Derek Popewiny
Ms. Saddik
Honors English IV Period 4
10 October 2012
Hard Times Life, to some people, may be a joyous rollercoaster ride with little to no problems. Unfortunately, others are forced to wake up every day wondering how they’re going to manage to consume a meal or make any money. This sort of dilemma pertains to the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens. The novel takes place in the city of Coketown, England which is a town of Industrialization and factories. The town is poverty stricken and is filled with the poor. Although there’s an immense amount of poverty, there are also the wealthy citizens like bank and factory owners along with many corrupt politicians. Thomas Gradgrind, a teacher who lived a life of blandness and facts, never allowed any of his students, or better yet, his own children, Louisa and Tom, to engage in any imaginative pursuits and raises them the way he was. This restricts their young thoughts to the cold ways of life in Coketown and alters them and how they think. Furthermore, Thomas forces Louisa to marry his wealthy friend of a factory owner named Josiah Bounderby who is more than twice her age. In Coketown, “the Hand” is a general name given to the extremely poor who slave in the factories for any type of income. The city of Coketown can be related to our country and the type of economy we possess. In cities like Detroit, robberies occur daily and people have poverty written all over them metaphorically. Also, the dramatic difference between the upper and lower class reminds me of presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s platform where he proposed tax cuts to the millionaires of this country and increased taxes for the middle class. This platform, if successfully implemented, would drive the middle class straight into the ground. Further on in the novel, Tom makes the decision to rob a bank and manages to flee freely from England. Louisa falls in love with a “Hand” named Stephen Blackpool and decides to flee from the Bounderby residence. From there, she heads off to her father’s house and confesses how she’s so unhappy with Josiah and with life overall and that’s when finally Thomas realizes his