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Dickens and a critique of education
Dickens and a critique of education
Education in the victorian period case study
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Hard Times
Hard Times by Charles Dickens was published in 1854. Dickens vividly depicts the various social issues of his time, and his critical view is reflected in the story. Unlike the majority of the children at that time, Dickens was fortunate enough to attend private school. He wrote this story to voice sympathy for children who had to follow the biased education system that emphasizes facts and concrete logical thinking. Dickens shows his dislike of the system through use of language, setting, and character development over abstract ideas, and creativity imagination.
Each book of Hard Times using farming terms: Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering. These names reflect steps of the education system in Coketown. They sow facts and figures into children to make them into good specimens, then reap and garner the perfect form of those grown up children filled with facts. In chapter 1, Book 1, titled,” One thing needful” which says what is most necessary in Coketown: and his colleagues. A quote from chapter1 (Book 1, pg.11, line1~8) suggests, teaching children only facts is the principle he strongly believes in. “Plant nothing else and root out everything else.” In this manner, he can exterminate their imagination completely. Some of the characters in this book have names that further reflect Dickens’ views. For example, Gradgrind, of Mr. Gradgrind means to reduce something to fine particle. It is his wish to reduce children’s imaginations and to make them into robotic carbon copies or clones. Choakumchild of Mr. McChoakumchild means to choke children to torture and to kill their imagination. Dickens invents these silly names to mitigate the sad and serious part of this book.
Coketown in Victorian industrial society has th...
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... beings into machines by interrupting the development of emotions and imaginations. These suggestions are quite apparent from the fall of Bounderby and Gradgrind, who were so caught up in being forthright and analytical. Louisa and Tom are the victims crushed under the anti-fascism education taught by their father.
On the other hand, Sissy who grew up in the circus constantly treated in the fancy world forbidden to Louisa and Thom. She spends happier life, lovingly raising her children. It is obvious that love and warmth enriched her personalities. But at the same time, we should not forget that if Gradgrind had not adopted her, Sissy would have no guidance and discipline. Her life could have been different. As a conclusion, the one thing needful is that both fact and dream are important for a balanced life.
King, in introducing the little convent girl to the reader, goes to great lengths to present her as a dreary and uninteresting creature. She wore dark clothing, sat rigidly upright, secluded herself in her room, and displayed little zest for life. Therefor, when King uses the work "blac...
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
Charles Dickens is the author of many well-known classics such as A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and David Copperfield, but he was a man of humble beginnings. Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth, England as the second of eight children. Though they had high aspirations for success, Dickens’ family remained poor, and his father was even imprisoned for debt. When Dickens’ entire family was sent to work in a downshodden boot-blacking factory, he felt that he had lost “his youthful innocence… betrayed by the adults who were supposed to take care of him. These sentiments would later become a recurring theme in his writing”(biography.com).
The warehouse work at age 12, the humiliating shadow of prison and family debt, questions of money and social rank, and topical issues of law and reform preoccupied him in early life - but they rankled and haunted him through his later years as well, and are present in various forms in all of his writings. In all of these fictional imaginings, drawn from the turmoil of his own life, the reader senses Dickens' compassion for the less fortunate and his desire to find real meaning and substance behind an individual's worth favoured by society, wealth, class, power, and education. Charles Dickens was born in 1812, in Portsmouth, England. He spent his formative years in London, and began his schooling at age nine. In 1824, his father, John, suffered financial difficulties and was stripped of his house by creditors.
Charles Dickens is a famous novelist who was born on February 7TH 1812, Portsmouth England. His novel ‘Oliver Twist’ had been serialized and to also show Dickens purposes, which was to show the powerful links between poverty and crime. The novel is based on a young boy called Oliver Twist; the plot is about how the underprivileged misunderstood orphan, Oliver the son of Edwin Leeford and Agnes Fleming, he is generally quiet and shy rather than being aggressive, after his parents past away he is forced to work in a workhouse and then forced to work with criminals. The novel reveals a lot of different aspects of poverty, crime and cruelty which Dickens had experienced himself as a young boy in his disturbing and unsupportive childhood, due to his parents sent to prison so therefore Charles, who was already filled with misery, melancholy and deprivation had started working at the age of twelve at a factory to repay their debt.
Charles Dickens’ (1812-1970) father had great financial difficulties. The boy had a rather miserable childhood, and the lad spent much of his time in poorhouses and workhouses. Did poverty overwhelm Charles Dickens? Was his negative environment to blame for an unproductive and fruitless life? No it wasn’t. Dickens retreated into his imaginary world and incisively wrote about the need for social reform in what later became such literary classics such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.
In Hard Times Charles Dickens portrays Louisa Gradgrind as a realistic character who faces conflict from the start of her life. Louisa encounters three major psychological conflicts in the form of three different men: Mr. Gradgrind, Mr. Bounderby, and Tom Gradgrind. Men play a very important role in the shaping of Louisa's life. Instead of being her own person and expressing her own feelings, Louisa falls under the realm of these three men.
The novel, Hard Times by Charles Dickens revolves around the central idea of English society, including the social, economical, and political issues during the mid 19th century. Fact superior to imagination is one of the main themes of this novel, apparent mainly in book one. Mr. Gradgrind raises his children to ignore their imaginations and anything that is not cold hard fact. For example, Louisa, his daughter, in particular tends to question this rationalism with her curiosity about the circus. There are countless examples in which Mr. Gradgrind bestows his “wisdom” on both his children, and students in the education system located in Coketown. The way Mr. and Mrs. Gradgrind raised their children, described by Dickens, parallels the way in which John Stuart Mill was raised by his own parents in London during the 19th century. John, similarly to Louisa, was educated with the idea that any of his own imagination or creativity was wrong. His parents would burn toys in front of him, emulating the idea that any object or concept that brings happiness is simply wrong. His father, Sir James Stuart Mill, also had a major impact on Mill’s childhood and even manhood. The majority of his infancy was centered on education, and the thought that hard-core knowledge was the solution to any conflict. During this time, his father would make him read Greek and Latin classics to ensure that he were prepared for disciplinary jobs in the future. Through this childhood of fact, and purely fact, along with a lack of moral influences instituted in his life, constituted Mill to become an advocate for utilitarianism. This theory was proposed by Jeremy Bentham who was indeed Mill’s family friend and tutor, emphasizing the idea of maximizing happiness and ...
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.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times: An Authority Text, Background, Sources, And Contemporary Reactions Criticism. NewYork: W.W. Norton & Company. 2,1990. Ch.1: 1, ch.7: 203, ch.8: 210 & 211, ch.9: 218.
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
Charles Dickens uses satire in his novel Hard Times as he attempts to bring to light social issues such as class division, education, and industrialization in nineteen-century English society. Hard Times was originally published in weekly segments in Dickens’ magazine, Household Words, from April 1854 to August 1854 (Cody 1). In order to better fit into the Libraries at the time, Charles Dickens divided Hard Times into three books: Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering. Each book with its own theme, guides us through the lives of the characters living in the fictional city Dickens calls, “Coketown.”
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.
When considering representation, the ways in which the authors choose to portray their characters can have a great impact on their accessibility. A firm character basis is the foundation for any believable novel. It is arguable that for an allegorical novel - in which Hard Times takes its structure, Dickens uses an unusually complex character basis. The characters in Hard Times combine both the simplistic characteristics of a character developed for allegorical purposes, as well as the concise qualities of ‘real’ people (McLucas, 1995). These characters are portrayed to think and feel like we as readers do and react to their situations in the same way that most of us would. Such attributes are what give the characters life and allow us to relate to their decisions.
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.