Compare the novels written by Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens and bringing out a difference in their theme.
THE novelist Charles Dickens in his novel ‘Hard Times’ wrote about the terrible effects of industrialisation on people’s lives and characters. The industrialisation in Europe was accompanied by an economic philosophy which celebrated the per cent of profit and undervalued the lives of workers. He was deeply critical of this development. In other novels, too, Dickens focussed on the terrible conditions of urban life under industrial capitalism.
On the other hand, the novelist Thomas Hardy, wrote about traditional rural communication of England that were fast vanishing, and the old rural culture with its independent farmers were dying out. This sense of change is beautifully caught in Hardy’s ‘Mayor of Casterbridge’. We can see that Hardy mourns of loss of the move personalised world that is disappearing, even as he is aware of its problems and advantages of the new order.