LICEO STATALE CLASSICO-LINGUISTICO-SCIENZE UMANE

“PUBLIO VIRGILIO MARONE” – META

ANNO SCOLASTICO 2019 - 2020

ELABORATO PER L’ESAME DI STATO

LA CANDIDATA, FACENDO RIFERIMENTO AD ALCUNI TESTI LETTERARI DI
SUA CONOSCENZA, ESAMINI IL TEMA “COKETOWN AND THE CIRCUS”
IN UN ELABORATO ORIGINALE

CANDIDATO E CLASSE
BENEDETTA FANONI VG
 “Coketown and the circus”
While Victorian England celebrates its political and commercial glories, “Hard Times”,
Dickens' most political work, shows all the urgency of a message of denunciation towards
the capitalist organization of work. With the beginning of industrialized society man
changes his nature and Dickens' novel captures all its nuances, highlighting that industrial
modernity kills hopes and destroys all beauty.

Coketown, the place where the story narrated in “Hard Times” takes place, is of central
importance, it is an imaginary industrial city in England, where

«time went on … like its own machinery: so much material wrought up, so much fuel consumed, so many
powers worn out, so much money made».
Hard Times, 14th chapter

In this symbolic space, two representatives of the master class try to apply abstract models
of utilitarianism to the social (and even family) sphere. Their patterns, however, will prove
completely inadequate with respect to the emotional needs of human beings.

Coketown is a surreal city, suffocated by heavy

black smoke from industries and it is the direct
product of utilitarian philosophy as well as its
characters, who seem to acquire features and
end up being what they produce. And so
monstrous snakes of smoke envelope in their
coils the representatives of the new urban
world, whose days are marked by a ruthless
clock.

«The Fairy palaces burst into illumination before pale morning showed the monstrous serpents of smoke
trailing themselves over Coketown. A clattering of clogs upon the pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and all
the melancholy mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day’s monotony, were at their heavy exercise
again».

Hard Times, 11th chapter

“Hard times”, therefore, outlines an opposition: on the one hand the realm of industry,
statistics and mathematics, which represses the imagination considering it unproductive;
and on the other hand the world of feelings and fantasy.
Dickens, captures new tensions and new social conflicts: he discovers that the society is
sick and introduces, through this discovery, a fundamental metaphor of the postclassical
age. Everyone, from this point on, exploited and exploiters, will be pathological. The way
to Franz Kafka's nightmares is already open. But above all the ill who stay in the restricted
area of industry will be the worker: just think of the compromised bodies of the miners of
Émile Zola, in Germinal, who spat black sputum, and their stunted and hunchbacked
children.

The real opponent of the anti-humanism economist of the businessman-banker Josiah

Bounderby and his friend Thomas Gradgrind is the character of Sissy Jupe, who is an
orphan raised in the Sleary walking circus and then adopted by the Gradgrind family.

The circus, in fact, symbolizes resistance to the alienating rhythms of industrial life and it
is the bearer of values such as reciprocal understanding and solidarity, alternatives to the
mechanization, that has also invaded the inner life of men. When the circus arrives in
Coketown it has a destabilizing effect. In a city dominated by smoke, where everything is
industry, the breaking of the circus breaks the monotony of industrial work and represents
the colour, the joy, the disorder and the subversion of the laws.

This is how they are presented by Dickens, circus artists:

« Meanwhile, the various members of Sleary’s company gradually

gathered together from the upper regions, where they were
quartered … There were two or three handsome young women
among them, with their two or three husbands, and their two or
three mothers, and their eight or nine little children, who did the
fairy business when required. The father of one of the families
was in the habit of balancing the father of another of the families
on the top of a great pole; the father of a third family often made a
pyramid of both those fathers, with Master Kidderminster for the
apex, and himself for the base; all the fathers could dance upon
rolling casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl
hand-basins, ride upon anything, jump over everything, and stick
at nothing. All the mothers could (and did) dance, upon the slack
wire and the tight-rope, and perform rapid acts on bare-backed
steeds ».

Hard Times, 6th chapter

It is therefore the circus, not the facts, the true happy and correct city, the place where
fantasy and hope find their place. In the circus there is a sense of freedom and magic because
it offers endless possibilities for man to look within themselves and understand the
irrational. Living then in accordance with reason or satisfying the instinct?

Sissy Jupe, precisely because she is the daughter

of a circus, represents a parallel and utopian
dimension: the circus is opposed to the new
society in which the individual has lost its
peculiarities and has become a number.
Imagination becomes the only possible tool to
stem the effects of materialism and achieve a
reconstitution of values.

However, the negative element predominates in “Hard Times”. Dickens' indictment is

based on a harsh reality closed to optimistic solutions. Devoid of love stories, the novel
does not even offer prospects for social improvements.

Coketown will continue to be hell on earth and the owners will remain robots, ridiculous
disseminators of a caricature of Utilitarianism.

“Hard times” places itself fully into the tradition that subsequently leads to the works of
Orwell and outlines a real pedagogical utopia that turns upside down in its opposite
becoming a kind of totalitarian nightmare.
The novel does not provide solutions and the answers seem to come from an ethical
inspiration: by the movements of the heart and sentimentalism.

However, both this and other Dickens novels had the merit of provoking legislative
interventions on the social problems that they highlighted from time to time. Thanks to
Dickens, social conflict enters literature, anticipating still today very topical issues, such as
social injustice and the need for anti-utilitarian education.

Difficult times are also those that we are experiencing, looking for new paths, not only in
terms of economic responses but also on a social and ethical level.

Has the dream of a solidarity continent been broken? Has Europe crumbled, as Paolo Rumiz
says, at impressive speeds like the tower of Babel? Certainly the general impoverishment
has turned all of us into potential migrants, in a scenario that could see the increasingly
wealthy became richer and the poor became poorer.

Perhaps it is up to us young people to break the silence and bravely face these difficult new
times, and rebuild Europe, a new, more supportive and inclusive Europe, without walls and
without barriers.