The Impact of Society and Culture on Victorian Novels: Study on Charles Dickens’s Hard Times Novel

Abstract

The Victorian age saw a notable change in the society and culture. During the Victorian period, Britain was an influential nation with a rich culture. It had a steady government, a growing state. It controlled a large kingdom, and it was wealthy, in part because of industrial revolution and its grand assets. Charles Dickens is the most famous Victorian novelist; he is one of the famed literary personalities in the Victorian phase. Victorian Age was a long period of success in the English history. Dickens concentrated on the social and cultural troubles of his period, his works tell the tales of victimization, to improve social conditions and to help the person who reads to become aware of many of the difficulties of the Victorian humanity.This paper attempts to investigate the social and cultural influence on Victorian novel; taking as a case-study Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. The paper highlights how Charles Dickens represents the Victorian society in his literary work Hard Times. The researcher adopted descriptive analytic methods. The sample consists of one literary work written by Charles Dickens focusing on society and culture, and collecting the data from the relevant tools of the previous studies such as the books, journals, and the novels under the study as primary sources. The researcher reached to a finding that society and culture had influenced the literature of the Victorian period and Victorian literary works are considered as a means of social and cultural reform. Hard Times shows the social and cultural setting of English community through the Victorian era. Dickens novels tell the narratives of sufferers; they are printed to reform and progress social situations. Finally the researcher recommends that the literary works should be taught and learnt by the students, so that they can develop both linguistic abilities, and social culture.