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Charles Dickens Divorce Law Analysis

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Dickens wants to convey us that in his time there was almost a divorce law but it only supports aristocrats, and the lower rungs or poor men suffers from it and they could not give divorce to their wives. How much they are in pain in their married lives, how much they are frustrated in married lives, how much they are in dilemma, because of the constraints of the Divorce law they could not free their selves from it. The best example in this novel is Stephen Blackpool, who in other aspects is good and honest man, who bear moral scruples but still his life is in vain as he is bound to the Victorian Divorce Law. He could not get rid of his drunkard wife because he is too poor who hardly meets his basic needs and by any means he could not be estranged …show more content…

Slackbridge is the villainous figure in Dickens eyes: he orchestrates the ugly mob hysteria that ostracises and indirectly kills the innocent and morally fastidious Stephen. On the other hand, reading with our present day perspective, we can see that Dickens`s union man touches some resonant chords. In particular, he is right to insist that they rally round one another and one united power. A basic tenet of the entire socialist movement has always been the need to act together, to show unity in order to exert the greatest pressure on the owners of the capital. The union man’s speech is ambivalent: it is boiling and common rhetoric, its comic bombast bathetic and ripe for our scorn. On the other hand Slackbridge tells some truth about the plight of workers in the industrial north in the nineteenth century. As Raymond Williams said, these are in Hard Times two “incompatible ideological positions”: one “that environment influences and in some sense determines character” and, second, that “some virtues and vices are original and both triumph over and in some cases can change any environment”

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