What Was Dickens Thinking????

To start off, this book is hella dark. As we talked in class about what was happening in Hard Times, we see that not much is happening in the industrial city of Coketown. But seriously, who names a town COKETOWN. Anyways in class we had talked about themes of the book, which mostly related around darkness and despair. We can tell that Charles Dickens is great writer but I don’t really know what he was thinking when he wrote this book, but some thought he was just fed up with utilitarianism and political Economy.  This book literally takes us through a life of two people, a boy and girl, brother, sister and how they were raised through economical theory, which pretty much ruined their life. Charles Dickens wanted to prove to everyone that Utilitarianism is a load of garbage, especially when it tries to take over Judeo-Christian ideas, I don’t know what the hell these ideas are since I am a Catholic and we are the best. But it somehow ties into morality and how utilitarian thinkers tried to replace this with more statistical based explanations with their motto basically being “SCIENCE BITCH!” and here is poor old Charles Dickens saying “Whoa that’s not cool bro” and thus the creation of this story is made.

            Economists had different theories to go off of this and it’s pretty interesting to see what they have said. Take David Ricardo for example, he wanted people to know that they as economists didn’t want to tell people how to live their lives (Yeah because that makes a lot of sense based on these utilitarian thinkers), then you have economists like Harriet Martineau who say “Hell Yeah! Let’s tell these people how to live their lives (That’ll work out well). Then here comes once again good ole Charles Dickens who is the wise one of everyone and says “Hey screw both those ideals and let people be who they are without the use of math and crap” (My Homie right there). So thus like I stated earlier he wrote the novel Hard Times in order to get his own ideals and voice across to these thinkers and normal human beings in this awesome but screwed up world. With ideals in his head and a smartass mouth Dickens wrote probably one of the most depressing stories that I have never read and yes it really did get across to the people in a sense that it hit every key issue that was brought up during his time.

This is Shane Winkelbauer

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