The Industrial Revolution was a global phenomenon during which technological advancements in means of production, transportation, and communication simultaneously worked together to create an industrial “boom” of sorts that completely upset traditional ways of thinking and living. Taking place from 1733 to 1913, the Industrial Revolution altered every aspect of life as was known at the time, shifting economic, social, cultural, and political paradigms on a scale unprecedented in history, and bringing about more change in two centuries than had previously occurred in all of human history combined. As with any epoch in human history, the literature created in the midst of this revolution provides us with a window into the everyday lives of those experiencing this total upending of everything they knew about the world, standing as a testament to the various changes in technology, work, attitudes, and values. 

Victorian author Charles Dickens is well-known for having illustrated the changes that occurred throughout this period, and, in particular, the varying ways in which these changes affected different social spheres. In his 1854 novel, Hard Times, Dickens set out to illustrate the plight of the working class as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Often viewed as a moral fable by some literary critics, Hard Times makes use of exaggerated, trope-like characters to tell the story of Coketown, a fictionalized factory town in which there is great disparity in quality of life between the wealthy, such as factory-owner Mr. Josiah Bounderby and businessman Thomas Gradgrind, and those in the working class who slave away in the factory, also called the “Hands,” of the factory, such as Stephen Blackpool, Rachel, and Slackbridge. The novel was written during a period of great change for those in the Victorian Era, and these changes are evidenced throughout the narrative. The main source of these changes lies in the onset of industrialization, which changed countless aspects of life, as well as ways of thinking about life, for Victorians, including the very nature of work itself, class structuring and the distribution of wealth and power, and the dynamics of the public sphere and citizen involvement. In short, it completely disrupted the traditional patterns of life, all within a relatively short amount of time.

The changes seen throughout the Industrial Revolution and illustrated throughout Dickens’ Hard Times, while they took place over a century ago, are not that far off from the changes we are experiencing in present times. We are in the midst of our own historical revolution, known as the Digital Revolution, and the parallels between this and the Industrial Revolution are eerily similar. Both revolutions upset the way of life as it was known at the time, particularly in regards to economic, social, and political dynamics. In pulling upon the themes and examples present in Hard Times as a guide, one can perform a comparative analysis of sorts between the Digital Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, highlighting the similarities between the two and recognizing how these similarities can better prepare us for what the Digital Revolution, and subsequent revolutions, may have in store. 

Before the two revolutions can be compared, however, it is important to identify what exactly is meant by the term ‘revolution.’ Changes are always occurring in human history—new inventions are made, innovations created, phenomena discovered—this constant ebb and flow of change is fundamental to human nature and sociology. So at what point do we deem these changes as more than just part of the natural trajectory of anthropic advancement and instead consider them part of a great epoch of time, a historical period to be remembered? Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington considers a revolution as, “a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values and myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and government activity and policies,” while sociologist Theda Skocpol calls it a, “rapid, basic transformation of a society’s state and class structures” (Tiruneh 5). The key idea that can be pulled from these working definitions is that revolutions result in an upheaval of a society’s state, structure, values, and beliefs—the current way of life is turned completely upside down. This was indeed the case with the Industrial Revolution. Educator John Green offers the following thought-experiment to exemplify the immense change that occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution:

"Imagine that it’s 1820, your life is basically identical to those living in 1720, or 1520, or, for that matter, 1220. Now that’s not to say that nothing has changed in those years...lots has changed, but, as Gregory Clark observed, in terms of standard of living, Europeans in 1800 basically led lives similar to those of Neandrathrals. Now imagine that you close your eyes in 1820 and wake up in 1920...By now most people in England do not work in agriculture, they may work in shops or transportation or mining or in factories, cars exist, some people may have radios, occasionally you might even see an airplane flying through the sky." (Green 00:12-2:02)

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Essentially, by the end of the Industrial Revolution the world would be completely unrecognizable to someone who lived in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Changes beyond the imagination occurred. This rise of a completely new way of living and thinking is the key factor in determining a social revolution. 

