How were the effects of ‘Industrial Revolution’ reflected in the novels?
Answer:
- When Industrial Revolution began, factories came up, business profits increased but workers faced problems.
- Cities expanded in an unregulated way and were filled with overworked and underpaid workers.
- Deeply critical of these developments, novelists such as Charles DicRens wrote about the terrible effects of industrialisation on people’s lives and characters.
- His novel Hard Times depicts a fictious industrial town as a grim place full of machinery, smoking chimneys and rivers polluted.
- Dickens criticised not just the greed for profits but also the ideas that reduced human beings into simple instruments of production.
- Dickens’ Oliver Twist is the tale of a poor orphan who lived in a world of petty criminals and beggars. Oliver was finally adopted by a wealthy man and lived happily everafter.
- Emile Zola’s Germinal was written on the life of a young miner and ends on a sad note.