Explore the presentation of childhood in Hard Times and Atonement

Explore the ways the two writers present the difficulties of childhoodJoint Paragraph: Patrick and FayeThe need to escape, as a difficulty of childhood, is explored through the setting of both HardTimes and Atonement. In the former, Dickens idealises the pastoral, in contrast to the‘monstrous serpents’ of Coketown’s industrial landscape. This is particularly pertinent in Book3, Chapter 6 as Stephen is put to ‘Redeemer’s Rest’ amongst the ‘larks singing’ and the ‘pleasantscents’ of the agrarian landscape. It’s apparent that as the industrial revolution caused theincreased movement of people from rural to urban areas, a tendency to romanticise the imageof the pastoral also emerged throughout 18 th and 19 th literature. Similar nostalgia for thenuances of the countryside is reflected through Stephen’s death ‘along the fields, […] down thelanes and over the wide landscapes’ – the saint-like connotations of his death serving toreiterate the promise of freedom offered by the arable setting. Likewise, the woods inAtonement offer Cecilia escape from the confines of her upper class lifestyle to the ‘cool highshade of the woods’. The stifling passivity of the setting is, perhaps, suggestive of the disillusionassociated with postmodernism: the frustration at the regimental societal order allowed for thecollapse of Europe into a ‘dead civilisation’. Losing innocence is fundamental to growing up, andthe woods within Atonement support this through enabling Robbie to continue his sexualencounter with Cecilia ‘far from the house, beneath the trees by the river’, as such is integral tothe loss of youthful naivety. Unlike Hard Times, this woodland has an unknown, yet liberating,quality which is starkly different to Stephen’s faith in finding ‘the God of the poor’ in the land,however it’s apparent that the emblem of rural landscape persists throughout both texts to offera form of escapism.