Compare and Contrast Dickens' treatment of two schoolmasters in David Copperfield and Hard Times.

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Sam Reid (B)                08/05/2007

Compare and Contrast Dickens’ treatment of two schoolmasters in David Copperfield and Hard Times

        Both Hard Times and David Copperfield show to us the harsh severity of the Victorian school system and the teachers that were around at the time.

           The two teachers I will be looking at are Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Creakle. The first thing we notice about both of them is their distinctly gruesome, unattractive surnames. When you think of the name Creakle, you come up with the word creak. The word creak is a noise that you would associate with a haunted house or ghost stories; this may be a premonition of what is to come of Mr. Creakle’s character. From the name Gradgrind you can find the word grind. Grind is another word that describes a noise, you often talk of people grinding their teeth together and this could also be seen as him grinding the facts into his student’s heads.

        Mr Creakle is a horrifying teacher. He loves to inflict pain on unsuspecting children, especially the vulnerable, for example the fat children. However, Mr Creakle shows himself to be a bully as he only picks only the weak and refuses to pick on the most powerful and popular boy in the school, Steerforth. “But the greatest wonder that I heard of Mr Creakle was, there being one boy in the school on whom he never ventured to lay a hand, and that boy being J. Steerforth.”

        This shows us that Mr. Creakle is not actually as powerful as he may think but only hits these children as a way of making himself feel more powerful. Mr Creakle is a sadist in some ways. You get the feeling that while he is torturing and tormenting these boys he is enjoying it, the fact that he has to make young boys feel bad by demeaning them to an animal by putting the dreaded placard on their back, makes us hate him which brings across that evil side to him. Copperfield tells us that he enjoys it on page 89 when in the text he says “I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight in cutting at the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite.” From this we can see that Mr .Creakle beat the boys under his control as much as normal people eat. This shows us just how harsh it is that he will beat a boy as if it something he has to do, just as eating is something humans have to do. You could also interpret as meaning that Copperfield thinks that Mr. Creakle feeds off the pain that he causes these poor children.

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        We do not hear of Mr Gradgrind hitting the children he teaches. This automatically makes us like him more than Mr Creakle because we feel that we are in a safer environment than him. Instead Gradgrind punishes the children by filling them full of facts “nothing but facts”. This is because he is of the belief that all children need in life to excel is their facts.

        On page 80 David Copperfield has not actually met Mr. Creakle but he already suspects him of being awful. He has probably got this impression of him from the fact that Mr. Creakle ...

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