Significant passage book 2 :)

At the beginning of ch.4 in book 2, Slackbridge is rallying the workers of Bounderby's factory and he is giving a speech.

"As he stood there, trying to quench his fiery face with his drink of water, the comparison between the orator and the crowd of attentive faces turned towards him, was extremely to his disadvantage."

Here Dickens is preparing to contrast the extreme differences between the upper class and the working class. I love how he subtley tossed in the fire symbol to help characterize Slackbridge as a product of industrialized society! And of course the audience is in representation of the working class.

"Judging him by Nature's evidence, he was above the mass in very little but the stage on which he stood. In many great respects, he was essentially below them."

I love how sassy the narrator gets...He is just getting warmed up. But this sassy-ness is in representation of Dickens distaste for industrialized societies where there is no room for free thought or progression of class.

"He was not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humoured; he substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense. An ill-made high shouldered man, with lowering brows, and his features crushed into an habitually sour expression, he contrasted most unfavourably, even his mongrel dress, with the great body of his hearers in their plain working clothes." (pg.137)

This blunt description of Slackbridge is Dickens creating a social comment of labor institutions. Dickens literally grabs the upper class and working class, sits them side by side, and compares their differences by ripping Slackbridge to pieces with his horrible characteristics. Of course the reader is going to root for the working class men after that! Dickens takes the average honest man, strips him of all redeeming qualities and...out pops Slackbridge. Now, while he is a symbol of the type of man engrossed in Industrialized success, the reader then is able to agree with Dickens's aversion to Industrialized/Facts-based society.