Dickens was a Victorian critical realist writer whose masterpieces were A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Orphans of the Mist, and Difficult Times. In his writing, because of the development of industrial civilization in 19th century, Britain's economy was the first in the world, such as the sun in the sky, known as the "empire where the sun never sets". A large number of people were concentrated in the cities, the cities were constantly expanding and crowded, and the newly affluent bourgeoisie appeared in large numbers. The decline and struggle of the old aristocracy, the rise and triumph of the middle class, and the poverty and helplessness of the lower classes are intertwined.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="2" > "Tough Times."</h1>
"Individual struggle is no longer seen by society as a right-and-fits-all, but as an integral part of a normal life journey of a man of achievement. In the torrent of competition, the security of the individual is no longer seen as a virtue, but only as cowardice and incompetence. ”
The story mainly revolves around Ge André and Pompeii and their surroundings, such as Louisa, Tom, Bi Zhou, Stephen, and others. Originally a hardware wholesaler, Ge Huanggan retired as a councillor of coking coal towns, and he was a utilitarian believer, classifying everything and even human nature and emotions as "a numerical problem, a simple arithmetic problem.".
In his eyes, there is only money, buying and selling relationships between people, such as imagination, romance, emotion, benevolence, etc. These things that have nothing to do with money are nonsense. So, he married his 20-year-old daughter, Louisa, to a nearly 50-year-old man, Pompeii. If nothing else, there is only one reason, and that is that Pompeii is rich.
Pompeii is the representative of the new forces, the newly rich bourgeoisie. He renounced love, mercenary, hypocritical and selfish, and finally ruined in his own hands.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="24" > the background of the times</h1>
In 19th-century Britain, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and the newly wealthy bourgeoisie conformed to the general trend of industrial civilization, they mastered advanced technology, and their wealth continued to grow, while the old forces and the old aristocracy continued to shrink. This is an era of intertwining old and new forces, one after the other, social transformation, and power transfer.
The old aristocracy was stubbornly unwilling to give up power, while the newly wealthy bourgeoisie, in order to consolidate its power, had to collude with the old aristocracy, and in the end it was the broad underclass that suffered and were exploited.
The Industrial Revolution provided an excellent opportunity for the lower classes of the British people to enter the middle class through hard work, and a large number of people at the bottom or from humble origins succeeded through diligent study, or self-reliance, self-made, and personal struggle. The new wealthy bourgeoisie emerged in large numbers, they were the beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution, and they accumulated a great deal of social wealth.
At the same time, capital and wealth are also constantly concentrating, the gap between the rich and the poor is becoming more and more serious, and the people at the bottom are uprooted from their hometowns and have a difficult life. For "capital is dead labor, it is like a vampire, only by sucking living labor can it have life, and the more living labor it sucks, the more vigorous its vitality will be." ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="25" > money is supreme</h1>
The impact of industrial civilization on traditional family relations and ethics, under industrial civilization, the traditional family between parents and children, husband and wife have lost the love and harmony of the past, and evolved into a pure money relationship.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="26" > utilitarianism</h1>
The British of the time used utilitarian principles as a guide to action. People are mercenary, and interests become the basis and source of people's happiness, but everything that can satisfy personal interests is reasonable and desirable, otherwise it is unreasonable and undesirable. The greatest happiness of the British is the infinite pursuit of pleasure, and the root of happiness lies in the greatest satisfaction of self-interest.
Everyone should be free to pursue their own interests, and the amount of benefits obtained is the measure of a person's success.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="27" > philosophy of life</h1>
Focus on efficiency, ignore fairness, be good at calculation, give priority to interests, disregard morality, and abandon ideals.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="28" > one-dimensional person</h1>
In the novel, smoke billows over the coking coal town, like a coiled python, eerie and terrible. The pistons of the steam engine in the factory moved up and down, like crazy elephant heads suffering from "melancholy", suppressing and tearing people, seriously suppressing people's mental space, splitting the harmony that people should have with their environment, soot and machines became man-eating monsters, and people became "things".
The mechanization and automation of industrial civilization has made the world orderly, but it has made people and orders uniform, without personality and vitality. The inhabitants of coking coal towns are almost all the same, they come in and out at the same time, they walk on the same sidewalk, they make the same footsteps, they do the same work, and for them, today is no different from yesterday and tomorrow, and this year is the same as last year and next year. In the long and monotonous life, people have no hope, no motivation, no spiritual needs, and even began a degenerate life, the relationship between people is increasingly cold and alienated, gradually lost in the prosperous industrial civilization, the industrial workers are completely materialized by the capitalist mode of production into a tool of production, and the workers become the "human hands" of the capitalists, like machines, and become one-dimensional people.