Before discussing about hindi play I want to share information about Victorian era means that how people live their life and what they do as work and most important situation of society in case of society upper class and lower class people's life.
The Industrial Revolution :
From 1760 to 1850 inventions in the textile industry and enormous industrial changes led to extensive industrialization. This was the era of the Industrial Revolution, when production began to be made in factories instead of in the home. The Industrial Revolution took place in Britain because Britain was rich in coal, which provided energy for the factories, and could count on cheap raw materials coming from its colonies.
Many people left the countryside and went to live and work in the new large cities. The workers were paid very little and lived in terrible conditions, but the factory owners made a lot of money and became very rich. They used the cheap raw materials brought from the colonies.
Life in the city was very difficult for poor people; they worked long hours for very low pay. Women and children worked, too.
But there were also great social changes. A new social class of industrial workers was created. Social reforms took place; in 1842 it became illegal for boys under ten, women and all girls to work underground in mines. Primary education became compulsory in 1876.
Education
Britain was the first country to change from an agricultural economy to one founded on a factory system. Scholars call this great change the Industrial Revolution. From Britain the Industrial Revolution spread to many countries in the world. The Industrial Revolution began with the mechanization of the textile industry; many machines were
invented for the spinning of cotton. Steam engines were first invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1705. In 1769, James Watt, a Scottish engineer, invented the first steam engine that provided the power for the others. Steam power was used to automate factory equipment such as spinning machines. In the next century, steam engines powered not only factories but also locomotives and steam boats. By the 1830s there were steam railways in England and in the United States, and steamships crossed the Atlantic Ocean
regularly.
That was about Victorian sociaty and people. Now I want to tell about Charles Dickens who discussed about it in his novel Hard Times,
Who is Charles Dickens ??
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, in the South of England, in 1812. Two years later his family moved to London.When his father was arrested for debts the boy went to work in a factory.
He was nine years old. A year later his father left prison and Charles was sent back to school.Dickens’s secret ambition was to write stories. Success came with the publication of
'The Pickwick Papers (1836).
His next novel was Oliver Twist (1838). It was followed by many others like A Christmas Carol (1843) and David Copperfield (1849). With this novel, based on his own life experiences, Dickens
reached the height of his fame.
He died in 1870 and was buried at Westminster Abbey in Poets’ Corner.
He is generally considered one the greatest English novelists and he was the most important writer of the Victorian Age. He described the social conditions of his time, especially of children and poor people. He was very popular in his day and after.
Novel - Hard Times :
Hard Times, novel by Charles Dickens, published in serial form as Hard Times: For These Times in the periodical Household Words from April to August 1854 and in book form later the same year. The novel is a bitter indictment of industrialization, with its dehumanizing effects on workers and communities in mid-19th-century England.
Louisa and Tom Gradgrind have been harshly raised by their father, an educator, to know nothing but the most factual, pragmatic information. Their lives are devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination, and the two have little or no empathy for others. Louisa marries Josiah Bounderby, a vulgar banker and mill owner. She eventually leaves her husband and returns to her father’s house. Tom, unscrupulous and vacuous, robs his brother-in-law’s bank. Only after these and other crises does their father realize that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.
At the end of the novel, Bounderby fires Mrs. Sparsit for her many mistakes. The narrator projects into the characters’ future lives, stating that Bounderby will die on the street of an unknown affliction. Mr. Gradgrind will become a political outcast, Tom will perish in America after apologizing to Louisa. Louisa never marries again; she will live a life of charity and kindness, and will have a happy and imaginative life with Sissy’s children. Hard Times, though almost all of its many characters face despair, suggests that the actions of individuals deeply affect even the distant futures of their lives.
Hindi play on Hard Times :
We saw the play on the Novel Hard Times to understand the novel easily the play was in hindi and we noticed many things in play about Victorian sociaty.
The play open by two persons who talked about what they should play ane then they told that every story is imagination and then they decided to play on Charles Dickens's Novel Hard Times.
The play start by one song which shows the theme of entire novel. The song's word like that,
"Kamal ki kahani ye
Hai to bdi puarni ji"
"Jo gaur se dekhenge to
Saf najar aayegi sachchai"
"Charles Dickens ki tarah kre
Hum kalpana cocktown jese shaher ki"
So , play strat by song in which we saw the theme and reality of their life and also condition of people.
Same thing did by Imtiaz Ali in TAMASHA same sequence are there in starting of the movie.
After the song there was Thomas Gradgine and Joseph Bounderby talking to each others. Bounderby talk about his mother and he behaves like he know everything and praise his own selves.
I am not talking about whole play but I talked about the characters of the play.
Joseph Bounderby :
He is Mr. Gradgrind’s best friend, Josiah Bounderby is more interested in money and power than in facts. Indeed, he is himself a fiction, or a fraud. Bounderby’s inflated sense of pride is illustrated by his oft-repeated declaration,
“I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.”
