Analysis 4

Upon doing the readings for Marxism, I couldn’t help but recall a short excerpt of Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times I had read a while back.

Book I chapter 5
Coketown, to which Messrs Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune. 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 like the painted face of a savage. 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 pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned.

Although this remains the only fragment of the novel I’ve read, it is unmistakable that the text relates to clear Marxist ideology.

In today’s modern world where technology and machinery prevail, appreciation for the simple and humble is practically nonexistent. The nineteenth century, similarly, proved to be a time of great change as industrialization and modernization began to dominate. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, major parts of the world experienced drastic changes socially, economically and politically, as we saw an increasing trend towards poverty, unemployment and noticeably dreadful working conditions. In our present day, the working conditions prove to be quite similar to that of 19th century England. With industrialization and modernization still on the rise, many factory job positions are needed to be occupied. Many people not skilled enough for other occupations have no choice but to work a factory job. Not only are the hours long and burdensome, the pay is close to nothing, and many of the jobs are often dangerous, with most employers offering no benefits or workman’s compensation for injuries.
Many authors held negative views on the industrialization of England and believed that its disadvantages heavily outweighed its advantages. In Charles Dickens’s excerpt from his novel Hard Times, Dickens presents his view of the working conditions and the industrialization of a fictional city in England known as Coketown. It is clear through his descriptions that the city has been considerably industrialized, and subsequently the city has become a place of monotonous redundancy. Along with the modernization and industrialization of England came the pollution and contamination, which is evidently present in our modern world. Dickens provides a vivid description of the pollution of Coketown and it is clear that from the trail of “interminable serpents of smoke” drifting out of chimneys to the “river that ran purple”, the city of Coketown is heavily polluted due to its industrialization. In the excerpt, however, Dickens primarily focuses his train of thought on the city’s blandness and mentions several times that all the red brick buildings, which no longer contain their red hue due to the pollution, look the same. He continues this idea of “sameness” and refers to the streets that all look the same, the people who all look the same, sound the same and do the same and propounds the idea that the industrialization has transformed people into machines rather than human beings. These people no longer have identities as individuals, but rather, they belong to a group- to the proletariat (the working class). On the opposite end, we have the bourgeoisie-those who own the means of production. V.N. Volosinov in “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language” explains that “individual choice under these circumstances, of course, can have no meaning at all.” Clearly, the society existing within Coketown relies heavily on production. Without the proletariat, production would cease to exist. Hence, the bourgeoisie would cease to exist. Karl Marx explains in “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” that ‘the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

Marx, Karl. "The Manifesto of the Communist Party." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Volosinov, V.N.. "Marxism and the Philosophy of Language." Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 1st ed. Malden: Blackwell, 1998.