Significance of Emotional Education in Dickens' Novel, Hard Times

Set in the ever shifting world of the Industrial Revolution, Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times begins with a description of a utilitarian paradise created by the illustrious and "eminently practical" Mr. Gradgrind, a world that follows a prescribed set of logically laid-out facts. However, readers soon realize that Gradgrind's modern utopia is only a simulacrum, belied by the damnation of lives devoid of elements that feed the heart and soul, as well as the mind. As the years progress, the weaknesses of Gradgrind's carefully constructed system become painfully apparent, especially in his children Louisa and Tom, and in the poor workers employed under one Mr. Josiah Bounderby, a wealthy factory owner who is a subscriber to Gradgrind's system. Dickens, through the shattering of Gradgrind's utilitarian world, tells us that no methods, not even constant oppression and abuse, can defeat and overcome the basic nature of humans and their fundamental need for emotion and imagination.

Louisa, Mr. Gradgrind's favorite child and the protégé of his factual regime, leads a broken and embittered life culminating in a showdown between ideologies. 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 other people, but yet she yearns to experience more than the hard scientific facts she has learned 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 invoking her emotions. She would have been a curious, passionate person that would ha...

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...ng, is awarded the Victorian ideal of true happiness ― husband and children. All other characters, despite repentance for some, meet a depressed and melancholic end. With this imparting, sentimental conclusion, Dickens warns the audience to live a better, more selfless, wiser life.

Dickens believed not so much in political and social revolution than in internal modulation and growth of the mind. He argues that all humans have a similar nature, a fundamental need for imagination, emotion, and love. He tells us that this collective need cannot be altered or thwarted by any methods of education or oppression, despite how strict and abusive it might be. In the end, it does not matter whether you were born in a good or a bad environment, Dickens tells us, it is how your true nature responds, changes, and molds the environment that decides what person you will become.