INDUSTRIALISED MISERY

Dickens reserved some of his most scathing attacks for capitalists who put profits over people

By the 1830s, northern England had become home to a new, industrial landscape. Factories dominated the skylines of towns that were rapidly expanding with the influx of new workers. Long hours, dangerous working conditions and the unregulated employment of women and children created anxiety among social elites.

In 1838, Dickens signalled his support for legislation restricting the labour of women and adolescents to 10 hours a day. After visiting several factories in Manchester, which “disgusted and astonished me beyond all measure”, he wrote of his intention to “strike the heaviest blow in my power” against the factory system. One of his next novels, The Old Curiosity Shop (serialised from 1840), included a frightening account of an industrial town through which Nell and her grandfather were forced to travel.

However, Dickens’ tour of America in 1842 fostered ambivalence. Seduced by scenes of well-dressed and prosperous female factory workers, who had pianos in their boarding houses and subscriptions to a

circulating library, he praised the factories he encountered in Lowell, Massachusetts in his American Notes. Subsequent public speeches also expressed pride in the achievements and potential of British industry.

When Dickens finally produced an ‘industrial novel’ – Hard Times – in 1854, he attacked the cultures of industrialism rather than factory work per se. Coketown – its ugliness and monotony, and the lack of individuality of its inhabitants – was the product of crude utilitarianism and laissez-fair capitalism, philosophies embodied in the novel’s two villains. The factory owner Mr Bounderby is a despicable self-made man who views his workers solely as commodities, or ‘hands’. For the local businessman Mr Gradgrind, there is nothing of value in life but facts and figures.

Dickens also expressed little sympathy for the striking workers – like other middle-class writers, he feared their revolutionary potential. They did not, he suggested, need better wages, but more fulsome lives. They needed, in other words, to have some fun.

Dickens wrote of his intention to “strike the heaviest blow in my power” against the factory system

Dark satanic mill? Metal is processed with a steam-hammer, in an 1842 engraving. In his novel The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens painted a grim picture of the impact of industrialisation on workers’ lives

Job satisfaction Women at work in a Massachusetts textile mill, as depicted in a hand-coloured engraving from the 1850s. The prosperity of such workers softened Dickens’ hostility to the rise of the factory