Charles Dickens Builds a Portrait

¶ … Charles Dickens builds a portrait of a fictional English industrial town called Coketown in the grip of the Industrial Revolution and the philosophies which drove it forward. He uses a number of literary elements such as characterization, symbols, and themes to tell a story which has as its primary purpose the painting of difficulties that the both the working classes and the owning classes underwent as the nation moved through this difficult period.

In this brief paper, some of the primary literary elements utilized by Dickens will be explored in order to show what he intended to say about the English Industrial Revolution. Dickens opens his novel with the character of Gradgrind telling the school teacher at his children's school that he wants the children to be taught nothing but "Facts." Nothing else matters, he says. Facts are the only things he believes to be of importance in the modern world in which they find themselves living.

In this one moment, Dickens sets out many of novel's most important conflicts, character elements, and themes. He sets the stage for much of the action to come by showing one of the novel's main characters insisting that the guiding philosophy of life -- reflective of the dominant utilitarianism in the real England of that day -- is based on scientific reasoning, to the exclusion of imagination and whimsy.

By juxtaposing "Fact" and "Fancy" and insisting that the Industrial Revolution wants to do away with the latter, Dickens begins building a thematic argument that will carry on throughout the book: mechanization of humans is unhealthy and unwise. Dickens furthers this argument throughout the first section of the novel by continually referring to plumes of smoke that rise over the factories in the city, choking the air of the townspeople, and equating this smoke with fact.

The symbolic use of pollution to depict what he believes to be an actual polluting force in the lives of his countrymen is both effective and foreboding. In the character of Gradgrind, who is a type of wealthy bourgeois, as well as in the characters of the evil industrialist Bounderby and the honest working-class slug Blackpool, Dickens builds typologies for the working class struggle against the owning classes that are suggestive of the class warfare which captured much of the imagination of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Bounderby, as a manipulative, dishonest, self-centered industrialist, and Gradgrind, as a sincere but misguided follower of the Industrialists' program, rule the world for their own benefit and the benefit of their philosophy. Bounderby is characterized as a villain who sucks the lifeblood from his workers to enrich only himself He is a man who ultimately even turns away from his wife and mother and anyone else of consequence in his life just to make a dollar.

Gradgrind, who later has a change of heart and turns away from his insistence on facts, once his beloved daughter confronts him about the unhappiness of her childhood raised on such a program, seems to give himself to the ideology of capitalism because he thinks it is inevitable. Only in Blackpool, a character who suffers at the hands of both the owners and his fellow workers because he is too honest to do otherwise, does the story get a representative in the industrialist struggle who seems to be approaching heroic.

His tragic death in the end for reasons that were beyond his control but also not his fault, suggests that the worker is the ultimate loser in a material sense in the Industrial Revolution, even if everyone loses in the spiritual sense. Other characters in the story are.