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Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is a novel divided into three books. These books are titled “Sowing,” “Reaping,” and “Garnering.” Charles Dickens is one of the most important and popular authors of the nineteenth century. He lived in an interesting time and because of his position as a huge popular author, he had the chance to comment on them. Charles Dickens wrote Hard Times to convey his inner feelings of repression of the Industrial Revolution, by putting his characters through the processes of sowing, reaping and garnering.

One of the characters in Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind, is a middle-class businessman and later becomes a Member of Parliament. More importantly, he is the owner and operator of the educational system. Grandgrind's system is based on the idea that only facts, logic, and the measurable are important. He thinks that openly expressing affection or other emotions should be repressed. Gradgrind not only raises his own kids according to his theory, but Gradgrind also sows the value of hard fact and reason into the minds of the school children taught by Mr. M'Choakumchild. Insisting that his children should always stick to the facts, Mr. Gradgrind raises his daughter Louisa Gradgrind and son Thomas Gradgrind Jr., also known as tom, to disregard emotions and see everything in terms of facts or statistics. Louisa is the eldest of the Gradgrind children and finds it hard to express herself clearly and obeys her father in everything. When she grows older, her father arranges her marriage with Bounderby, a man twice her age. In the novel, fire, which Louisa frequently stares at, is a symbol of the imagination which she has been taught to deny. Her only affection is for her brother. Louisa's discontent with the hard facts...

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...hom Dickens gives a truly happy ending. As for Gradgrind after being told by his daughter that her unhappiness was his fault and the way he brought her up lead to her dysfunction as a emotionless person, his son ending up a thief, and his wife dyeing never knowing what a happy and loving marriage felt like, he realized that his philosophy was incorrect and started to make a change.

In this book Charles Dickens basically explains to us how human beings were being turned into machines. Repression caused by the Industrial Revolution dulled fantasies and feelings and people became almost mechanical themselves. This novel shows us that a person's natural tendencies or urges need to be handled carefully by that person's environment and education. Through the processes of sowing, reaping and garnering he was able to explain the mechanizing effects of industrialization.