Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsea, England to a poor family that struggled financially and moved frequently. As a young boy, Dickens worked in a blacking factory after his father was sent to debtors' prison. He later became a journalist and author, writing many famous novels that were initially published serially. His novels, such as Hard Times, satirized social issues and criticized aspects of society, industry, and family life in Victorian England. Hard Times specifically addressed themes of industrialization, utilitarian philosophy, and the failures of families and domestic life under these influences. The novel is divided into three parts that represent sowing, reaping, and garnering to reflect its examination of cause and effect

1. Charles Dickens

3. Personal Life:
 Born- 7 February 1812 at Portsea, near
Portsmouth
 Father- John Dickens, a clerk
 His family moved twice before moving to
London
 Constant moving became familiar to Dickens
 Dickens's father was always in debt, and it
was as his carelessness with money that they
were forced to move again.
 In 1824, John Dickens was arrested for debt
and sent to prison.

4. Personal Life:
 1824-his first employment- six shillings a
week, for sealing and labeling pots of
blacking
 After two years, he joined the firm of
Ellis and Blackmore as a solicitor’s clerk
 His family was still not settled, having
moved again three times in as many
years
 His family was always on the verge of
economic collapse.

5. Personal Life:
 1836, Charles married Catherine
Hogarth, 1858-separated
 He wrote 15 novels in addition to many
humorous sketches and stories and five
Christmas books, as well as work for
operas and dramatic productions.
 Died on 9 June 1870 at the age of 58.

6. Historical background:
 In the year of Dickens's birth there were riots
in England, carried out by the Luddites who
opposed the introduction of factory machinery
and the advance of industrialisation. They
were unemployed men who thought that their
troubles were mainly caused by the arrival of
the machines which for them represented the
Industrial Revolution.
 The two themes of machines against men and
of hungry workers recur in a number of key
scenes in Dickens’s Hard Times.

7. The Work of Charles Dickens:
 In the four years from 1838 to 1841,
Dickens wrote four major novels: Oliver
Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old
Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.
 His novels were initially serialised in
either monthly or weekly parts.
Serialisation was a common practice in
the 19th century. It was a technique used
by publishers to increase sales. He used
it with Hard Times as well.

8. Dickens the novelist:
 He can weave plots of such complexity as to
ensure a sense of mystery and uncertainty all
along the way.
 Dickens devoted particular energies to his
production of energies to his production of
novels of quite bewildering length in an
endeavor to please and satisfy the reading
public so he had to develop the technique of
suspense to a fine art.
 A further quality is his gift of fascinating
characterization. His plots are admired as the
product of a fertile and active imagination.

9. Dickens the Novelist:
 In many of Dickens' novels fancy provides a
haven of imagination opposed to an alienating
reality. Dickensian innocents such as Little Dorrit
and Paul Dombey find solace in worlds
dominated by poverty or finance. Wemmick in
Great Expectations builds his own fantastic and
ludic castle in the heart of London in opposition to
the commercial life of the city. Hard Times is
Dickens' most didactic novel, taking on directly
the problems he continually returns to in his
essays and journalism : those of industrialism and
utilitarianism.

10. Dickens’s the novelist:
 His characters are vividly and cogently
drawn.
 He employed humor in his novels. This
feature is closely connected with
characterization, but his humor is of
more varied kind, there are instances of
authorial comments, the large comic
scenes of simple confusion, the wit of
dialogues, are all part of rich humor of
Dickens’ novels.
 His novels address the variations and
contradictions of the Victorian family

11. Dickens’s the Novelist:
 Dickens’s has a reputation as satirist
and critic of society. He takes those
institutions respected by the Victorians
and exposes their inadequacies and
failings.
 He attacks Parliament, marriage and the
family, philanthropic societies,
education, the law and the church.
 In 1841, he wrote to his friend and
biographer, Forster, ‘How radical I am

12. Dickens the Novelist:
 Margaret Oliphant describes
Dickens innately a "class writer, the
historian and representative of one
circle [the working class) in the
many ranks of our social scale" .
His career, wholly considered, does
explore the lower classes to a
greater degree than did most
writers of the century.

13. CHARLES DICKENS AND THE
VICTORIAN MIDDLE-CLASS
FAMILY
 Dickens has been glorified as a writer of
home life, Dickens devotes his energy
and talent to scrutinizing the middleclass
family structure in his novels.
 His portrayals of middle-class
households are full of perplexing
contradictions.
 Dickens works the complexity of
Victorian middle-class family structure
into his novels.