So, given these guidelines, can we say that the Digital Revolution is, in fact, a revolution, and one of the same magnitude as the Industrial Revolution, at that? It is contested as to exactly when the Digital Revolution began, but it is generally accepted that it began sometime in the second half of the twentieth century (Pariona 1). Applying John Green’s thought-experiment to the Digital Revolution, if someone closed their eyes in 1941 and woke up in 2021, would the world be recognizable to them? Has there been a complete altering of the way of life since the first half of the twentieth century? I would argue that yes, with the onset of modern technology, namely, the implementation of the Internet, smartphones, self-driving cars, an entire virtual public forum known as social media, and Amazon two-day delivery shipping, life as we know it is vastly different from that of 1941. 

The underpinning for both the Digital and Industrial Revolutions is the technological advancements that occurred rapidly and simultaneously prior to and throughout them.. The presence of technological advancements were the catalyst behind both revolutions, acting as the driving force behind the myriad of social, political, economic, and cultural changes that occurred. While the types of technologies that emerged through each revolution were vastly different, the important thing to note is the nature in which those technologies completely altered society’s way of living. For example, the Industrial Revolution was marked by the creation of the steam engine, the spinning wheel, the telegraph, and more, each of these which revolutionized ways of travelling, working, and communicating. Similarly, the Digital Revolution has been characterized by inventions such as smart-cars, artificial intelligence, and video calling, all of which have, once again, revolutionized ways of traveling, working, and communicating.

The technological advancements of the Digital and Industrial Revolutions were the catalysts for the changes that occurred, but what exactly were these changes and how are they indicative of great similarities between the two revolutions? The changes can be observed and discussed within the context of social, cultural, political, and economic domains. In particular, both revolutions experienced changes in the nature of work, alterations in the class structuring of society, and new opportunities within the public sphere for communication and involvement. We can use the exploration of these themes in Dickens’ Hard Times by viewing Coketown as a microcosmic lens guiding us through the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and therefore, through inference and prediction, through the effects of the Digital Revolution as we continue to live through it in real time. While values, beliefs, and society may undergo revolutions throughout history, human nature does not, and it is because of this fact that we can rely on the emotions and reactions of the characters of Hard Times to predict how modern day individuals may react to the effects of the Digital Revolution. 

The theme of industrialization plays a dominant role throughout Hard Times, and throughout the novel, Dickens seeks to criticize industrialization and its consequent effects, particularly as they applied to varying social classes.The entire fictional factory city of Coketown, where the novel takes place, stands as a symbol of industrialization and the harmful effects that it had on populations. Dickens describes it as:

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"a town of machinery, and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building where...the piston of a steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness." (31)

The setting of Coketown almost acts as a character in and of itself, personifying the filth, dreariness, and monotony of industrial life. Coketown acts as a representation of the people that inhabit it; Dickens even goes on to say that the factory town and all of its negative characteristics were, “inseparable from the work by which it was sustained,” by virtue that it contained people “equally like one another, who all went in an out at the same hours...to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow” (Dickens 31). 

Although Hard Times is known to be a novel of satire and, at times, exaggeration, the poor working conditions and high levels of monotony exemplified by Coketown were quite characteristic of the Industrial Age. The entire nature of work changed as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Before, most people worked in agriculture, with families working to sustain themselves and their loved ones through physical labor. Almost everything that families owned they worked to make for themselves, and all of that work was done by hand or by use of rudimentary tools. The nature of work tended to be quite personal and individualized—people were intimate with their work and what they were creating, everything was hands-on, and they could often see a direct correlation between the work they did and the benefit to themselves or their families. During the Industrial Revolution, however, this sort of relationship with work came to a halt. With the onset of machines and factories, people no longer had to rely on themselves or artisans for goods. Everything from food to clothes to tools to books could be mass-produced in factories. This meant that there was now a degree of separation between workers and their work, as well as a lack of individualization of the worker. Instead of being seen as an autonomous being with unique thoughts, feelings, and emotions, workers were now seen as just cogs in a machine. We see this lack of autonomy displayed throughout Hard Times, particularly through the character of Stephen Blackpool, a worker, or “Hand,” of the factory owned by Mr. Josiah Bounderby. We are given great insight into his mind and personal life, which acts in direct contrast to the dehumanizing way that factory owner Bounderby views his workers. In one scene of the novel, Stephen is bent over his work in the factory, contemplating the strange juxtaposition between the machines at which he and his fellow Hands work and the individual lives that operate those machines. He considers how ironic it is that the exact force and output of the machines are known to the precise measurement, yet no one can quantify, “the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions” (Dickens 76). This inner monologue of Stephen epitomizes the unnaturality of so many unique human minds being reduced to nothing more than machine operators or “Hands at the Mill.”

