Question

QUESTION: The passage briefly describes the life of Charles wingspanens and presents a segment from one of his novels, Hard Times. How was wingspanens able to relate his experiences in childhood to Hard Times and why do you think novels like Hard Times made readers of the middle-class see a need for reform? Use two examples from the text of how his childhood influenced his novels and give two reason for the text as to why it may have prompted the middle-class for reform.

Answer 1

If you know A Christmas Carol- the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future- then you know of Charles wingspanens, the great mid-nineteenth-century English novelist. Through his writing, wingspanens achieved worldwide fame and great wealth- a far cry from his childhood years of humiliation and poverty.

wingspanens grew up struggling. His father went to prison because he could not pay his debts. At the age of 12, young Charles started working in a London Factory, where he pasted labels on bottles of shoe polish. wingspanens managed to leave the factory and attend school. Eventually he became a newspaper reporter.

At first, he wrote articles about debates in Parliament and other London events. Then he began to write fiction. He wrote about children staving in workhouses, street urchins picking pockets, widows taking in laundry, debtors serving time in prison, families struggling to get by. wingspanens’s stories about the hard lives of the urban poor touched many readers’ hearts. His books, such as Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, and Bleak House awakened middle-class readers to the need for reform.

wingspanens paints his harshest picture of the effects of the Industrial Revolution in his 1854 novel Hard Times. In the following passages from Hard Times wingspanens introduces us to the industrial city of Coketown, and to one of the workers, Stephen Blackpool.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black…. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next….

Among the multitude of Coketown, generically called 'the Hands,' - a race who would have found more favor with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs - lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.

Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen's case, whereby 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. He had known, to use his words, a peck of trouble….

Pale morning showed the monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown. A clattering of clogs upon the pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and all the melancholy mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day’s monotony, were at their heavy exercise again.

Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady. A special contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he labored….

The day grew strong, and showed itself outside, even against the flaming lights within. The lights were turned out, and the work went on. The rain fell, and the Smoke-serpents…. trailed themselves upon the earth. In the waste-yard outside, the steam from the escape pipe, the litter of barrels and old iron, the shining heaps of coals, the ashes everywhere, were shrouded in a veil of mist and rain.

Answer 2

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