This study will argue that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens' Hard Times present very different perspectives of the role and nature of power in England in the first half of the nineteenth century in England. At the same time, they each portray a society in which the economic basis of power prevails, with Austen focusing primarily on the domestic realm and Dickens focusing largely on the public realm. Both works can be seen as social critiques, although, again, Dickens focuses on more public issues (education, labor, capitalistic economics), while Austen focuses on the private sphere (love, marriage, gender issues).
In those contexts, both authors make clear who they believe has the power in society. To Dickens, the rich capitalists and their underlings control society, and they do so through exploiting and controlling the poor and the working class on every level of society. To Austen, it is the men who control society (at least on the surface), specifically the small realm of society upon which she focuses her critical microscope. Power in Austen's world is a matter of women (for the most part without power or money, to speak of) trying to land a husband (who has that desired power and money). Women such as Charlotte, for example, knowing they are about to marry a man they do not even respect, do so anyway because they know the alternative is to be marked morally, socially and economically as isolated outsiders. The same, however, can be said for the workers of Coketown in Dickens' novel. The workers have no alternative, either, although they might dream of a better future in which they had the power, or at least a share of it.
In both novels, those who have the power are to some degree also slaves to that power. Can readers say that the capitalists in Dickens are truly happy or peaceful? Can readers say the same for the men in Austen? Certainly, no enlightened woman in Austen or humanistic worker in Dicken...