Dickens' Presentation and Criticism of the Gradgrindian View of Education
"Now what I want is facts… Facts alone are wanted in life… This is the
principles on which I bring up my own children."
In the opening paragraph of the novel Thomas Gradgrind gives us an
uncompromising and utilitarian view of what education and childhood
should be. Dickens shows us that by the end of the novel the idea of
education has flaws and causes grief and heartache to Gradgrind and
his family.
The two main characters that promote this system of education are Mr
Bounderdy and Mr Gradgrind. "Square forefinger… square wall of a
forehead… square coat, square legs, square shoulders… Squarely
pointing with his square forefinger" this humorous exaggerated
description of Mr Gradgrind by Dickens in the first two chapters of
the novel gives a view of the person that mainly installs this system
of education.
"I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything else…
everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me".
Mr Bounderby is not as demanding but boastful and more extreme about
his view and how he grew up. This gives a perfect team to run the
system of education. From the irony and exaggeration used in the
description of both the two leaders way of looking at the school
children "looking into all the little vessels ranged before him, on
after another, to see what thy contained" it seams that this view will
cause problems as the children grow old as they will become factual
pages of a book.
By Sleary the circus owner's speech "People must be entertained" I
found that Sleary and Sissy are in a world that spirit, imagination,
wonder and compassion-"fancy" in other words. Dickens uses this to
show how dry and soul destroying the "industrial system of facts"
employed by Gradgrind is. Also giving us other symbols of how life
with facts will therefore have dreariness "bare windows of intensely
white washed room" as the class room is described. Then in the same
being a coach, he loved the game. He has the same posters, and the same dreams and
love for competition helped him become a leader on the football field as well as
anyone can be sure of is, when Prime Time sets his sight on something. You better get out of his way if you don’t want to get ran over in the progress. When the time comes he performs, he rises up to the occasion and look adversity in the eye and is determined to defeat it. This is why he was successful from a young age and continues to be.
Drummond, unlike many people at the time, possesses the ability to put himself in another man’s shoes and understand their perspective when everyone else
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
so is a complicated issue, but what is rather clear is that the setting of the novel is ideal for such a
Hard times is set in the 1840’s in the North of England. It’s set at a
How Dickens Establishes a Strong Sense of Character in the Novel Great Expectations In the novel, ‘Great Expectations’, Dickens employs a number of techniques to create a strong sense of his characters. One way in which he does this is by describing the settings in which Magwitch and Miss Havisham are placed, and using them to reflect the characters themselves. He situates both in environments that echo neglect, abandonment and decay, and both have an eerie, hostile feel about them. When introducing Magwitch’s setting, Dickens writes, “this bleak place overgrown with nettles”, whilst he says of Miss Havisham’s room, “everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre” These examples show a distinct lack of care toward the setting.
Readers of Charles Dickens' journalism will recognize many of the author's themes as common to his novels. Certainly, Dickens addresses his fascination with the criminal underground, his sympathy for the poor, especially children, and his interest in the penal system in both his novels and his essays. The two genres allow the author to address these matters with different approaches, though with similar ends in mind.
Twain, Mark. The adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company inc. 1990.
Dickens criticized the world of his own time because it valued the status of being a gentleman over someone doing a useful job. Those who thought they were gentlemen often mocked ordinary citizens. Show how he achieved these aims through the language used and his description of the way Pip and the other characters behaved in the novel.
Charles Dickens' Picture Of Childhood in Victorian Times Great Expectations is set in early Victorian England, a time when great social changes were sweeping the nation. The Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had transformed the social landscape, enabling capitalists and manufacturers to amass huge fortunes. Although social class was no longer entirely dependent on the circumstances of one's birth, the divisions between rich and poor remained nearly as wide as ever. London, a teeming mass of humanity, lit by gas lamps at night and darkened by black clouds from smokestacks during the day, formed a sharp contrast with the nation's sparsely populated rural areas. More and more people moved from the country to the city in search of greater economic opportunity.
...ng basketball, that the reason he sticks firm to his own values for coaching his team. He never deviated from his values and remains firm with his expectations from his team. Evan when everyone was against his decision when he locked up the gym because he stand up for what he believe best for his team. If one fails, everyone fails. If one doesn’t show up to train or didn’t show up on time then everyone suffers. He made everyone accountable for each other’s and this makes them understand that teamwork is important for making things easier and quicker to reach the goal in life that they cannot reach that goal by trying on their own. The positive attitude towards his team and remain focused to achieve his aim of transforming the team to having a successful carrier or future not only in basketball also in studies, and therefore remain consistent in his leadership style.
In the 1830s, as the capitalist system had established and consolidated in Europe, the drawbacks of the capitalist society appeared, and the class contradictions also sharpened day by day. The capitalist mode of production "has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than calloused `cash payment'. It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom --- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."(Marx, Engels 1972: 253). Additionally, the development of natural science and the victory in objecting to the religion and idealism struggle of materialism impelled the writers to break the traditional concept and illusion, and to watch the world and research the social realistic problems with the relatively objective even scientific eyes, so that Realism replaced Romanism to become the principal school of European literary circles. Since at that time the realistic literature was good at ferreting out to capitalist society and criticism, Maxim Gorky called it as "the criticized realism"(Gorky 1978: 110-111).
Essay Title- Examine how either text represents EITHER class OR gender. Are these representations problematic or contradictory? How do they relate to the plot and structure of the novel?