How has Charles Dickens put forward to us a sense of the hard times as shown in the town and education system?

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  Andrew  Lightstone

How has Charles Dickens put forward to us a sense of the hardtimes as shown in the town and education system?

A main theme in the Charles Dickens book, ‘Hard times’ is the Industrial Revolution, how technology had advanced drastically, yet the standard of peoples lives were decreasing and getting ever harder. No more is this emphasised, than through the basic layout and look of the, appropriately named, ‘Coketown’. The town was supposed be evolving both technology wise and money wise, yet each building was as plain and as dirty as the next, closely resembling most of the people who work and will work in the town, those being the young machinists – the children of ‘Coketown.’

Although the standard of living was supposedly better through the Industrial revolution, with new communication, transportation, and manufacturing methods, it meant there was an even greater demand for workers to work the machines. The life of a worker in the Revolution was, monotonous, and could kill the spirits of even the most imaginative of people. As a result, from a fairly young age, the children were taught not to have imaginations. ‘Only facts’ were to be learnt and applied to everyday life. Thomas Gradgrind is the patron of the school in which this process is highly used and believed in. Gradgrind himself was bought up believing there was nothing more to, ’this life’ than facts. Imagination would only get in the way of the children when they started working in the factories.

We are introduced to the method of teaching immediately at the beginning of the story. ‘What I want is Facts,’ and the opinion of the Gradgrind, being that, ‘Facts alone are wanted in life.’ To emphasize this, ‘facts’, has a capital F. According to this theory, there is no religion, no clear identity, and only one belief and purpose. This is ironic because most of the people of the time were quite religious Christians and it shows a contradiction between their beliefs and views. The first paragraph is almost a monologue with Gradgrind, because no one interrupts him. This shows his importance, the slight fear he inflicts on people, when the children spoke to him with a, ‘trembling voice’, and the respect they have for him. With these aspects in mind, it is easy to see how he influences the children’s minds and opinions.

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Gradgrind’s ambition is to, ‘plant nothing else and root out everything else,’ but facts. The children are not even to, ‘fancy’ anything. So much so, the room in which the children are being taught is just a, ‘plain, bare, monotonous vault,’ of a classroom. The word vault, indicates the children are trapped in the education system. Every bit in the room is the same, boring and dull and in no way creative – so the children would get no mental stimulation from it. It leaves little to the imagination, as with Gradgrind himself. Dickens uses technical and geometric words, ...

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