Beginning Of The Second Extract example essay topic

Two Extracts From Hard Times by Charles Dickens These two extracts describe a very significant point in the history of Britain, the industrial revolution. This was not in any sense a revolution that occurred overnight but the gradual warping of acres of beautiful countryside into barren industrial wastelands as those portrayed in these extracts. Many people believed that the revolution put Britain on its feet and was a very positive and resourceful change to occur in our nation but there were also the people who thought negatively about this whole rapid change sweeping through the land. Dickens was not sceptical about the influx of machinery that was beginning to dominate our countryside; in these two extracts he is only trying to show that these industrial towns were changing peoples way of life.

I believe that his main aim is to emphasise the fact that this change was awful and it ruined lives and vast tracts of countryside and I think Dickens has described these cities and people in a very atmospheric and menacing way using a lot of description but mainly metaphors that compare the shapes of the town to various hellish imagery. The passage does exaggerate the bleakness of the city in some points of the extract such as the river running black with dye but maybe this is an insight into the future of cities such as Coketown The people seem to progress from being happy farmers to drones, stuck in the monotony of industrial life, entrapped in the life that they lead. Hellish imagery seems to be a recurring theme throughout the two extracts. In the first three lines the word red is repeated three times to emphasise the heat.

The metaphor concerning the face of the savage makes the chimney seem aggressive and hostile. The smoke that churns out of the chimneys trail on for ever like a serpent signifying the fact that this town could stay the same for ever, with generations living and dying with the same chimneys burning the same materials and producing the same smoke for centuries into the future, the town seems to have continuity but it offers no variation to the workers lives. It seems that the future of these people who inhabit this dreadful town is set in stone and they are bound to their relentless lives by the sinister factory owners who have no face. Coketown is so full of activity any time of the week, night or day, that it has taken on its own mystic personality in the way that Dickens refers to the city as it, assuming that it has some kind of underlying life force that powers it from deep within. The extracts are written in a way that is very sensual; there are stimuli within the extracts for sight, sound, smell and touch that make the poem more vivid and immediate. The piles of buildings that rattle and tremble seem to be alive with the commotion of the workers inside.

These 24-7 factories are very unnerving because they show that unlike the traditional countryside, if you want peace and quiet you wait till the evening and go for a walk, but in Coketown even the night offers no peace for the workers desperately in need of rest. The last sentence of the first extract arouses pathos in the reader who is explained the meaninglessness of the workers lives who, had they no watch or calendar, would not know how old they were or what day it was because they couldnt differentiate the days in their own lives because they were all the same. Individuality is killed off by the need for work and the workers lose their backgrounds, their families, their patriotism, their morals, their beliefs, everything that may have made them a person and not a hand has been swallowed up by the gluttony of Coketown. In the beginning of the second extract we can see that simple things that bring us pleasure or make it a good day for us can make the day so much worse for the people of Coketown. For example, the sunshine does not make the day nice or happy, it beats down on the haze surrounding the town and heats up the streets to almost a hellish extent making the occupants lethargic and lazy, but the workers cannot slack because they are tired, they must work to feed their families and so the sun brings no relief to the people of Coketown. Dickenss bleak descriptions show that nature has been eradicated and it no longer has a place in our ever-expanding society.

Through the passage the immediate, simple and direct statements get through to us one after the other in a long sequence that makes up the passage, at the end we begin to contemplate our place in society and these two extracts give us a very good insight into Dickenss feelings about people stuck in a never-ending cycle and they leave us thinking about ours.