Charles Dickens p495

Through these writings Charles Dickens was really able to show how strongly he opposed the coming of this new age of industrialism. It seems that he experienced multiple emotions from pain and sorrow to outrage and disgust. People did not even have time to process the change, it was not only sudden but it was dramatic, While many were striving to tell the public about how great a change this was, Dickens was able to see the reality of it.

“Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of hearth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pool.” (The Coming of the Railway, p496)

After reading these lines, I could develop a visual image of what a typical town may have looked like during this time of change. The development of technology created a society that focuses on self-interest and individual gain. This was the beginning of a new era in which the concepts of community, religion, and individuality were destroyed. Dickens noticed the monotony and dehumanization that developed along with the industries:

"It contained several large streets all very like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.” (Coketown, p497)

I don’t think that much as changed today. Though we have benefited much from new means of transportation and medical breakthroughs, it’s not easy to decide whether or not we have benefited more than it has hurt us. During this age we are now beginning to see how industrialization has taken a toll on the world around us. Deforestation, pollution, extinction…. if we could go back in time and start all over knowing what we know now, I think that there would not have been such a rush to begin new developments. Outrage over the oil spill definitely adds to the mistake of industrial development. But now that modernization has already begun, I don’t think it’s possible to stop it or even slow it down.