Hard Times

8 Pages 2006 Words

The novel “Hard Times” written by Charles Dickens is a reflection of the changing ideas established during his time. Dickens’ characters essentially are personifications of changing ideas in psychology and political thought. Each one of his characters represents a different principle and its relationship to the general public. Both Stephen Blackpool and Thomas Gradgrind, Jr. for the most part characterize ideas of significant philosophers around the time of Dickens. Stephen Blackpool represents the abused worker, suffering under capitalism as expressed by Karl Marx. Blackpool symbolizes the oppressed working class of the 19th century in Dickens’ novel Hard Times. He is exposed as a sincere, hard-working weaver employed by the factory proprietor and proclaimed “self-made man” Josiah Bounderby.
Through the course of the plot, Blackpool is found to have suffered many trials in life together with a matrimony to a drunk and the ill-fated love of a woman he cannot wed. He is even unwanted and disliked by his own class because of his denial to join an union with his fellow factory workers due to his belief that the trade union rebel is a fake prophet. In the end he defends the employees against thoughtless words spoken by Bounderby about them, and ends up losing his occupation for that.
Blackpool is Marx’s representation of the fraud of the employee by capitalism. Blackpool is the first wounded of the labor cause. He leads from his beginning a miserable life. “Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that very life has its roses and thorns; there seemed however, to have been a misadventure of mistake in Stephen’s case, where by somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own.” (Hard Times, pg. 60). Stephen has not known any magnificence in his life. His job is all he has, but that is not his obsession. He ...