Hard Times Charles Dickens

As the titles Bleak House and Hard Times suggest, there is an abundance in both of imagery, metaphor, and overarching plot that is unpleasant, rendered in such relishing detail as to suggest that Charles Dickens had, in the words of John Forster,...

Charles Dickens' Hard Times is a bleak book. Its characters are a collection of victims and victimizers, each pitiable or damnable. Of this sorrowful lot, perhaps the most tragic individual is Louisa Gradgrind. Ingrained since childhood with...

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....