This statement generally prefaces the story of Bounderby’s childhood poverty and suffering, a story designed to impress its listeners with a sense of the young Josiah Bounderby’s determination and self-discipline. However, Dickens explodes the myth of the self-made man when Bounderby’s mother, Mrs. Pegler, reveals that her son had a decent, loving childhood and a good education, and that he was not abandoned, after all.
Bounderby’s attitude represents the social changes created by industrialization and capitalism. Whereas birth or bloodline formerly determined the social hierarchy, in an industrialized, capitalist society, wealth determines who holds the most power. Thus, Bounderby takes great delight in the fact that Mrs. Sparsit, an aristocrat who has fallen on hard times, has become his servant, while his own ambition has enabled him to rise from humble beginnings to become the wealthy owner of a factory and a bank. However, in depicting Bounderby, the capitalist, as a coarse, vain, self-interested hypocrite, Dickens implies that Bounderby uses his wealth and power irresponsibly, contributing to the muddled relations between rich and poor, especially in his treatment of Stephen after the Hands cast Stephen out to form a union.
Thomas Gradgrind :
Gradgrind is a middle-class businessman and later a Member of Parliament. More importantly, he is the owner and operator of the educational system Dickens is dead set against. Grandgrind's system is based on the idea that only facts, math, and the measurable are important. He thinks that touchy-feely things like emotions and creativity should be repressed. Gradgrind not only raises his own kids according to his theory, but also makes sure that the school children taught by Mr. M'Choakumchild have it drilled into their heads as well.
However, as he finds many years later, if you don't teach morality, the kids won't learn morality. And so Gradgrind's comeuppance is extremely appropriate (of the eye-for-an-eye variety). Everyone who has excelled at Gradgrind-directed studies ends up betraying or letting him down in a shattering way. His daughter Louisa makes a terrible marriage, almost has an affair, and ends up separated and childless. His son Tom becomes a thief and frames another man for his crime. In the final kicker, Bitzer, the model student, refuses every appeal for mercy and gratitude from his old headmaster. Instead he just quotes Gradgrind's own materialistic and selfish philosophies back to him.
Still, what seems interesting is that Gradgrind doesn't himself live according to his worldview. He is generous – for instance, he accepts Sissy into his school and lets her live at his house when her father abandons her. He is a lot more tolerant and empathetic than other fathers of the time would be toward a near-adulterous daughter. We see him immediately take Louisa in and encourage her to be apart from Bounderby. And by helping Tom escape from justice without hesitation, Gradgrind shows that he believes that his duties as a father outweigh whatever he might owe the nation as an indifferent citizen.
In the end, Gradgrind is actually able to see how wrongheaded his approach has been. He changes his attitude and behavior to the point that he is ostracized by members of his party in Parliament. Why do you think this is? Gradgrind is the poster-boy for the strict school of thought that the play seems to be demonizing. What is the reader to make of the fact that he actually turns out to be a fairly decent human being?
Louisa Gradgrind - Loo :
We watch Louisa, Gradgrind's daughter and human guinea pig, grow from about twelve to about twenty-two years old. Her dad raises her to disregard emotions and see everything in terms of facts or statistics. This is a disaster. She becomes trapped in a loveless marriage, almost has an affair, and spends the rest of her life trying to learn to be a normal human being with feelings.
Actually, for Dickens, not just girls but all people should be allowed to have fun. But Louisa has been brought up to only consider life in Utilitarian terms. She tries to see everything numerically, either through the hard sciences or through statistical evaluation of human behavior. This is as unnatural as it sounds. She is so completely detached that most human emotions and experiences are beyond her grasp. In a novel full of some of the most tragic characters Dickens ever wrote, she is probably the saddest.
Louisa's life is so wasted on a loveless marriage and a would-be affair with a cynical opportunist that she is not even allowed to have a second chance at a more fulfilling existence. Think about it – Dickens could have made her story end any way he wanted to. She's only 22 years old at the end of the novel, after all! But no, she dies a lonely and childless spinster. Louisa is denied the kind of domestic and maternal life that was for Dickens the height of what women should aspire to. There is a pretty direct and awful connection between her childhood and adulthood here. She is damaged by her father's desire to remove her from the world of emotions, morality, and anything else that can't be put into numbers. By the time she's an adult, she's lost a large part of her humanity, the part that makes her a woman.
Why finish her plot line this way? Why give Louisa such a sad ending? We'll suggest a couple of possibilities, and you see what you think. Perhaps the idea is that she is such a one-note embodiment of the Gradgrind philosophy that she really can't be allowed to reproduce. To save the rest of the world, this philosophy and its products must die out with her and with her brother Tom, who also dies childless. Or maybe the key is the way the play's last part maybe the best way to motivate some kind of action is this kind of no-holds-barred heartstring tugging.
