In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Dickens presents Gradgrind as a factual man, who is portrayed to be only square. When using the word square, it means the actual shape of a square. In the first chapter, the reader reads all this descriptive language of how square Thomas Gradgrind is. Throughout the text, Charles Dickens changes the reader’s view of Thomas Gradgrind from square to circle through Gradgrind’s behavior and the view of himself.
The first time the reader views any knowledge of Thomas Gradgrind or his family is in the first book, Sowing. In the first chapter of Hard Times, Gradgrind is introduced when he is lecturing at his new school about facts. “You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.” (Dickens). In this first part of the book, Gradgrind is described as a having a square head, a square body, and basically everything square. This is the initial square behavior of Thomas Gradgrind. Facts are his life and his faith. Gradgrind believes facts is his faith because the facts he has learned in life haven’t let him down yet. That is all about to change when Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus performer, can’t answer what a horse is in a factual definition. When Gradgrind goes to tell Sissy that she cannot attend school anymore because she has a bad influence on the other children at his school. There is something about Sissy Jupe that made Gradgrind take her home to raise her with his own children. Part of the reason is because Sissy Jupe’s father disappeared from the circus because he was so ashamed he could perform anymore, so Gradgri...
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...troyed his family, and made his wife miserable like Louisa was with Bounderby. Through Gradgrind, Dickens portrays the way he feels about the educational system and schools. They do not give students the education that is truly necessary for life, all they give is the factual evidence that drives people to a lonely life of misery. Gradgrind serves the purpose of being the person who saw the awful things fact has done to his family and changes. Without Gradgrind in this novel, there would be no sense of awareness that change was needed, and so was love to make their family work. In the end, Gradgrind and his children have a better bond because of Sissy Jupe’s background of fancies. Without Sissy Jupe, the Gradgrind family would not be a family with any bonding besides blood.
Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. Hard times. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2001. Print.
I had a Political science professor that once said “Political survey answers depend more on how a question is asked than on what the question is asking.” I read and reread the above question. I have to admit that even after 15 weeks of topic discussions, PowerPoint, text chapters and Google; I am still confused about how tax expenditure works. The nearest I can figure out and in plain English, it is simply a tax break. That being said, this question is very methodically asked. The term “anti-poverty programs” is a gentle, non threatening term that will be met with compassion and kindness among more than 85% of (surveyed) US citizens. Second “tax expenditures” is a confusing term associated with the mean IRS that must have something to do with the government taking hard earned money and doing something with it, but what? Who knows? The final term is the big, bad anti-conservative term that only about 11% of surveyed Americans actually greet with any positivity. So the question in our subconscious mind flows something like: “What are the advantages and disadvantages of helping people who need it with your tax money instead of giving it to people who don’t want to work?” But that’s not what the question is asking. Because I know that my subconscious takes into consideration, the information it believes is true. First anti-poverty programs, such as Medicaid, are in most people’s minds still welfare. Before the New Deal many of the anti-poverty programs, as well as welfare (utility assistance, help purchasing groceries, etc.) were funded completely through private charities....
In the book “The Great Gatsby” we have the character Nick, which at first, gave the impression of a nice person, because in the book he states that keeps all judgments to himself, stated in, this quote, “ In consequence I am inclined to reserve all judgments.” This gives an idea that Nick while knowing the character of another keeps his ideas to himself, in addition, it shows that Nick is aiming to keep the judgments that his father gave him with out giving up, even though it has caused Nick a lot of trouble. That make Nick boring, nonetheless, he continued showing an ambition to keep his fathers advise, ...
There are many different opinions about the differences between faith and reason. Traditionally viewed differences between reason and faith are that reason is something that requires empirical, factual evidence while faith relies merely on, well, faith. For something to have reason it must have some kind of factual evidence to make it true, or at least very good sound reasoning to believe that whatever it is, is factual. Faith is far from something that attains empirical evidence, faith usually relies on personal accounts which are usually of mystical content. Many philosophers have different opinions about how the two can coexist; some say under no circumstances at all, while others claim they can justify each other, and some claim faith is reason alone. Some philosophers claim that believing in God is an obvious choice by the claim that just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there like Blaise Pascal. Blasé Pascal and Clifford offer two completely different standpoints on the role of reason and faith.
