scholarly journals A Reading of Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854) As a Crime Novel

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-199
Author(s):  
Lina Alzouabi
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Economic Benefit ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Divorce Law ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The Rich

This study explores how Charles Dickens presents a panoramic picture of social and moral crimes, criminals, victims and the causes as well as consequences of criminality in his novel Hard Times (1854). By employing Collins' Dickens and Crime (1964), the article provides a reading of Dickens' Hard Times as a crime novel, arguing that this novel is not only a social commentary on England in the Victorian era for the purpose of achieving social reform at the time. It is also a crime novel, portraying different types of crimes with various motives and criminals from different backgrounds and classes. Gradgrind, a follower of the utilitarian philosophy, manipulates his daughter Louisa into marrying the capitalist Bounderby for social and economic benefit, which, as a result, gets her to be exploited by Harthouse. In addition, Gradgrind's philosophy has affected his son Tom who has turned into an idle and selfish person, stealing the bank and indicting Stephen and indirectly causing the latter's death. Stephen is also a victim of the capitalist society and the Divorce Law, as only the rich have been entitled to divorce. By investigating Dickens' Hard Times as a crime novel, the study attempts to provide new insights into reading Dickens' novels at the present time, arguing that they can be reread as crime novels that intriguingly portray crimes, criminals, motives and the dire consequences of crime.  

scholarly journals Ten books

2007 ◽  
Vol 191 (6) ◽  
pp. 567-570
Author(s):  
Allan Beveridge
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
The World ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Mind

In the novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens gives his views on education. His character Mr Gradgrind believes in ‘facts’ and is suspicious of the imagination. All we need to know about the world, he maintains, can be reduced to simple facts. Dickens shows that such a philosophy leads to the impoverishment of the mind and to the weakening of ethical reasoning. Today it seems that the descendants of Mr Gradgrind are still in charge. The main psychiatric library where I work has been closed. It is argued that we can obtain all the ‘facts’ we need from the internet. The notion that books might have more to offer than prosaic detail, that they reflect the rich diversity of human experience, seems alien to the modern-day Gradgrinds.

scholarly journals Exploring the Mechanical Life in Literature through Marxist Theory

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 932-939
Author(s):  
Cristina Guarneri
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Mechanical Characteristics ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Environmental Setting ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Hard Times

The Victorian Era of writings of works such as Charles Dickens Hard Times used the social and environmental setting by which the characters live in; it is created by a philosophy that adds fuel to sustain the advancement of industrialization. The philosophy mirrors the mechanical characteristics of industrialization and how they are expressed is of great importance to the mechanical perceptions, such as objective utilitarianism. The mechanization that is found in the lives of the characters has an evil presence of depriving them of human dignity by living a mechanical lifestyle. It was the mechanical lifestyle that can be explained through Marxist theory to explain the key characteristics of the Industrial Era and its importance to materialism, as it represented political power. Marxism provides a theory for requiring the working class to concentrate on working in factories in Coketown and the “bourgeois” to separate themselves as competing agents of self-interest. It is a goal of the wealthy social class to maximize utility as a consumer and profit as a producer within the mechanical world. Keywords: Victorian Era; Mechanical Thinking; Marxist Theory

scholarly journals "A Strange Fever of the Nerves and Blood": Nervous Illness in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Parry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich

<p>In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the ‘nervous illness’ – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences.  The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.</p>

scholarly journals A Semantic Study of Dummy Subjects in Dickens’ Novel Hard Times

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 383
Author(s):  
Zainab Hussein Alwan
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Semantic Structure ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
General Semantic

To be required for some grammatical properties, dummy elements have lost their lexical meaning. They have no sense of their own. However, such items have meaning in context. They play essential roles in the general semantic structure of sentences. This study attempts to confirm that dummy constructions can have some semantic meaning and there is no matter how abstract they are. It also highlights the functions of inserting these elements to satisfy the structural and semantic needs in Charles Dickens&rsquo; novel Hard Times.

A VICTORIAN CHILD AND THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL (1881)

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 868-868
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Poor Child ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Children's Hospital ◽  
Wide Difference ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Children’S Hospital ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Divine Order ◽  
Brothers And Sisters ◽  
At Home

The following description of life in a children's hospital appeared in The Children's Sunday Album, published in London in 1881.1 The wide difference between the rich and the poor child was usually accepted in the Victorian era as part of the Divine order of things. Look at this picture well, you little, bright, happy children, who are well and strong, or even any afflicted like these, and be grateful for the cheerful homes, the loving friends, the comforts which surround you! Good generous people, pitying and loving little children, have sent enough money to support them, and have them taught trades to enable them to lead useful lives, though they are cripples. See how busily at work this big girl is at the end of the form; but her crutches lying beside her tell only too plainly of her misfortune. Bad nursing in their babyhood, joyless unchildlike lives in crowded dirty streets, cause the children of the London poor to be wretched sufferers; and it is a piteous, touching sight to visit the hospitals which have been built for these poor little creatures. Everything is done for them that skill and kindness can do; but it is not like you at home in your beautiful nurseries, with your toys and books, your loving mother, and healthy little brothers and sisters making merry round. In each little bed is some poor, suffering child, tended by kind nurses certainly, but no mothers. Think of this, little ones, when inclined to be fractious and cross, and troublesome, and bless God who has made your lot so bright.

