, the news of the death of his last grandson, Cedric Dickens, a couple of months ago has deprived Dickens’s admirers of one of the leftover threads leading to Dickens’s world. His works are not only read all over the world, but have been an integral part of university curriculum. So much has been written on Dickens that he is the centre of a thriving corpus of academic knowledge. Among the most cited authors of all times, he is ranked immediately after William Shakespeare. In his writings, he emerged as a liberal reformer of his age who was concerned with the problems arising out of the industrial revolution. He appealed to various classes of society from aristocrats to labourers. He appealed to intellectuals and simple people, at different levels of emotion. He is one of the great pivotal authors of England, embedded deeply in the national consciousness, and expresses the milieu of the people of England, especially of the middle and lower classes, in a way that is very widely admired. masterpiece. Its readers are grateful to F. R. Leavis for highlighting the principal merits of this novel which it deserves. He gave the novel a very high prestigious rank and since then, his appreciation has attracted a great deal of attention of critics, reviewers and research scholars alike. This research work is an attempt to analyze, interpret and evaluate the novel; and most specifically the central theme of the novel. The entire work has been divided into six chapters where each chapter deals with a binary theme and ultimately the fifth chapter discusses industrialism as the central theme which is the source, the fountain head, of all the themes. It is hoped that this thesis will add a new dimension to the understanding, appreciation and evaluation of this novel. Concluding Remarks This concluding chapter is intended to summarize, highlight and inter-relate the observations made in the earlier chapters. At the outset, the first chapter presents an introduction with a description of Hard Times, a short biography of its author Charles Dickens, the motives behind writing the novel, a brief idea of the contemporary historical circumstances to Charles Dickens himself and the publication of that novel. It also attempts to have a survey of scholarship and delineates what the critics have said about Dickens, the novel and its themes. Hard Times is one of the greatest novels authored by Charles Dickens. He is one of the most popular and beloved writers who ever lived. After Shakespeare, he is the most written-about author in English literature. His novels and tales catered to a vast and intensely loyal audience. More than just an entertainer, Dickens used his enormous popularity to attack injustice and strengthen the sympathies of his readers towards the poor and the helpless, for orphans and outcast persons. He lent his active support to a variety of philanthropic endeavours. The problem of the education of the poor, particularly children, engaged his attention. The evils of industrialism shed their light upon the entire system, including education, society, values and even the way of thinking. That makes industrialisation the major theme of Hard Times. Victorian England was the scene of enormous, far-reaching changes, in the nature and organization of work, in population growth, and changes in the very landscape itself, brought about by the railway and the growth of entirely new industrial cities and towns, like Coketown, the melancholic gloomy industrial town described in Hard Times. When Dickens was born in 1812, England had, by and large, an agricultural economy. The great majority of the population passed their lives in the country, working in the fields and farms as their ancestors had done before them. A small class of landowners held much of the political power, presiding over a small electorate of propertied men. England was in continuity with the England of past ages, a hierarchical society based on hereditary privilege with unquestioned traditions, beliefs, and a settled order. By 1854, however, when Dickens published Hard Times, conditions were quite different. Half of the people lived in towns or cities due to the exodus from the suburbs and rural areas into industrial towns to look for new jobs. Marvellous new machines, like the power loom operated by workers such as Stephen Blackpool, replaced many tasks formerly performed by hand, increasing the country’s productivity but also causing unrest and unemployment. For the toilers in the factories, traditional rural ways were being left behind for repetitive, monotonous, and often health-destroying new routines of work. Whenever humanitarian objections were raised to conditions in their factories, the new class of industrialists - caricatured in Hard Times in the person of Josiah Bounderby - often turned to the doctrines of political economy, especially the idea of the ‘hard-headed’ outlook of Utilitarianism. In Hard Times, Bounderby’s friend and ally Thomas Gradgrind is shown upholding some of the views, heavily satirized by Dickens, of political economy and Utilitarianism. By 1854, portions of England’s working class had formed into ‘combinations’ or unions, which used strikes or the threat of strikes as a way to force employers to improve wages and conditions. Working-class militancy in England had its nineteenth-century origin in a movement called Chartism, to which Dickens’s response was ambivalent. He sympathized with the sufferings and the hunger that motivated workers but feared the potential for violence and social disorder accompanying Chartist agitation. The rhetoric of the leaders of such unions is mocked in Hard Times in the speeches of Slackbridge. In the intellectual and cultural spheres, the England of 1854 was very different from the one Dickens was born into. New and disturbing challenges to old certainties were in the air; Darwin’s evolutionary ideas were soon to undermine religious faith, and new ideologies like socialism questioned the entire basis of the social order. In the arts, the movement called Romanticism had entered into the feelings, and changed the outlook, of many who believed - Dickens was one of them - in the