Tasks to complete on Part One.
1.
Compare the
description of Hanky Park in
chapter 1 with the descriptions of Coketown in Hard Times.
2.
Greenwood details
Harry’s perceptions of Marlowe’s works; are there any comparable idealisations of Bounderby’s
mill in Hard Times? What purpose do
these idealisations serve? In each case, how are we made aware of the
realities?
3.
Compare the
presentation of Mr Price with our first introduction to Mr Gradgrind. Consider
novelistic technique and the interpretation of character we are invited to
make.
4.
Contrast Harry’s
moods of black despair (pg 43) with Louisa’s malaise in Hard Times.
5.
Find examples
of Greenwood’s use of figurative
language and contrast them with Dickens’s.
6.
The details of
daily and weekly life in Love On the Dole build pictures of both
the material and intellectual poverty of life in Hanky Park. Find and discuss a
representative sample.
7.
Both Harry and
Helen have dreams. Compare and contrast them.
Tasks to complete on Part
Two
1.
Ch 1 begins with
Harry’s aspirations; preoccupied by them, he fails to understand the
significance of the changes taking
place in the works. Explain.
Harry wants to be responsible for a machine and fails to understand the significance of the new machinery or the disappearance of the older boys. The former require less human input and the latter have just been made redundant at the end of their apprenticeships.
2.
In ch 2 economic
realities begin to teach Harry some lessons about life and about exploitation.
How does Greenwood convey these?
Can we compare Harry’s feelings about being ‘cheated’ to Tom’s feelings
in Hard Times?
Harry realises that he will only have the basic wage and that this is not enough to live on without the support of his parents. On page 74 he feels that the older boys doing men’s work was ‘outrageous’. About life Harry realises that he is under a sentence: no growth but ‘a never-ending suffocating circle’. Greenwood conveys his realisations through taking the reader into his stream of consciousness.
3.
Explain how and why negative feelings take possession of
Harry.
4.
In what ways could the
description of the lovers on Dawney’s Hill (pg 79) be
symbolic?
Lovers look towards the innocent rivers and fields and away from the urban sprawl with the smudgy skies.
5.
Contrast the
presentation of Larry’s speech on pg 86 with Dickens’s presentation of
Slackbridge’s.
6.
Hardcastle and Harry
argue over the purchase of a suit; explain how this functions to show us the
human effects of lifelong poverty.
7.
How does Greenwood use
the ramble to contrast working
class and middle class culture? (pg97)
Include the role of the séance at the end of ch 6; the middle class have Beethoven and Bach, but the workers have only gambling, drinking and superstition.
8.
In what sense does ch 6
show us that there is a ‘dog eat dog’ aspect to the all-pervasive money economy?
And what evidence is there that the
poor look to a romanticised and lost past rather than to a utopian
future?
Mrs Nattle’s commissions and her resale of spirits; the conversation looking back to the time of the millionaires in the Eccles Old Road.
9.
Ch 7 shows us that the
capitalist Sam Grundy makes some sort of capital even out of a ‘losing’
situation. Explain. What do Sam’s attitudes to Sally and to his old friend Ted
reveal?
10. Part Two ends with both
a demonstration of the power of money to transform lives and some fairly explicit economic analysis of the plight
of those at the bottom of the heap, the ‘hands’, of a type not found in
Hard Times. Explain and comment. It also ends with a poetic and symbolic
paragraph hinting at both happiness and disappointment/danger.
Discuss.