Charles Dickens lived during a time of great social change in Europe. Having published novels during the late 19th century, the subject of his writing typically focused on class structure, poverty, and treatment of the especially underprivileged. Dickens was particularly interested in the years immediately preceding...and leading up to his own adulthood. Between the 1770s and the 1840s, England underwent a sweeping transformation from a sleepy agrarian society to an intensely industrial one. For …showed first 75 words of 626 total…

…showed last 75 words of 626 total…by their bootstraps and get out of this mess. This is, obviously, a middle class perception unshared by anyone who has ever been poor. In our day, just as in Dickens’, the violent cleavage between classes renders the poor almost subhuman in society’s eyes. Dickens did a tremendous job of combating this smug assumption in Hard Times, but we need to reinforce messages such as his with compassion toward those less fortunate than ourselves...