Hard Times (Cyclopedia of Literary Places)
At a glance:
- Author: Charles Dickens
- First Published: 1854
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Social realism
- Time of Work: 1840’s
- Genres: Long fiction, Social realism
- Subjects: Teaching or teachers, Values, Nineteenth century, Social issues, Education or educators, Mistaken or secret identity, England or English people, Robbery or robbers, Politicians, Reformers, Labor unions, Satire, Victorian era or Victorianism
- Locales: England
Places Discussed
Coketown. Fictional factory town in northern England that offers nothing that is not “severely workful.” Coketown is center of Dickens’s social criticism. As “a triumph of fact,” it is grim, unnatural, and mechanical, from the polluted purple river to the identical laborers who all “do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow.” Forested with the smokestacks of its textile mills, it is a “sulky blotch upon the prospect,” abandoned by the sun even in sunny midsummer. Its tenements, such as Stephen...
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