Hard Times Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory

This one is from the narrator and runs throughout the novel: the idea that the ugly, square, fact-based, oppressive mills look like fairy palaces with elephants in them when they are lit up at nigh...

Purely a Louisa thing here, since she's a big fan of sitting around staring at the fire and thinking about life. There are two strands to this image. One is for fires in the fireplace, which send u...

Bounderby's old standby whenever he wants to talk smack about the things his workers want is to bust out their unreasonably (and obviously totally fictitious) desire to eat this fancy, expensive me...

So, there's a really great million-dollar word that applies to Mrs. Sparsit: schadenfreude (pronounced sha-den-froi-da). It's an awesome term we borrowed from German, and it means "taking pleasure...

And speaking of giant pits of despair – Old Hell Shaft! So there are subtle symbols, and then there is this one. Let's see if we can decipher the very cryptic meaning here. Literally falling...