Cecilia Jupe - sissy :
Sissy is the daughter of a circus performer, who comes to live with the Gradgrinds as a servant when her father abandons her. She is naturally good and emotionally healthy, so the Gradgrind philosophy doesn't affect her, and she is able to take care of Louisa and to arrange Tom's escape. At the end of the novel, she is the only character who gets a happy ending of marriage and children.
Sissy is the main force for good in the novel. She is kind, caring, and loving. In the face of being abandoned by her father and then being forced to learn the Gradgrind philosophy, she never stops being the only grounding, emotionally positive force in Coketown. In a way, she is similar to another one of Dickens's favorite character types, the perfect young woman who selflessly takes care of other people. Check out Esther in Bleak House, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit, Lizzie in Our Mutual Friend… OK, there are a lot of them. Take our word for it.
But in this novel, Sissy is also a messenger from the land of imagination, creativity, and selfless actions. For instance, all three are combined when she cheers up her father after a hard day in the circus ring by reading him fairy tales about ogres and giants. What's more, everyone else in the novel is so weirdly screwed up, that the reader is always hugely relieved whenever Sissy appears, because finally someone normal is going to say some normal things in a normal way about all the craziness going on.
And yet Sissy, like Bounderby, is an interesting contradiction. She is obviously tied to the circus, to entertainment, to the life of the imagination. But she is also clearly one of the more realistic and matter-of-fact characters in the novel. The reason she can't deal with most of things Gradgrind's school is trying to teach her is that they are so abstract. Gradgrind's policies don't make any actual sense despite being logical.Think about when Sissy tells Louisa about her mistakes in school. They are all intersections of economic theory. They're clearly meant to be Sissy's more reasonable, human interpretations of what the world is actually like. For instance, when questioned about how very unimportant a few deaths in a thousand people are, she pretty sensibly answers that to the families of those dead people, those deaths are actually quite significant indeed.
Mrs. Sparsit
Bounderby’s housekeeper, who goes to live at the bank apartments when Bounderby marries Louisa. Once a member of the aristocratic elite, Mrs. Sparsit fell on hard times after the collapse of her marriage. A selfish, manipulative, dishonest woman, Mrs. Sparsit cherishes secret hopes of ruining Bounderby’s marriage so that she can marry him herself. Mrs. Sparsit’s aristocratic background is emphasized by the narrator’s frequent allusions to her “Roman” and “Coriolanian” appearance.
Stephen Blackpool
A Hand in Bounderby’s factory. Stephen loves Rachael but is unable to marry her because he is already married, albeit to a horrible, drunken woman. A man of great honesty, compassion, and integrity, Stephen maintains his moral ideals even when he is shunned by his fellow workers and fired by Bounderby. Stephen’s values are similar to those endorsed by the narrator.
Rachael :
A simple, honest Hand who loves Stephen Blackpool. To Stephen, she represents domestic happiness and moral purity.
James Harthouse :
A sophisticated and manipulative young London gentleman who comes to Coketown to enter politics as a disciple of Gradgrind, simply because he thinks it might alleviate his boredom. In his constant search for a new form of amusement, Harthouse quickly becomes attracted to Louisa and resolves to seduce her.
Mr. Sleary :
The lisping proprietor of the circus where Sissy’s father was an entertainer. Later, Mr. Sleary hides Tom Gradgrind and helps him flee the country. Mr. Sleary and his troop of entertainers value laughter and fantasy whereas Mr. Gradgrind values rationality and fact.
Bitzer :
Bitzer is one of the successes produced by Gradgrind’s rationalistic system of education. Initially a bully at Gradgrind’s school, Bitzer later becomes an employee and a spy at Bounderby’s bank. An uncharacteristically pale character and unrelenting disciple of fact, Bitzer almost stops Tom from fleeing after it is discovered that Tom is the true bank robber.
Mr. McChoakumchild :
The unpleasant teacher at Gradgrind’s school. As his name suggests, McChoakumchild is not overly fond of children, and stifles or chokes their imaginations and feelings.
Mrs. Pegler:
Bounderby’s mother, unbeknownst as such to all except herself and Bounderby. Mrs. Pegler makes an annual visit to Coketown in order to admire her son’s prosperity from a safe distance. Mrs. Pegler’s appearance uncovers the hoax that her son Bounderby has been attesting throughout the story, which is that he is a self-made man who was abandoned as a child.
Mrs. Gradgrind :
Gradgrind’s whiny, anemic wife, who constantly tells her children to study their “ologies” and complains that she’ll “never hear the end” of any complaint. Although Mrs. Gradgrind does not share her husband’s interest in facts, she lacks the energy and the imagination to oppose his system of education.
Conclusion :
The conclusion of Hard Times tells the reader the fates of some of the major characters, including Mrs. Sparsit, Mr. Bounderby, Mr. Gradgrind, Tom, and Louisa. Of these, Louisa's is the last and happiest. Though she will not have her own children, she will love and be loved by Sissy's, improving their lives with the beauty and imagination so conspicuously absent from her own childhood.
Words count : 2122
References : https://youtu.be/-Ts3XTdJ9_8
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