So how does this compare with the Digital Revolution? It is easy to apply this visualization of deindividualized workers, or “cogs in a machine,” to the modern day office workspace, except, instead of working on an assembly line or behind a spinning jenny, workers work behind computer screens. Even the way in which Dickens describes Coketown as, “several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another” (31), can be analogized to the layout of cubicles in office spaces, with row upon row of desks laid out like a grid, and what Stephen calls the “forest of looms,” in the factory that are, “crashing, smashing, [and] tearing,” is not too far off from the “forest” of computers in offices, with keyboards and mouses that are clicking, clacking, and rattling. Further, the change in the nature of labor from predominantly physical, or human-powered, to mechanical, as seen in the Industrial Revolution, is comparable to the transition from mechanical labor to computerized labor currently being seen in the Digital Revolution. It is not a far stretch to imagine that this will continue to evolve into a world of work completely reliant on computerized, or artificial, intelligence. This once again alters the role of the worker, for they are no longer needed to operate machinery, and even the mental aspect of labor can now be taken away—computers can do many of the tasks previously delegated to humans. This opens up the door for humans to focus, not on their relationship with work, but their relationship with one another and with their world. 

The onset of machines and factories in the Industrial Revolution not only led to these changes in individuals’ relationships with work itself, but it was also a distinct alteration in the means of production which, in turn, led to a restructuring of society in terms of who held wealth, power, and status. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, many families were responsible for their own means of production, meaning that no one individual or groups of individuals had monopoly over what could be produced and who could profit from it. However, the rise in machines and factories meant that someone had to own those machines and factories. This group of upper-class individuals became known as the bourgeoisie, and, as Karl Marx and Friedreich Engels explain in The Communist Manifesto, those who hold the means of production, in this case, the factories, hold the power in a society. This meant that the working class, also known as the proletariat, now relied on those in power for their own well-being, for they had no other option but to labor for the bourgeoisie. As stated in the manifesto, “[The proletariat is] a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity” (Marx 34). 

We, once again, see these power dynamics evidenced throughout Hard Times in the character of Mr. Bounderby, who has zero respect or consideration for the workers in his factory. In fact, Mr. Bounderby accuses his “Hands,” of being unreasonable, and of wanting to be fed, “turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon,” criticising any worker who is dissatisfied with their undesirable predicament in life as a laborer (77). Mr. Bounderby’s position as an emblem of the bourgeoisie, and as an upper-class business owner with little regard for his employees, is easily paralleled to business owners today such as Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. The Digital Revolution, which has allowed for Internet, and, subsequently, online shopping, as well as unimaginable fast delivery times, has allowed for a select few to monopolize upon these advancements for their own gain, just as the shift in the means of production to factories during the Industrial Age allowed the bourgeoisie to hoard wealth and power. It is simply the same story with different characters, repeated over and over again throughout history, quite like Marx and Engels predicted in The Communist Manifesto. 

In both revolutions, the disparity between the wealthy and the poor, or the “haves and the have nots,” only continued to increase with the introduction of new technologies. We see this in the juxtaposition between the slums in which the “Hands'' reside in Hard Times, described as, “the inner most fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in” (70), versus the luxury in which Bounderby lives, owning both a town home and a country home, the former of which is described as a “mansion,” and a “private red brick dwelling, with the black outside shutters, the green inside blinds, and the black-street door [with] two white steps” (130). Not only is this inequality in standards of living still present today, with the top 1% of Americans owning more wealth than the entire middle class combined (Pulliam and Sawhill 9), but the Digital Revolution has also brought about a new form of inequality—the digital divide. This refers to the growing gap between regions and socioeconomic classes that have access to the benefits of new technologies of the Digital Age, and those that do not. As access to computers and the Internet becomes increasingly important for participation in social, economic, and political aspects of life, those without it become more and more disadvantaged the farther we advance into a completely digital society. This trend comes as no surprise; sociologist Manuel Castell even theorizes that, “Authoritarian, exclusionary, inegalitarian societies will likely use information age technologies as tools to consolidate power, expand social divisions and inequality, and increase the level of exclusion” (Cengage 24).

