Please help I will give Brainliest!!



Literature often reflects the time period in which it was written. Hard Times is a novel written by the author Charles Dickens in 1854 during the height of the Industrial Revolution. The book evaluates English society and is aimed at highlighting the social and economic problems of the times. The book follows several characters from different levels of society. One of these characters is Stephen Blackpool, a worker in an industrial mill in the fictional city of Coketown.


Task: As you read the excerpts from Hard Times, look for three passages that relate the living and working conditions of industrial revolution. Using the chart, explain how the passage you chose relates to history.


P 1. “The factories burst into light, before pale morning showed the monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown. A clattering of shoes upon the pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and all the steam engines, polished and oiled up for the day’s monotony, were at their heavy exercise again. Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age, made his way up the hill to his work. Stephen looked older, but he had a hard life. It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen’s case, because it seemed that somebody else had gotten ahold all of his roses, and he had only ended up only with the thorns, and perhaps somebody else’s thorns as well.

P 2. Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked, carefully avoiding the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he and all the others labored.

P 3. So many hundred workers in this mill; so many hundred horses of steam power. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the machine will do. But what you cannot calculate is the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for how this machine impacts the souls of its workers.