14. CHARLES DICKENS AND THE
VICTORIAN MIDDLE-CLASS
FAMILY
 His novels show how completely he
understands the major familial issues facing
the newly powerful middle classes.
 A reviewer said in 1846 in The Morning
Chronicle, "he is so particularly a writer of
home life, a delineator of household gods, and
a painter of domestic scenes.”
 Throughout his works and his life, Dickens
paid searching attention to the nature of
families, viewing the family as an epitome of
the world.

15.  Dickens's works are always full of domestic
scenes.
 A close examination of Victorian families
described by other Victorian novelists proves
that Dickens's childhood trauma is typical of
the nightmares shared by many lower middle-
class children. Jane Eyre in Jane Evre.
Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and Becky
Sharp in Vanity Fair are all portrayed as
sensitive young children, feeling isolated and
disoriented either by a separation or by a
discontinuation from their families. One must
not diminish the depths of Dickens's anguish
as a victimized boy.

16.  Dickens can be seen as idealizing home and
woman in the Victorian age: as George
Orwell says "What Dickens seems to be
doing, as usual, is to reach out for an
idealized version of the existing thing“
 Dickens writes about the abuses of urban life.
 In Hard Times, Dickens appears to abuse the
industrialists of his time both in their attitudes
towards life and humanity, and in the
monstrous factories that they create.

17. Hard Times:
 Perhaps Dickens’s certainly his most
influential novel was Hard Times which was
published in 1854. Hard Times was based on,
and took its “tone” from, the great labor
dispute within the weaving industry in
Victorian England which has come to be
known as “The Preston Lockout of 1853-54”.
 Dickens was a follower of Thomas Carlyle and
even dedicated Hard Times to Carlyle when it
was finally published in book form in 1854.

18. Structure of Hard Times:
 The structure was dictated to some extent by the
serial form in which the novel was initially written.
 The novel has been praised for its economy of
form, that is, for the neat and compact way in
which Dickens has organised the narrative.
 He pays a good deal of attention to coherence.
 The choice of the titles of the three books
indicates a desire to draw attention to this
coherence, to make the reader aware of
continuity, of cause and effect, of
interdependence.

19. Structure:
 Novel is divided into three books/parts:
 Sowing, Reaping and Garnering
 It calls to mind the biblical words “As ye
sow, so also shall ye reap”
 These words would have been familiar
to Victorian readers.

20. Hard Times:
 Hard Times, lastly, seeks to demonstrate the
inadequacy, the artificiality, and the pretension
of claims of authority.
 in Hard Times, Dickens is most interested in
relations of power across society:
relationships between teacher and pupil,
parent and child, husband and wife, mill
owner and laborer, union leader and union
members, governors and governed, and
ultimately between the middle and working
classes.
 All these relationships are relations of unequal

21. Hard Times:
 In Hard Times, a gloomy picture of Victorian
domestic life is delineated. Both men and
women become victims of delusions and
perverted beliefs.
 A multiple family household of the working
class, represented by Mr. Sleary's circus,
emerges as Dickens's ideal picture of
domestic structure in this novel.
 In Hard Times, middle-class households are
in an even darker state.

22. Hard Times:
 Through the analysis of chaotic and confusing
domestic scenes in Hard Times, one can examine
Dickens's dilemma between idealizing domestic
life and exposing conflicts within the middle-class
household.
 The story of Hard Times is built around the
evidence of denying marriage and family. Dismal
domestic scenes are everywhere. Wives, such as
Mrs. Gradgrind, are destroyed in their own
houses; sons, such as Mr. Bounderby and Bitzer,
deny motherhood; fatherhood is lethal as in the
case of Mr. Gradgrind. Instead of presenting the
reader with an ideal middle-class household

23. Hard Times:
 Dickens pictures five family units in a state of
disruption: the Gradgrind family is perverted
under the rule of the father's practical philosophy;
Bounderby's household is desolate without love
and feelings between husband and wife; Bitzer's
home is destroyed by his desertion of his own
mother; Blackpool's home is wretched with a
drunken, unloving wife; Jupe's family is
incomplete when the father gives up his duty.
 Though bound by blood ties and marriage, the
members of these five families are emotionally
alienated in their
solitary worlds, unable to experience domestic
comfort and peace.

24. Critics on Hard Times:
 Lord Macaulay, the great English man of
letters and historian, spoke of Hard
Times in these terms, “One excessively
touching, heart-breaking passage, and
the rest sullen socialism.”
 John Ruskin- “Hard Times should be
studied with close and earnest care by
persons interested in social questions.”

25. Works Cited:
 Chen, Chao-ming. “Charles Dickens and the
Victorian middle-Class family.” 1991.
 Hyland, Dominic. York Notes on Hard Times. York
Press, 1981. Print.