The Industrial Revolution’s Effect On Literature

The Industrial Revolution’s Effect On Literature

Charles Dickens’ novel, Hard Times for These Times was written in response to the Industrial Revolution. One of themes of the novel is the mechanization of human beings, written as a warning to the overzealous embrace of new technology, and how it might effectively turn humans into machines by stunting the development of emotions and imagination. Hard Times also portrayed a very valid image of the wastelands that the working class have to live in during the Industrial Revolution. Protest poems such as Caroline Norton’s A Voice from the Factories (1863) and Thomas Hood’s Song of the Shirt (1843) were also written to highlight the suffering of the working class. Elizabeth Browning created Cry of the Children as a way of expressing her anger at the reports of the Children Employment Commission of 1842.


Poet William Wordsworth on the other hand, wrote about where the introspective artist might belong in a “Mechanical Age”. In Preface to the Second Edition of ‘Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth went on to say that as technology moves closer to being at the center of a culture, the mind is reduced “to a state of almost savage torpor”.

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