Hard Times: an ecocritical reading

Abstract

The present study is concerned with the environmental and cultural change that occurred in Victorian London as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, which has altered the relationship between humans and their ecosystem in an unprecedented and irreversible way. Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times suggests that the industrial productive system was detaching humans not only from the natural environment around them, but also from the emotional and imaginative sphere inside of them. Hard Times repeatedly alludes to the parallel between children’s impoverished upbringing in the name of fact and rationality, and adults’ prosaic conditions of life, in a world where it seems that there is no space left for genuine feelings, pleasure, and of course, nature. If children are raised in an increasingly industrial, dull, and alienating environment, and if they are deprived of all those fables and magical stories which are always full of natural elements, where can they learn about nature? How can they establish a respectful relationship with nature when they become adults? The first chapter offers an alternative reading of Hard Times, by focusing on those excerpts from the novel that describe the changing natural landscape in the fictional industrial city of Coketown; the second chapter attempts to chart the allegorical meaning of the novel, and analyzes the parallel between absence of nature and absence of fancy in the new industrial society; in the last chapter the focus shifts to the battle between the country and the city, which have been traditionally associated to nature and culture, respectively.