importance of cultivating the imagination and in the central place, childhood holds in human development. For them, the Romantic poet William Blake’s image of the “dark Satanic Mills” appeared frighteningly apt for places like Coketown. The second chapter of the research talks about the first binary theme introduced in this thesis. The binary theme of fact and fancy is represented by one of the major characters in the novel - Mr Thomas Gradgrind. His utilitarian philosophy is centred in what he believes and excludes the others’ beliefs and affections. It makes him the founder of an abstract philosophy with its executants and victims. In that sense, he is a victimizer and his children and students are the victims. The executants and the followers of his views are the schoolmaster, his wife Mrs Gradgrind and his student Bitzer. All these characters are analysed in the second chapter and their roles in the plot of the novel are pinpointed therein. Literary speaking, it can be argued that all these characters, including Mr Gradgrind himself were victims of inapplicable theory. Some of them have realized the inaccuracy of such a philosophy and some have not. The founder of the utilitarian philosophy in the novel, Mr Gradgrind himself has discovered his follies in applying a single sole piece of mind. When he discovers his mistake, he feels remorse and decides to undergo atonement. To do that, he protects his daughter by keeping her home as soon as she seeks his shelter although he is aware of her being a wife and her husband seeks her return to his house. Furthermore, Mr Gradgrind decides to protect his son Tom by fleeing him away out of justice although he is aware of his being a thief and that he is wanted by law. Briefly, due to the drastic change, some critics have argued that there are two Gradgrinds in the novel; the hard-headed utilitarian harsh inadequate character at the beginning of the novel who sees to it that everything should go along with his principles and beliefs and the other is the sympathetic adequate human character after the confession of his daughter to him. Such dramatic change makes the readers unsympathetic to the old ways of thinking of Mr Gradgrind and more sympathetic to his character and his newly humanitarian household perspectives. Mr Gradgrind sets up a school for his own children and the children of his town, where his philosophy is taught by the schoolmaster M’Choakumchild aided by his wife. That system of education is another failure of the Utilitarian industrial system and concepts. But the idea of establishing a school for teaching children is a sign of the good intuition that Mr Gradgrind has and an anticipation of his ability to change and be altruistic to his family and the others around him. That anticipation came true later in the novel when he changes completely to the opposite. The way of combining ‘fact’ and ‘fancy’ in one binary theme, in the second chapter of this work, shows that life can not go with either one of them without the other. They are integrated and interrelated. The industrial influence on the characters, such as Mr Gradgrind, the beliefs and systems is apparent. The Victorian period was the period of drastic changes and instability in human behaviours, thoughts and laws. For that, Mr Gradgrind positively changes and abandons his old way of thinking. The third chapter of this research deals with the binary theme of manufacturers and labourers in Hard Times where the first are represented by Josiah Bounderby and the latter by Stephen Blackpool, Rachael and their fellow workers. Mr Bounderby is a rich snobbish egocentric person who thinks of himself as the ideal person to be imitated or followed. He frequently talks about how he was born in a ditch and the unauthentic story of his mother’s abandon to him. He boasts that he raised himself of an indigent childhood into a very successful manufacturer to make an example of himself for the self-made man. He disowns the grace of his parents and other people who favoured him to become a glorious person. Like Mr Gradgrind (the one at the beginning of the novel), he believes and applies his own thoughts and principles and neglects the others’. On the other hand, unlike Mr Gradgrind, he does not change or even reviews his beliefs. Mr Bounderby understands neither himself nor the others. He is intolerable and pitied by his surroundings. He is selfish in the sense that he misuses and misunderstands others and their affections. Moreover, he misjudges all the people including his parents and wife. Bounderby appreciates his industrial town – Coketown – and factories more than humans. People to him mean more steam-engine power and the workers are people who venture to gain more wealth of his. They are ‘thinged’ and described as ‘hands’ to signify that what is important to him is their hands and not their intellects. The workers such as Stephen and Rachael are other victims of the industrial revolution. They indulge in donkey work from the early morning in a very gloomy atmosphere where they produce much money to be used by the others. They receive pennies and their masters earn loads of income. Labourers are neither appreciated nor given their own rights, even the civil or social rights such as, the divorce of Stephen from his drunken wife or his remarriage to his beloved Rachael. Life is made complicated for them and they have no choice of changing the existing situation. The industrial impact on this theme is obvious in creating the class distinction of manufacturers or the high rich class and the labourers or lower class. It is also manifested in the rights which both of them receive. Industrial revolution weakens the social ties and strengthens the materialistic utilitarian aims. ‘Manufacturers’ and ‘labourers’ in this thesis are combined into one binary theme due to their correlation. They depend on each others for their wages and livings. Dickens drags our attention to the relationship between these two classes and how each one of them deals with the other. He criticizes the class-based distinction during the Victorian period and how people are drifted by materialism and industrialism. The fourth