Charles Dicken's Hard Times is a novel depicting the destructive forces of utilitarianism on the modern world following the Industrial Revolution. Through the vivid characters interwoven throughout the text, Dickens exemplifies the devastation...

In Hard Times, Charles Dickens uses the character of Signor Jupe to portray the clash between love and reality. Signor Jupe reveals his philosophy of love as a meaningful force through his actions at the start of the novel. By accepting...

Inventor and scientific pioneer Albert Einstein once commented that "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." Though he was not referring to the industrialization of England during the nineteenth century,...

E.M. Forster and Charles Dickens use their novels, Howard's End and Hard Times, respectively, to discuss the social inequalities of class. These inequalities are registered in their characters' different relationships to facts and knowledge. While...

In Charles Dickens’ literary satire, Hard Times, geometry--especially that of squares and circles--serves an important thematic function. The “man of hard facts,” Thomas Gradgrind, has a “square forefinger,” “square wall of a forehead,” and a “...

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts” (9) pronounces Mr. Thomas Gradgrind in the opening line of Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times. Gradgrind employees this utilitarian philosophy in his schoolhouse and...

Though many have argued that Dickens used the character of James Harthouse to criticize Romanticism in his novel Hard Times, it is his utilitarianism that makes him such a danger. Harthouse himself notes early in the novel that there are many...

In Dickens’s Hard Times, Christianity is often alluded to both symbolically and literally. Because of the time period in which the novel was written, the presence of these religious themes are not surprising, but the way Dickens presents these...

Ideas of social change and progressive ideals are prominent in many nineteenth century works of literature. Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is a prime example of a social criticism novel, putting prominent ideas of the time period, such as...

Early in Hard Times, Dickens develops the portrait of Gradgrind in the classroom delivering a lesson centred on horses at his model school to his model students. Dickens carries Gradgrind’s factual theories, utilitarianism and educational system...

The nineteenth century saw the attempt word weavers of all kinds – poets, essayists, journalists, and novelists – to artistically capture the multitude of facets of the ever-changing political, social and economic conditions found in England...

Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is a critique of the issues of 19th-century European industrial capitalism. Dickens uses Coketown and its inhabitants to draw parallels to the real-life experiences of the British during this time period....

Dickens explores the issues of an industrialised society and, a key theme, the capability of the latter to suppress and obstruct human emotion, individuality and imagination. Dickens conveys these themes, primarily, through the characterisation...

Gender roles are a basis for the family structure which supports the larger societal structure, Charles Dickens argues in Hard Times. Women, especially, as the bearers of children carry a large part of the burden of ensuring a balanced society....

I. If there is one word that sums up the pervading atmosphere of Little Dorrit, it is claustrophobic. From the very first chapter, the reader is inducted into a world primarily made up of rigidly enclosed spaces; every level of the novel is in...

This essay will focus on the collapse of William Dorrit (Bk 2, ch 19) and examine William’s imprisonment to self-deception in this passage as a consequence of his moral debts to society and Amy, what effects this has on his character in the novel...

“Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.” This quote, often attributed to Einstein, is actually said by many physicists and writers – the oldest confirmed being Ray Cummings in a short story. However, Dickens’s novels have...

Most characters in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens have a pretense that they keep up in the novel, both to themselves and to others. Sometimes it is clear that others can see through the person’s actions, and sometimes, people fall for the...

Dickens' Oliver Twist , which ultimately celebrates a protagonist who journeys from innocence to experience without capitulating to the evil forces that hinder his progress, addresses the pervasive problem of evil in society and human nature....

In writing Oliver Twist, it is clear that Charles Dickens’s main literary objective was to expose the plight of the poor in Victorian London. The story of Oliver is comparable to other Victorian novels, such as Jane Eyre, in its strong didactic...

Oliver Twist is a criticism of the society in which Charles Dickens lived. The book directly criticized the Poor Laws and attempted to inspire readers of the middle and upper classes to improve the intolerable conditions in which Dickens himself...

In what is arguably his best known work, Charles Dickens addresses the blatant gender inequality that ran rampant in the 1800s. Oliver Twist confronts the disheartening public view of not only women in lower social classes, like Nancy, but also...

In English novels, Jewish characters have been routinely described as greedy, nit-picking, and stingy misers. They are usually but not always merchants, money lenders, or bill brokers—Shylock from The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare,...

Oliver Twist is a novel that evades easy categorisation; what begins as a political satire of the 1834 Poor Law morphs into a detective novel which in turn becomes a melodramatic thriller with a surprisingly tidy ending. While Dickens juggles...