Hard Times

Sowing means planting crops (seeds), reaping is harvesting the full-grown crops, and garnering is picking up the pieces that are left over after the harvest. Sowing and reaping are intimately...

One notable characteristic of the nineteenth century is that it was not dominated by a single worldview. Throughout the century, a large number of changes occurring at a rapid pace permanently...

Hard Times is a favorite Charles Dickens book. It's also one of his shortest and least acclaimed. Those with an unfavorable opinion often say that Dickens's concern with making a statement about...

Hard Times is divided into three books, entitled respectively "The Sowing," "The Reaping," and "The Garnering." These titles correspond to three stages in a child's upbringing and education. The...

The moral of Hard Times is that a life built completely on the basis of facts and statistics is limited and unhappy. Gradgrind raises his children, Tom and Louisa, to value only money and to live...

Sissy Jupe and Louisa Gradgrind are in many was opposites in this novel, but they do share some commonalities. Sissy, the daughter of a circus clown, represents the world of imagination and magic...

M’Choakumchild is the name of a schoolteacher assigned to instruct Sissy Jupe in the fact-based education that Gradgrind supports. His name sounds like his role as a teacher: he is Mr....

Hard Times is a novel written by famed English writer and social critic Charles Dickens. It was first published in 1854, in Dickens’s weekly periodical magazine Household Words, in the form of a...

I am not really sure that there is any other way to describe the story of the Gradgrind family other than to say that it consisted of plenty of "Hard Times." The mere educational philosophy of...

Sissy Jupe brings a ray of light and life into the serious and rationalistic world of the Gradgrinds and Coketown. The daughter of circus worker, she represents poetry, imagination, and pleasure....

The novel's main conflict has to do with Louisa's disastrous marriage to Mr. Bounderby and Tom's theft from Bounderby's bank. But the underlying conflict in Hard Times is the opposition of emotion...

Thomas Gradgrind wants nothing but facts: "NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts." When he asks Girl #20 to tell the class what a horse is, she cannot come up...

Gradgrind calls himself a "man of facts and calculations." He wants his pupils to know nothing but the facts. He calls Sissy Jupe girl number twenty, because he believes education is primarily a...

In Hard Times, Charles Dickens presents a generally negative view of materialism as a driving force in the rapidly industrializing Victorian society. Dickens is especially hard on factory owners,...

Charles Dickens, like William Shakespeare, used character names to conjure up certain perceptions of the characters in the reader's (or audience member's ) mind. In the case of Hard Times, some of...

Dickens' creation of Gradgrind's teaching style seems to be a direct indictment of capitalism and a world where acquisition is the sole driving force. Gradgrind's mantra of "facts, not fancy" and...

The main moral lesson in Hard Times is that industrialization, if unchecked, can turn human beings into machines, into cogs in a vast system of production. Such a process involves the deliberate...

In Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, Louisa and Tom Gradgrind are sister and brother. The two siblings have very different responses to their difficult upbringing at the hands of Thomas Gradgrind...

In Hard Times, the circus symbolizes learning through experience. It's here that Sissy Jupe learns what a horse is, for example, without needing to give the kind of precise, lexicographical...

In Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Mr. Sleary is a circus owner whose philosophy of life stands in sharp contrast with some of the novel's other characters (especially Thomas Gradgrind, Josiah...

Sissy Jupe represents all the magic, compassion, and creativity that has been sucked out of life by Gradgrind's fact-focused utilitarian philosophy. She is the abandoned daughter of a circus...

Realism in literature is identified by literary critics as a method of presenting human experiences as they actually occur. In the nineteenth century, it arose as a style that purported to be the...

Yes, the novel is a satire of industrial society. More importantly, perhaps, it is a satire of the values on which industrial society is based. The sort of values which Dickens is satirizing is...

Hard Times protests the ill effects of industrialism, which was beginning to dominate life in England by the Victorian era. Much like many real mill towns in the mid-nineteenth century, Coketown...

This excellent Dickensian classic promotes the fear that the author had of the impact of embracing industrialisation in society and how this would, in turn, inhibit humanity and turn them into...

Clearly the two relationships that this question refers to are the relationship between Louisa Gradgrind and her father, Mr. Gradgrind, and then the relationship between Sissy Jupe and her father,...

In the opening of Charles Dickens's Hard Times, the philosophy of Gradgrind's model academy is spelled out in great detail: Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but...

Hard Times refers both to the difficulties of the factory workers in the age of industrialism and to the utilitarian philosophy that encouraged people's hearts to harden and imaginations to...

In Charles Dickens' "Hard Times," Coketown is portrayed as a sort of industrial nightmare area. The book is written in the context of an England where a new, industrialized society is taking the...

When his bank is robbed, Bounderby does not in the least suspect Tom Gradgrind at first, although Tom is the thief. Tom has spent time planning the robbery so as to divert attention from himself....

Sissy and Rachel discover evidence that Stephen Blackpool, who has been missing for some time, fell down the Old Hell mine shaft. They find his hat, with his name written in it, and then Rachel...

The timeline of Bitzer's character begins in chapter 2 of Hard Times, which is titled "Murdering the Innocents." He is a young boy going to school at Gradgrind's academy. From the very start,...

Gradgrind's model school in Dickens' work is a result of the utilitarian model motivated by the Enlightenment gone sadly awry. We can see this in the opening chapters. The direct method of...

Charles Dickens's Hard Times can certainly be interpreted as an attack on Victorian society during the initial waves of industrialization in England. Victorian-era ideals were strongly rooted in...

Like a good Victorian novelist would, Dickens uses a highly knowledgeable third-person narrator who looks down from "above" and can speak with authority about what is going on in the novel. There...

Sissy, the nickname of Cecilia, Jupe is a child during much of the action in Hard Times. In many ways, Sissy embodies the novel’s title—the difficulties that England’s poor must endure. Charles...

The fact-based upbringing provided by Mr. Gradgrind resulted in Louisa and Tom becoming emotionally stunted and detached. The complete lack of any kind of encouragement to help them imagine and...

The Victorian era is reflected in the economic situation of the factory workers in Coketown. They work very hard for very low pay and have no benefits or job security. Many feel they have no...

Lord Macaulay objected to what he called the "sullen Socialism" in Hard Times and, although the book is not ideologically Socialist, it is easy to see what he means. More than any other Dickens...

Every single character in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times represents a trope or facet of Victorian society. Mr. James Harthouse is no exception. He represents the archetypal “rake,” or a wealthy,...

I think that one of the most significant element about the writing style that Dickens employs is to bring out an almost philosophical treatise to the literary narrative being depicted. Dickens...

Tone is a writer's attitude toward the subject at hand. In the very short first chapter of Hard Times, the tone is bitterly ironic. The first chapter focuses on the teacher's expression of the...

Charles Dickens’ use of the term “little pitchers” to describe the students at Mr. Thomas Gradgrind’s school reflects the educational values of Utilitarians during the Victorian era. Dickens...

Mr. Bounderby's age is alluded to in Chapter 4 of the novel. Dickens writes that Mr. Bounderby "looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again,...

Education in Hard Times is often presented as little more than rote learning and the transmission of facts. In the notorious figure of Mr. Gradgrind, we have the epitome of Victorian utilitarianism...

At the experimental private school run by Thomas Gradgrind in Coketown, the children learn facts and only facts. To Gradgrind, there is no purpose for fun, fancy, or imagination in this world. He...