The narrator of The Great Gatsby is a man from America named Nick Caraway. He not only narrates the story but portrays himself as the book’s author. Whilst we as the reader make our way through the passage, it is effortless to forget the important fact that The Great Gatsby is first of all a book about a man writing a book; therefore we are not observering this scene first hand, although it seems on the surface as if we are; Nick Caraway is merley recreating events for us, filtering them through his own sense of connotation, and filling them with his own perception.
Swisher, Clarice, Ed. “Charles Dickens: A Biography.” Readings on Charles Dickens. San Diego, Greenhaven Press, 1998. Print. 21 March 2014.
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.
The tracts of looming smoke and gloomy chimney’s witness to Gradgrind informing his daughter she is to be married to the industrialist Josiah Bounderby, well enough show Dickens’ style and effect. But also here the appearance of the Blue Books in a windowless Observatory; -of course there are windows, Louisa looks out of them to see the factories-nevertheless, the comment on the “research” of the philanthropist is well taken: locked in his room; examining facts. See Gradgrind when he talks to Cissy -Girl number 18, at the school, memorably portrayed by Emma Lewis in the Peter Barnes 1994 BBC
“The Life and Times of Charles Dickens.” Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Ed. John O. Jordan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 1-15. Print.
It can be seen through Dickens’s highly successful novel Great Expectations, that his early life events are reflected into the novel. Firstly the reader can relate to Dickens’s early experiences, as the novel’s protagonist Pip, lives in the marsh country, and hates his job. Pip also considers himself, to be too good for his ...
In conclusion, obviously through this reading and Charles Dickens detailed descriptions of a sad school room of this time and how terribly the teachers mean were. Dickens wanted a change to all of this and this was his way of saying that by describing that there was no imagination allowed or creativity but rather only facts. The classrooms were dull and boring a cold place as was the rest of the country at this time.
Most of the story revolved around utilitarianism and the study of cold hard facts, but when the character flaws began to surface as a result of this philosophy, Dickens is quick to emphasize them. One actually sees the main character of the book and firm supporter of utilitarianism, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, experience the faults of his practice and begin to stray from it. Now, after watching his life fall apart, maybe he wishes he were in the circus.
Just before he started to toddle, he stepped into the glare of footlights. He never stepped out of it until he died. He was a good man, as men go in the bewildering world of ours, brave, transparent, tender-hearted, and honorable. Dickens was always a little too irritable because he was a little too happy. Like the over-wrought child in society, he was splendidly sociable, and in and yet sometimes quarrelsome. In all the practical relations of his life he was what the child is at a party, genuinely delighted, delightful, affectionate and happy, and in some strange way fundamentally sad and dangerously close to tears. 2
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 ...
In the small section of Charles Dickens’ novel, “Hard Times,” the reader is given small clues as to why Dickens wrote the book. “Hard Times” was written to criticize, and possibly reform the education system in England during that time period. Schools were dark places. It was almost as if happiness was not allowed in schools. It actually was indirectly not allowed, because imagination wasn’t allowed to be used, and visual representations of things which are not in fact found in classrooms were no where to be found. Everything was about facts. Nothing other than the facts was taught, or even mentioned at school. Apparently, nothing else mattered. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts.” School would have been even more boring back then than it is today. Dickens saw the problem in the way children were being educated, and wanted to fix that. He wrote “Hard Times.” In the small part of the novel that we read, there is a class in session. The teacher humiliates a young student named Sissy. Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher, repeatedly tells his class that fact is all that matters. Imagination is useless. Dickens makes his problems with the education system very obvious in this part of the novel. It is the small details, however, that really tell the reader what the purpose of the novel is. These acute details, such as the names of the characters, dialogue or statements between characters, and descriptions of the setting, are what can tell the reader exactly what Dickens thinks about the system. The names of the two men, the dialogue between Mr. Gradgrind and Sissy, and the bland, grey description of the classroom make the mood of the story very dark and cold, which is exactly what Dickens wants.