The Chapter titles in "Hard Times" are extremely significant. They are associated with themes, characters and other meanings, for example, from the bible.

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“Chapter Titles in Hard Times”

The Chapter titles in “Hard Times” are extremely significant. They are associated with themes, characters and other meanings, for example, from the bible.

The second chapter, "Murdering the Innocents," foreshadows the chapter, "A Loophole." Just as the theological comments on Herod's Bethlehem massacre (allusion from Chapter 2) focuses on the escape of the Christ child in the midst of the mass murder, the "Loophole" now offers escape from the "Murdering." And just as this chapter ends with the cliffhanger (Who is Mr. Bounderby?), the next chapter, entitled "Mr. Bounderby" answers that very question.

Dickens takes another image from children's literature and clearly names the teacher as an "ogre" who is "taking childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair." The loophole is a symbol of escape, both mentally and physically. The symbol of contrast to the loophole is Stone Lodge, the home of Mr. Gradgrind and his family, and most definitely a "statistical den." Dickens simile presents the gardens "like a botanical account-book" and this sustains the underlying comparison between the statistical classifications and the freedom that ‘one’ expects from nature. The children's "dissection" of the "Great Bear" constellation is a metaphor for the murder of fancy and mythology.

The "horse" vs. "Quadruped. Graminivorous." debate ,is sustained in the images of animal "celebrities" from nursery rhymes, figures who are unfamiliar for young Louisa and Thomas.

Thematically, there have been several "loopholes" in the Gradgrind training. There is the loophole as a peephole, which is a symbol that foreshadows a continued defiance (at least on Louisa's part); there is also the loophole of contradiction where astronomy permits the "Great Bear" but the real dog "Merrylegs" and the painted representation of "horses dancing sideways" on a wall are forbidden. Mr. Gradgrind's blind face prevents him from enjoying fancy but it also prevents him from seeing the contradictions in his thought and the loopholes through which his model children might escape.

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Chapter Eight, “Never wonder”, is more important within Dickens' philosophical context than in the actual "story" that is being presented in the novel. The battle between the literary agents of "fancy" and the hard mathematical analysts can be seen again in Dickens' use of fire imagery to convey the sense of the storyteller (in this case, Louisa Gradgrind, but also, in a larger sense, Dickens) as a somewhat magical, more modern version of the ancient oracles. In Greek myth, oracles were ordained priest-like figures who were usually female and

known for looking into the fire and "reading the ...

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