What literary techniques does Charles Dickens employ in order to satirise the education system of Victorian England in the opening chapters of hard times?
Hard times was wrote by Dickens about the Victorian education system. In the Victorian era the education system was very different with classes containing up to 50 pupils. Education was also only for the wealthy as there was definite class structures in place, with people either being very rich or very poor. Throughout the first two chapters of Hard Times, Dickens uses the literary technique known as satirise. He uses it to mock the education system, which he feels was pointless. In the following paragraphs I am going to look at the techniques that Charles Dickens uses to mock the system. Some of the techniques I am going to explore consist of; exaggeration, metaphors and personal comments made by Dickens himself.
In the opening two chapters of Hard Times we get a strong negative image of the education system of that time. Dickens portrays it to be both wrong in the way it is taught and that it has very dangerous effects on the recipients. We see from the opening three sentences, namely, “NOW, all I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” The sentences are quick and sharp and they simply show how the education system is wrong. Children are programmed with short sharp facts of little importance. Dickens also uses a metaphor comparing the way Mr Gradgrind teaches to a cannon, “a kind of cannon loaded to muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge” to symbolise how dangerous the education system was. He achieves this by describing how, by, their teacher firing facts at the pupils’ their innocence is being killed. One other way that Dickens satirises the education system is by including an allusion at the end of the second chapter. He compares Mr M’Choakumchild to Morgiana from Ali Barba and the forty thieves, “not unlike Morgiana in the forty thieves”. He compares the way Morgiana killed the thieves by pouring hot oil onto them to the way Mr M’Choakumchild is killing the children’s imagination by pouring facts into them. Dickens then adds a personal comment to further mock the education system by saying, “dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within” This quotation personifies the word fancy to show that within the education system of that time there is a problem because it is not based upon facts. In this quotation fancy is the original pupil before it has undergone the changes that the education system brought about. If fancy was killed then the original person and their innocence is lost, this is what happens to pupils at the end of the education system.
