The description of the workers at Bounderby’s factory demonstrates how machine-like they have become. Coketown is described as being “inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next” (27-28). By describing the actions of Coketown workers as monotonous and repetitive, Dickens calls to mind the involuntary movements of machines. The repetition of the word “same” within the passage emphasizes the repetition that occurs within Coketown and the factories. Dickens goes on to explain that “these attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained” (28). Dickens makes a point of using the word “inseparable” to explain how essential the factories were to the city. Coketown did not merely contain factories, it was itself a factory. The work being performed in Coketown’s factory, and by extension Coketown itself, was gradually being mechanized. By comparing the entire city to a factory that was becoming mechanized, Dickens is suggesting that the components of the city, the people, were becoming mechanized as well.

    The way that Bounderby treats the workers defines them as replaceable objects. He refers to the factory workers as a large group, rather than individuals. Bounderby believes that he is above the workers of the factory and treats them poorly because of this. He calls them “pests of the earth” and “you people” when talking to Blackpool about the unionization of the factory workers (144, 147). The workers are so objectified that when organizing themselves, they can no longer conceive of their own human individuality. Bounderby refuses to acknowledge that the factory workers are people of value, but instead separates them from himself. The workers can no longer imagine themselves as separate entities, because they have been consistently treated as “hands” rather than as individuals (66). By calling the workers “hands” Dickens illustrates how the factory workers are only seen as a part of the machine, only a part of the system, rather than individuals.

    Blackpool is used throughout the book as a metonym for the factory; he is internal to the factory. We first see him “standing in the street, with the odd sensation upon him which the stoppage of the machinery always produced – the sensation of its having worked and stopped in his own head” (66, 67). Dickens uses Blackpool to make it clear that there is no way out for the factory workers, “an idea that Dickens ironically illustrates by having Stephen leave Coketown only to fall into an abandoned mine pit, called the Old Hell Shaft, just on the outskirts of town” (Johnson, 228).

    Dickens does not give a clear solution to the problem of industrialization that society was facing at the time. He shows the circus as an alternative to the factories and he shows how children’s education is vital to how they will one day act in society, but he does not “offer a programmatic solution to the ugly snarl of Coketown; a program, after all, is simply more Fact. Instead he calls for a radical reorganization, by each of us, of our own lives, de-emphasizing schedule and machine, fostering the legitimate human instinct for relaxation, good humor, and creativity” (Danzig, 197). British society at the time was concerned about the dehumanization taking place throughout the country. In his novel, Hard Times, Dickens acknowledges these fears, but does not offer any concrete solutions that would have eased his reader’s minds.