. When Industrial Revolution began, factories came up, business profits increased but workers faced problems. . Cities expanded in an unregulated way and were filled with overworked and underpaid workers. . Deeply critical of these developments, novelists such as Charles DicRens wrote about the terrible effects of industrialisation on people’s lives and characters. . His novel Hard Times depicts a fictious industrial town as a grim place full of machinery, smoking chimneys and rivers polluted. . Dickens criticised not just the greed for profits but also the ideas that reduced human beings into simple instruments of production. . Dickens’ Oliver Twist is the tale of a poor orphan who lived in a world of petty criminals and beggars. Oliver was finally adopted by a wealthy man and lived happily everafter. . Emile Zola’s Germinal was written on the life of a young miner and ends on a sad note.