Balance in Charles Dickens' Hard Times
Balance; it is one attribute that almost everyone strives for within the trials and tribulations of everyday life. However, the delicate conditions needed to achieve such a plateau vary from person to person. It is Charles Dickens, in his novel Hard Times, who walks along a great tight rope in hopes of finding a medium between the multiple extremes. Using a satirical angle, Dickens tells the story of a community who becomes caught in the trap of one side of the spectrum, trapped with the cold, hard facts of life. In this world of rigid schedules and mind-numbing tasks, he is able to effectively display the absurdity of such circumstances.
One of the areas most greatly affected by such controversy is that of education. For many decades teachers have been struggling to find the balance between cramming student’s heads with facts, and letting their creativity and freewill dominate the learning process. Thomas Gradgrind, the school’s headmaster, is one character who is unable to see the need for the balance. His entire educational system was based upon proven fact. Gradgrind goes as far as discouraging the imagination and wonder of the unknown in his students. For he believed that “You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” Yet what he failed to realize was the importance of how creativity and emotion affected not only personal growth, but also the society as a whole. Without such stimuli, the children can become a form of walking drone, spitting out facts without analyzing and questioning them.
These zombies created in the school, grow up to become workers in the factories of the district. Toiling away for hours upon mindless tasks, these people are reduced to mere hands, painstakingly adding to the continuous hum of the factory. “So many hundred hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse steam power.” They are caught in the vicious cycle being treated as a mass, rather than individuals as they are. Each of the characters know something is absent from inside of their soul, but no one can figure out the exact missing piece. Yet to the reader it is an easy puzzle to solve, for a person is never complete without the ability to imagine and dream.
The French Revolution, which occurred in the late 1700’s was a period in history marked by violence and cruelty among classes. In the novel, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens powerfully depicts the cruelty of French society during this time of struggle. Throughout the novel, Dickens illustrates the theme of cruelty and inhumanity of men to their fellow countryman in France. This theme grows with each chapter and each brutal event in the novel. Dickens effectively develops the theme of man’s inhumanity toward his fellow man in A Tale of Two Cities by showing various acts of cruelty including, the horrific murder of Old Foulon by the villagers, the extremes that the Revolutionaries take in killing innocent nobles, and the noble Evrémonde family’s careless and harmful treatment of a peasant family.
Another man - we are not told who the man is or why he is present, are
The novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens offers a glimpse into the life and times during the industrial revolution in England during the nineteenth century. Dickens offers a wide range of characters from the upper class factory owner to the lowest class factory workers. He creates characters in this range of social classes and crafts this story that intertwines each person and their transformations throughout the novel. Almost every character in this story is complex and has characteristics that run deeper than their place in society, and this is what makes the novel so very important and intense. While there are many complexities linked to these characters, some do not appear to be as complex but in actuality they are. A strong example would be Josiah Bounderby, the wealthiest character in the novel.
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.
12. Oldham, R. (2000) Charles Dickens’ Hard Times: Romantic Tragedy of Proletariat Propaganda [Online]. Available: http://www.pillowrock.com [Accessed: 25th April 2005].
Hard times is set in the 1840’s in the North of England. It’s set at a
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Monod. A Norton Critical Edition. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001. 5-222
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.
Victorian Education and the First Part of Hard Times by Charles Dickens The education system in the 19th century was one of the more prominent floors in society. Trainee teachers usually began work around 14 years of age, predictably resulting in poor quality teaching. Subjects and topics were drilled repeatedly until set deep into the children’s memories. Numbers of children to a class were incredibly high, meaning there was a huge lack min teacher – pupil relationship. If you happened to be particularly bright then you were likely to be dragged behind whereas if you were unfortunately slow, then you would be left behind with no special help or encouragement.
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.
I have chosen to look at how the relationship of Pip and Magwitch develops during the novel. I have chosen 3 key scenes in which Magwitch and pip meet and I will look at how each is portrayed in terms of character, development, setting and the messages or morals that dickens is trying to convey.
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.
love does not exist in this world then the people who live on it will
"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
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.