With the advent of industrialization and urbanization during the nineteenth century, English society underwent changes. Overcrowding, pollution, and social climate changes were some of the effects of the Industrial Revolution.

As noted in Charles Dickenss book, Hard Times, one of the effects of the Industrial Revolution was the overcrowding of towns. Factories were located near railroads and railroads were located in towns. In order to support themselves, people moved into town. The population growth caused the many hundred Hands (76),( factory workers), to live in public houses in one room that usually was shabbily furnished with one bed (37). These rooms were often located above bars, banks, or stores because space was limited and everything in town had to be severely workful (31). All buildings, except churches, were used for multiple purposes. For example, jails might have been an infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail (31) or the town-hall might have been used for both.

The advent of factories and the resulting population growth led to pollution. Towns were dominated by factory chimneys described as monstrous serpents of smoke (75), that polluted the air and turned red brick buildings black like the painted face of a savage (30). Rivers were contaminated with ill-
smelling dye (30). Massive waste heaps of coal and ashes (76) that bricked out nature (70) were everywhere.

Industrialization and urbanization initiated social climate changes. Part of society consisted of laborers who worked in a forest of looms that consigned nature to oblivion (76). The laboring people (32) were often considered to be immoral and impiety (80-82) drunkards. A popular fiction in Coketown was that a dissatisfied Hand is fit for anything bad (184). The Hands considered that born citizens with their fact based practical education (46) and their social system of self-interest (282) led monotonous lives like a piece of machinery that discourages human interference (63). Each felt that one side was always right and one side was always wrong (154).

The industrialization and the urbanization of towns caused overcrowding and pollution as well as social climate changes in nineteenth century society.

According to Hard Times, some of the effects of industrialization and urbanization were represented in the way in which Mr. Gradgrind taught his students and raised his own children and in descriptions of Coketown and Stephen Blackpool. Mr. Gradgrind had a pragmatic method of teaching and an inflexible attitude toward his students and even his children that were, in the authors opinion, reflections of Industrialization. He was a man of "realities and calculations" who told his pupils that all he wanted to teach was "facts" (11). To his children, Mr. Gradgrind was an "eminently practical father" (20), perhaps, more of a cold instructor than a nurturer ("they had been lectured at from their tenderest years; coursed, like little hares," 18). Coketown was a polluted (70) and noisy "brick" town, covered with "smoke and ashes," filled with " machinery and tall chimneys." Monotony dominated its appearance; and depression and addiction pervaded the lives of its inhabitants. Coketown was, in many ways, totally "utilitarian" (30-
32). Stephen Blackpool was an honest factory worker in Coketown who epitomized Dickens view of the lives of working class people during the Industrialization period. Blackpool had gone through difficult times and knew he had no future ahead of him (70, 73). Unfortunately, at the end his loyalty to his supervisor and coworkers went unappreciated (151-155, 267).