Advocates for a New Social Order: Dickens, Marx, and the Trade Union i

Advocates for a New Social Order Dickens, Marx, and the Trade Union in Hard Times For over a century, Charles Dickens has been praised as beingness the working mans advocate, and the lower classes have played a major determination in peopling his vast world of characters. Al guidances, the reader is left with a smell out of sympathy and pity for these characters as Dickens journalistic descriptions of their plight are a good deal dramatic, stirring, and pathetic. Although he renders the living conditions of the poor in much(prenominal) a way that no reader can escape feeling sympathy for such characters, Dickens never once offers a solution to such distress. In Hard Times we find a man who suffers not nevertheless the degradations of the industrial city, but also the ostracism of his own kind when he disavows to join the ranks of a budding trade union. Dickens has often been deemed a tidy uper by many modern critics. However, if he truly seek reform for the treatment of the lower classes in Victorian England, why, then, does he refuse Stephen Blackpool a chance to take a part in that reform? Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Dickens realized and reported upon the conditions of the working classes, but he chose to offer a more spiritual form of aid alternatively than to suggest a complete political reformation. Dickens published his views on labor issues in several of his journals, and he spoke on the emergence frequently as well. Although he was moved by the plight of the workers, he could not understand why they would become violent at times. bill Ackroyd cites a letter to Angela Burdett-Coutts, describing Dickens views on trade union violence. The cogitate for such violence, Dickens contends in the letter, is that the lower classes were being brainwashed and swindle... ... twain a charitable and noble soul. He could not have linked the union as he did not believe it would help matters any, and he maintains his dignity even though he pay s the ultimate penalty for it in the end. Works ConsultedThe Oxford History of Britain. Ed. Kenneth O. Morgan. Oxford Oxford UP, 1984. Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York HarperCollins, 1990. Bowditch, John and Clement Ramsland. Voices of the Industrial Revolution. Ann arbor U of Michigan P, 1961. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Ed. George Ford and Sylvere Monod. 2nd ed. New York Norton, 1990. ---. Locked Out. domicile Words 8 (1854) 345-8. Faber, Richard. Proper Stations. London Faber and Faber, 1971. Marx, Karl. The Grundrisse. Ed. and trans. David McLellan. New York Harper, 1971. Williams, Raymond. Culture and hostelry 1780-1950. New York Harper, 1958.