Dickens' Attitudes to Education in Hard Times
I am going to explore the opening chapters of 'Hard Times' by Charles
Dickens and discuss his attitudes towards education in his time. In
particular I'm going to comment on various characters and Dickens'
narrative techniques. This novel in Dickens' time was a controversial
and a political comment to convey his views on education. Hard Times
is about a specific time, the 1840s; and it reflects the harsh and
comfortless lives of English people, particularly working-class people
in that period. As well as that after about seventy years of the
industrial revolution, industrialists were rich and prosperous,
whereas their workers were not. In the filthy, poorly built new cities
of the North, the workers were very poorly housed, overworked and
underpaid. Even women and children worked fifteen hours a day, six
days a week, in mines and factories. All of these issues are addressed
in the novel and Dickens' exposes the government and industrialists,
and he tries to a better quality of life for the workers. He gets
these views across through his themes, his presentation and his use of
language. By using these he attacks the government and industrialists
specifically and effectively.
Dickens presents the teachers and inspector in a negative light and
reveals his ideas and opinions on education through his presentation
of them. The first point at which he does this is through his
presentation of Mr Gradgrind. Dickens presents Gradgrind as a strong,
harsh person; everything about him is emphasised and he repeats this
word too, he does this to illustrate his own point. "The speaker's
obstinate car...
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... the best of the teacher's ability. Schools have also improved and are
now a little more colourful and attractive. I think that Dickens
thought that education was being taught the wrong way, that teachers
held too much power and authority, education allowed no input from
children, because there were so many of them and teachers didn't allow
it and that schools were bland and not a very nice place to be.
The ideas and opinions that he expresses through the novel are; that
treating people kindly is more important than facts. That while the
government, bosses and managers were getting rich, women and children
had terrible working environments, and that this was unfair and so
very wrong in all sorts of ways. He wrote this book as a political
comment and I think wholeheartedly agree with all of the issues he
addresses.
Charles Dickens born February 7th 1812 – 9th June 1870 is a highly remarkable novelist who had a vision to change wealthy people’s scrutiny on the underprivileged and by fulfilling the dream he writes novels. Furthermore, I think that Dickens wrote about poverty as he had experiences this awful incident in his upbringings.
along with the rest of his family to work in a factory to help repay
Another man - we are not told who the man is or why he is present, are
Charles Dickens' literary works are comparable to one another in many ways; plot, setting, and even experiences. His novels remain captivating to his audiences and he draws them in to teach the readers lessons of life. Although each work exists separate from all of the rest, many similarities remain. Throughout the novels, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, the process of growing up, described by the author, includes the themes of the character's ability to alienate themselves, charity given to the characters and what the money does to their lives, and the differences of good and evil individuals and the effects of their influences.
What is Dickens Attitude to the Working Classes in Chapter XX (Book 2, Chapter 4)?Does Dickens portray the Unions with as much Sympathy as the Workers? Charles Dickens wrote Hard Times in 1854. What is Dickens Attitude to the Working Classes in Chapter XX (Book 2, Chapter 4)? Does Dickens portray the Unions with as much Sympathy as the Workers?
On February 7, 1812, a popular author named Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England during the Victorian Era and the French Revolution. He had a father named John Dickens and a mother named Elizabeth Dickens; they had a total of eight children. In Charles’s childhood, he lived a nomadic lifestyle due to his father 's debt and multiple changes of jobs. Despite these obstacles, Charles continued to have big dreams of becoming rich and famous in the future. His father continued to be in and out of prison, which forced him, and his siblings to live in lodging houses with other unwanted children. During this period of depression, Charles went to numerous schools and worked for a boot cleaning company. This caused him
"Now what I want is facts… Facts alone are wanted in life… This is the
Hard times is set in the 1840’s in the North of England. It’s set at a
Charles Dickens is one of the most famous writers of the Victorian Age. This period is known for industrialization which brought about many problems. Workers were trying to fight for the rights which were taken from them. Dickens depicts this struggle in many of his works. In Hard Times he focuses on the new way of thinking, a result of the development of technology. The reader is introduced to the new philosophy applied to the upbringing of Victorian children, represented by Thomas Gradgrind and his off spring. This type of education had many negative effects on these young minds. One of them is dehumanization which is noticeable in the acts of Louisa and Tom Gradgrind. This research paper is going to focus on Dickens’ portrait of the Gradgrinds’ education and its
Charles Dickens is one of the most popular and ingenious writers of the XIX century. He is the author of many novels. Due to reach personal experience Dickens managed to create vivid images of all kinds of people: kind and cruel ones, of the oppressed and the oppressors. Deep, wise psychoanalysis, irony, perhaps some of the sentimentalism place the reader not only in the position of spectator but also of the participant of situations that happen to Dickens’ heroes. Dickens makes the reader to think, to laugh and to cry together with his heroes throughout his books.
The death of God for many in the Victorian era due to scientific discoveries carried with it the implication that life is nothing more than a kind of utilitarian existence that should be lived according to logic and facts, not intuition or feeling – that without God to impose meaning on life, life is meaningless. Charles Dickens, in Hard Times, parodies this way of thought by pushing its ideologies and implications to the extreme in his depiction of the McChoakumchild School.
Mr. Gradgrind was a prominent school head that believed in “realities, facts, and calculations.” He is described as a cold-hearted man that strictly forbids the fostering of imagination and emotion, especially in his two children: Tom and Louisa (Dickens 5). Mr. Gradgrind raises his children in Coketown, a Capitalistic industrial town that Dickens calls, a waste-yard with “litter of barrels and old iron, the shining heaps of coals, the ashes everywhere, shrouded in a veil of mist and rain” (128). In this town that seems to be impenetrable to the sun’s rays, his children grow up lacking social connections, mor...
love does not exist in this world then the people who live on it will
In the novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens connives a theme of utilitarianism, along with education and industrialization. Utilitarianism is the belief that something is morally right if it helps a majority of people. It is a principle involving nothing but facts and leaves no room for creativity or imagination. Dickens provides symbolic examples of this utilitarianism in Hard Times by using Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, one of the main characters in the book, who has a hard belief in utilitarianism. Thomas Gradgrind is so into his philosophy of rationality and facts that he has forced this belief into his children’s and as well as his young students. Mr. Josiah Bounderby, Thomas Gradgrind’s best friend, also studies utilitarianism, but he was more interested in power and money than in facts. Dickens uses Cecelia Jupe, daughter of a circus clown, who is the complete opposite of Thomas Gradgrind to provide a great contrast of a utilitarian belief.
While the novel does act as a social commentary on the disparaging treatment of the poor in England, Dickens fails to do more than comment on the situation. The fact that the social classes are fighting for survival against one another provides for the establishment of a further embedded social caste system of us against them. The very poor in David Copperfield, are at times overlooked by even the middle class characters in the novel. While some of the middle class characters do look out for a few of the lower class characters, these actions are taken as a result of their need to feel needed by others. My paper will examine the desire for the author to write a social commentary on class inequality, survival, and the search for happiness at all costs in David Copperfield.