Hard Times For These Times
In order to improve the sales of his own weekly magazine, Household Words, in which sales had begun to decline in 1854, Charles Dickens (lived 1812 – 1870) began to publish a new series of weekly episodes in the magazine. Hard Times For These Times, an assault on the industrial greed and political economy that exploits the working classes and deadens the soul, ran from April 1 to August 12, 1854.
In the opening scenes that take place in the classroom, you become familiarized with the Gradgrind School and its fundamentals. The Gradgrind philosophy, based on the Facts, Facts, and more Facts of reality, is demonstrated as being not only cruel and destructive to the workers – the “Hands" of society – but is also humanly inadequate to the Gradgrind family it served. Mrs. Gradgrind observed that her husband has missed something in his life, yet, "not an ology at all." Louisa and her brother Tom, "the whelp," are nearly destroyed by the strictly mechanical principles of Gradgrindery. It was Hard Times for everyone.
Sissy Jupe, who grew up among Sleary's Horse Riding Circus, and was not exposed to the harsh doctrine of the Gradgrind family until later in life, represents the imaginative creativity and generosity that the Gradgrind family misses. The coming together of Sissy and Loo, at the conclusion of the novel at the circus, represents what Dickens believes industrial England needs. "Let me lay this head of mine upon a lov...
The title of the story is very significant in the context that follows. Gryphon is a mythical, mysterious creature. The term is almost never used to describe the life of the fourth grade students. In this case, it works perfectly. A cleaver metaphor describes Miss Ferenczi in her role of substitute teacher that this fourth grade class is introduced to. Gryphon is an imaginary creature with the rear body of a lion and an eagle head. The parallel between the substitute teacher and the unreal creation serves a multipurpose metaphor. It is used to portrayed Miss Ferenczi's appearance and her teaching methods. Like a gryphon, Miss Ferenczi is misunderstood, courageous, and intelligent. With a picture like this in mind, it is effortless to see why she would be an outcast.
...the tower installed alongside the office building as part of the whole, they have to linked each other so there is no need to leave this entire large building which finally become more self-sufficient and union just like Bauhaus.
Hard times is set in the 1840’s in the North of England. It’s set at a
Charles Dickens novel “Hard Times” is set during the Industrial Revolution and reflects life at that period of time. The novel reveals Dickens disapproval of the utilitarian education system, which involves teaching children nothing but facts. He shows his dislike through his language and tones the various settings of the main action and through spiraling character development. Dickens uses Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. McChoakumchild as examples of characters who teach children only facts. This is clearly demonstrated even in their names. The word Grind indicates that he is grinding down the children’s imaginations. It also illustrates that he is being very aggressive and forceful. Mr. McChoakumchild’s, name suggests to readers that he is chocking children and merely stuffing facts in their mind.
The workers are poor and work hard. Women and children work for many hours. Dickens also presents bad social condition through his work and also shows lives of city people and industrial society in Coketown in England. In Hard times, Dickens has a compassion for the workers and calls for the readers' sympathy by showing the workers' hardships through Stephen Blackpool, a worker who is honest, innocent, generous and full of integrity.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Monod. A Norton Critical Edition. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001. 5-222
The main thesis or central theme displayed throughout the novel is that happiness, love, loyalty, family, human affection, and friendship are the important aspects of life, rather than social class or wealth. A prime example of this is how Joe (poor blacksmith) is much happi...
love does not exist in this world then the people who live on it will
Social Classes of Industrial England in Charles Dickens' Hard Times In his novel, Hard Times, Charles Dickens used his characters to describe the caste system that had been shaped by industrial England. By looking at three main characters, Stephen Blackpool, Mr. Josiah Bounderby, and Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, one can see the different classes that were industrial England. Stephen Blackpool represented the most abundant and least represented caste in industrial England, the lower class (also called the hands) in Charles Dickens' novel. Stephen was an honest, hard-working man who came to much trouble in the novel, often because of his class.
Macmillan Master Guides: Hard Times by Charles Dickens, Macmillan Education Ltd, London ("Romanticism (literature)," Microsoft® Encarta® 98 Encyclopedia. © 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation.) Watt, I. Ed. (1963) Jane
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...
"I must entreat you to pause for an instant, and go back to what you know of my childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something of the character formed in me then" - Charles Dickens
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.
Louisa, Mr. Gradgrind's favorite child, the paragon of his factual regime, leads a broken and embittered life which ends in a showdown between the ideologies of facts and fancy. She is a prime example of a child "filled to the brim" with knowledge by her father's strictly scientific education. Confused by her coldhearted upbringing, Louisa feels disconnected from her emotions and alienated from others, yet she yearns to experience more than the hard scientific facts she has absorbed all her life. While she vaguely recognizes that her father’s system of education has deprived her childhood of all joy, she cannot avoid being coldly rational and emotionally blunted, unable to actively invoke her emotions. She would have been a curious, passionate person who ...
''A town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the