CBSE Class 10 Answered

Charles Dickens’s novel ‘Hard Times’, published in the year 1854, is strongly critical of the effects of industrial capitalism on people’s lives. The novel tells the story of Coketown, a fictitious industrial town, as a grim place full of machinery, smoking chimneys, rivers polluted purple and identical, monotonous buildings. Workers in this town are known as ‘hands’, as if they have no other identity than as operators of machines. Through ‘Hard Times’, Dickens critiques not only the capitalist greed for profits but also the ideas that reduced human beings into simple production instruments.