Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.17234/SRAZ.70.1
“Wilderness of Smoke and Brick”: Imagination of the Times in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times
Borislav Knežević
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The article examines the imagination of the present period of English society in Charles
Dickens’s novel Hard Times. This industrial novel is somewhat atypical of Dickens’s
novel writing, for its setting in a manufacturing town (the fictional Coketown). The
focus of the article is on the novel’s representation of the ideologies of the town’s
middle class (associated with political economy and utilitarianism), and on the role
of Stephen Blackpool, a working-class character, in the context of that representation.
The novel depicts a society in which large segments of the population experience
great economic, political and legal inequality, and critiques a number of middle-class
ideological attitudes, embodied in the characters of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah
Bounderby. The article discusses the importance of the novel’s image of the town’s
industrial society as a “wilderness”; such figurative language has the effect of defamiliarizing
the middle-class social ideologies in the industrial society of Coketown.
The article also examines the way the novel addresses its work of defamiliarizing the
middle-class ideologies to the middle-class readership.
Keywords
Charles Dickens; industrial novel; middle-class ideology; utilitarianism
Hrčak ID:
345575
URI
Publication date:
18.12.2025.
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