chapter in this thesis discusses the other binary theme of individualism and socialism in Hard Times. Individuality is almost synonymous with selfishness and is represented by certain characters and deeds. In that chapter, the major characters are divided into two groups; a group of altruistic people who are of great benefit and help to their society and surroundings and a group of selfish individual people who think and act on their own. The first group is embodied in the characters of Mr Gradgrind, Louisa, Sissy Jupe, Stephen Blackpool and Rachael and the latter is embodied in the characters of Mr Bounderby, Tom and Bitzer. Mr Gradgrind is classified in the first group in spite of the fact that in the beginning of the novel he was moulding his children and students according to his own utilitarian philosophy, but for most of his acts, he is an altruistic. The first group symbolizes the sense of socialism rather than individualism. They tend to build up and keep the social ties and values. They are sympathetic, affectionate and helpful. The other group is the individualist selfish people who never sympathize nor bear any traits of help to their society. They run after their own businesses and self-interests. They exploit the others to fulfil their goals and never care for the consequences of their acts. Other institutions discussed in the fourth chapter are the broad concept of family, the Sleary Horsemanship and the trade union. These three organizations represent cooperative people who contribute to benefit the community. In general, family is the origin of all institutions and in Hard Times, three outstanding families are introduced to the readers. They are the families of Mr Gradgrind, Bounderby and Stephen. The members of these families are effective and helpful only when they cooperate or coordinate, whereas the familial role is shattered by the individuality of these members. Throughout the novel, it is noticeable that the members of the three families are not inseparable and the families are not united. They do not cultivate the sense of taking care of each others or being united. That results from individual self interest of some members only. The horsemanship is an institution which is made up of a group of acrobat and entertainers whose main aim is to amuse normal people and workers who spend their day hours toiling in factories and industrialised, suppressed settings. They prove to be beneficial to the others when helping Tom to flee away from Bitzer’s hands. The third institution is the trade union, which is intended to defend the workers’ rights and obtain them. On the contrary, it is represented in the novel as an organization that scatters its members due to the conduct of an individual; namely the organizer Slackbridge. In brief, throughout the novel, Dickens criticizes individuality and its consequences. On the other hand, he exalts the cooperative work which leads to the communal benefit. He emphasizes the industrial role in scattering the members of the society and weakening the social ties and values. According to his perceivable view, people were busy rushing after their own individual interests and neglecting all the other necessities. The fifth chapter of this thesis focuses on industrialization as the initiator of the other themes in Hard Times. That chapter historically looks back at the circumstances which led to and accompanied the industrial revolution. That revolution created many drastic changes at the level of politics, economy, social values, population and living. The novel portrays the evils of industrialism in the form of the industrial town – Coketown, the industrial mill-owners and manufacturers in the embodiment of Bounderby as well as the effects of the industrial revolution upon education, social ties and values. In the novel, Coketown is given a depressing gloomy dusky description where it is a place for work and individuality only. Workers have headed for it from several other areas to look for job opportunities. Thus, they are not connected or acquainted with each other. Families have become scattered because they toil in factories for most of the day and everybody looks after his own self-interests. The gap grows wider, either between the family members, neighbours, workers or their employers. On the level of education, students are taught figures, economics, materialistic elements and so forth. The old ideologies have been put aside or margined. The necessities of that time require learning such principles and sciences. Money and finance become more sacred than human or social issues. It is the industrial revolution which created and kindled such a trend of materialistic and utilitarian concepts. Hard Times is not the only novel by Dickens to criticize or attack industrialism, but it is the harshest in representing the negative part of it. As it has been mentioned earlier, Schwarzbach states that: The industrial system, which encompasses the philosophy of the masters as well as the process and routine of factory work, is identified as a prime source of social evil, and represented as root cause of England’s collective and individual social and spiritual malaise.[فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ] For that, as Schwarzbach believes, Dickens believes that the industrial revolution was the evil of all negative changes in the Victorian period. Hence, he severely attacked that revolution in Hard Times. The researcher depicts that aspect in the novel and focuses on industrialization as the central theme in the selected novel. It is hoped that the observations made here will add a new dimension, however small, to the understanding of Hard Times and that the facts and arguments presented here will stimulate further research on the thematic structure and the other closely related aspects of this great novel. [فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ]Schwarzbach, p. 143. [فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ] منتدى الإيوان [فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ] آخر تعديل بواسطة د. عبد الله بن محمود ، 17/May/2010 الساعة 12:42 PM

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