Compare and Contrast Dickens's picture of Coketown with Lodge's introduction to the industrial environment in his novel.

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English/English Literature Coursework Joint Folder

Wide Reading Assignment:

9th Century Prose: "Hard Times" (Charles Dickens)

20th Century Prose: "Nice work" (David Lodge)

Compare and Contrast Dickens's picture of Coketown with Lodge's introduction to the industrial environment in his novel.

----"Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact everywhere in the immaterial." - Charles Dickens

In the early 1851, London staged the Great Exhibition to show the world, the achievements and inventions of the Industrial Revolution. Many people believed that this showed how much better, safer and healthier Britain was than its neighbours in Europe. People living in mansions amid lawns and fountains, with horse drawn carriages certainly felt that life couldn't be better. However behind the publicity and the royal occasions there was another England, not so glorious. Benjamin Disraeli wrote that Britain was really "two nations", Dickens wanted to show his readers what was behind the glittering façade of Victorian industry. He wanted to show his readers the factual monotony behind the sulky blotch towns of industrial Britain.

As the essay title suggests, both Lodge and Dickens have portrayed their format of an industrial landscape. Both authors' coddle in a crestfallen environment of the industrial world: one at the height of a revolution, the other at the height of a decline. Dickens is keen to depict his Victorian contemporary world of Coketown in an essentially satirical context. It is emblemed with certain thematic issues including religion, the nature of employment and education, which follow course throughout the book. This surreal caricature of the Victorian landscape contrasts with Lodge's realistically styled piece. Lodge's passage, which holds a fictional veil over the names of "Rummidge and the Dark Country", is clearly intended to represent Birmingham and the Black Country.

In Hard Times it can be expected that Dickens wanted to emphasize Coketown as the "worst about Industrial Britain". What purpose would be privileged to do this? In many ways Dickens was viewed to denounce the Capitalist ethic. However never to found to be Communist/ Marxist it can be stated he was merely anti-materialistic. He felt the social injustice, which was created due to the heavy industry. Most of the mechanized account and in particular p.20 creates such an impression on the reader to think this. Dickens believed that this was a brutal world where everything is "measured by figures" in a Gradgrind gospel of "Fact". He has written a satire against the foundation and the constitutions of Industrial Society. A uniformly monotonous description is used, much like the movement of machine where "products are continuously churned out". The language used in this chapter holds no complexity. It translates simply to the author's purpose; generating a cold mocking account - "a satirical bite". This is the main thematic contrast of the two texts. We find Lodge is very unclear in who is denounced, what the author feels about society. It is very difficult to gauge what the author thinks about the deindustrialisation of Britain in the 1980's. Therefore we find the passage to be very much gentler in comparison, Lodge is not hostile to the West Midlands.
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Lodge mainly writes with a dry informative tone throughout most of the narrative. At times his writing can be said to quite tedious. There obviously must be much more to this mundane tone than the writer's real style. It is possible to think of Lodge in a publisher's position when writing this: to sell the novel abroad. Therefore this maybe an excuse for such an informative description. Lodge feels the factual need to explain the history of the area in a fiction whereas Dickens found no cause to do this. As Lodge was a modern writer we could ...

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