Altruism and the Monks of Thelema

Walter Besant ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 151-170
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Education ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Francois Rabelais ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
Mass Democracy

The central concerns of Besant’s philanthropic novels of the 1880s were anticipated in 1878’s The Monks of Thelema: An Invention, his first sustained foray into social commentary. Although largely neglected by scholars, the novel is an intriguing satire that is rich with contemporary insights. In addressing the dilemmas of philanthropic activism, Besant mocks the naïve idealism associated with Oxford thinkers and undergraduates while finding positive value in their reformist schemes of liberal education for the emerging mass democracy. With the French humanist François Rabelais supplying a model for progressive liberal humanism, amid the satire Besant’s fiction develops a positive ideal of association and moral perfectibility that foreshadows his later, more celebrated work in philanthropy and social reform.

Recent Developments in Victorian Periodical Research

1970 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-98
Author(s):  
Rosemary T. VanArsdel
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Wellesley College ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Serial Publication ◽  
One Year ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

Justification is no longer necessary for the importance of research in Victorian periodicals, nor for the clear and very special window which periodicals offer into the life and thought of the nineteenth century. The pressing problem is how best to use the plethora of resource which exists, and how to render useful to the scholar the mountains of material which remain essentially un-catalogued. If we accept as a temporary definition of a Victorian periodical “a serial publication, issued more than once a year, part (at least) of whose run falls within the span 1824-1900,” we find documentation to show that at least 16,000 of these periodicals were published during the Victorian era, and it is by no means certain that that figure is exhaustive. Within this framework can be found every conceivable variety of opinion, debate, political posturing and social commentary. If one were able to select one year, say at mid-century, and sample from each of the 16,000 periodicals what a kaleidescopic glance into an era would be provided. Since this is neither practical nor likely to happen until the humanists' use of computer skills becomes more sophisticated, it remains for the literary and historical scholars to develop other means of mastering the diffuse, and at times elusive, material.In the past twelve years a number of distinguished men and women, both in the United States and in England, have applied themselves to initial problems of periodical research and as a result there have been at least four outstanding milestones laid on the pathway. The first of these, the very prestigious accomplishment by Professor Walter E. Houghton, of Wellesley College, was the establishment of the 15-20 year project, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (WI), the first volume of which appeared in 1966. (The second volume is projected for 1971, and the third for 1976, with the question of a fourth undecided.) This project was born about 1958, of Houghton's own frustration in trying to make use of periodicals while writing The Victorian Frame of Mind. As a result, he and his wife, Esther Rhoads Houghton, set out to provide a new tool to study Victorian men and ideas.

scholarly journals Specificity distinction

2001 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 85-101
Author(s):  
Donka F. Farkas
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Semantic Type ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Rich Variety ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Way

This paper is concerned with semantic noun phrase typology, focusing on the question of how to draw fine-grained distinctions necessary for an accurate account of natural language phenomena. In the extensive literature on this topic, the most commonly encountered parameters of classification concern the semantic type of the denotation of the noun phrase, the familiarity or novelty of its referent, the quantificational/nonquantificational distinction (connected to the weak/strong dichotomy), as well as, more recently, the question of whether the noun phrase is choice-functional or not (see Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999). In the discussion that follows I will attempt to make the following general points: (i) phenomena involving the behavior of noun phrases both within and across languages point to the need of establishing further distinctions that are too fine-grained to be caught in the net of these typologies; (ii) some of the relevant distinctions can be captured in terms of conditions on assignment functions; (iii) distribution and scopal peculiarities of noun phrases may result from constraints they impose on the way variables they introduce are to be assigned values. Section 2 reviews the typology of definite noun phrases introduced in Farkas 2000 and the way it provides support for the general points above. Section 3 examines some of the problems raised by recognizing the rich variety of 'indefinite' noun phrases found in natural language and by attempting to capture their distribution and interpretation. Common to the typologies discussed in the two sections is the issue of marking different types of variation in the interpretation of a noun phrase. In the light of this discussion, specificity turns out to be an epiphenomenon connected to a family of distinctions that are marked differently in different languages.  

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