Despite the rise of inequalities present throughout both revolutions, the promising news is that the working class, or the proletariat, though they may not have society’s wealth, they do have society’s numbers, meaning it is possible for them to rise up and revolutionize against the bourgeoisie. In Hard Times, one character, a factory Hand called Slackbridge, tries to do just that, by unionizing his fellow workers and encouraging them to demand better treatment: “Oh, my friends and fellow-sufferers...I tell you that the hour is come when we must rally round one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors that too long have battened upon the pounder of our families, upon the sweat of our brows, upon the labour of our hands…” (Dickens 141). There is power in numbers, and time and time again in history, working-class populations have realized that and fought for their rights against those in power. We have seen this manifested in new ways throughout the Digital Revolution, and, particularly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a shift of mindset regarding who society’s “essential workers” really are, which has, in turn, led to those workers to demand higher pay, better benefits, and more respect from their employers in general, just like the Hands in Hard Times. 

The ability for the working class to rise up is even further advanced in the Digital Age as a result of the very technologies that characterize it. The public forum of social media allows instant access to new stories and direct communication with others regarding their conditions in their workplaces, giving a distinct voice to the online presence of those fighting for social justice. This can be paralleled to the Industrial Age as well; as Industrial Museum director Karl Murr states, “It is no coincidence that the age of industrialisation coincided with the era of democratisation, which involved an increasing number of people in political processes. With the development of media like books and newspapers, the public sphere grew, which enabled more people to participate in political matters” (Murr 3). Just as the introduction of new media made possible by the Industrial Revolution’s technologies transformed the public sphere over a century ago, the same can be said about the Digital Revolution’s technologies today. More and more people are able to become politically involved and contribute their voice to society, providing the working class with a forum with which they can fight back against unfair wealth and power dynamics. 

The examples of change induced by the Industrial Revolution that we witness throughout Dickens’ Hard Times can be viewed as direct parallels to those changes currently happening in the Digital Age, and the insight that Dickens provides into his characters and the structuring of Victorian society act as a mirror into our contemporary world. Through this we can see that we are not all that different in nature from those who lived a century ago, and our history is a pattern of quiltwork that repeats itself in new iterations over and over again, whether that be in changes to the nature of work, changes in the nature of wealth and power, or changes in the nature of the public sphere. We can remember that there is always hope for justice for those disadvantaged, and there is always humanity to be found. 

Works Cited

Cengage. “Information Revolution vs. Industrial Revolution.” Encyclopedia.com, Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/economics/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/information-revolution-vs-industrial-revolution.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York, J. W. Lovell Company, 1854. 

Green, John. “The Industrial Revolution: Crash Course European History #24” YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 5 Nov. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjK7PWmRRyg.

Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. The Communist Manifesto. London ; Chicago, Ill. Pluto Press, 1996.

Murr, Karl B. “Talking About Revolutions.” Europeana Pro, Europeana Foundation, 10 Dec. 2019, https://pro.europeana.eu/post/talking-about-revolutions-from-the-industrial-to-the-digital. 

Pariona, Amber. “What Was the Digital Revolution?” WorldAtlas, WorldAtlas, 25 Apr. 2017, https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-was-the-digital-revolution.html.

Pulliam, Christopher, and Isabel Sawhill. “Six Facts About Wealth in the United States.” Brookings, The Brooking Institution, 25 Jun. 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/06/25/six-facts-about-wealth-in-the-united-states/. 

Tiruneh, Gizachew. “Social Revolutions: Their Causes, Patterns, and Phases.” SAGE Open, SAGE Publications, Inc., July-September 2014, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244014548845.