“I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything else… everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me”.
Mr Bounderby is not as demanding but boastful and more extreme about his view and how he grew up. This gives a perfect team to run the system of education. From the irony and exaggeration used in the description of both the two leaders way of looking at the school children “looking into all the little vessels ranged before him, on after another, to see what thy contained” it seams that this view will cause problems as the children grow old as they will become factual pages of a book.
By Sleary the circus owner’s speech “People must be entertained” I found that Sleary and Sissy are in a world that spirit, imagination, wonder and compassion-“fancy” in other words. Dickens uses this to show how dry and soul destroying the “industrial system of facts” employed by Gradgrind is. Also giving us other symbols of how life with facts will therefore have dreariness “bare windows of intensely white washed room” as the class room is described. Then in the same paragraph moves on to “sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, caught the end” this is a great example of the use of symbols. Showing good from bad as Dickens then states “the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired, that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed” showing the difference of the two characters to be that there is hope for Sissy.
The point about being fully successful can not be brought about by Gradginds view of “you mustn’t fancy… you are never to fancy”, as in the end of it all and the end of the second book it is all reviled about how Louisa truly feels about all the years of living as a controlled machine in a world where there is only right and wrong. Sissy never has this problem as she was brought up with free spirit of opinion. Louisa’s father finds it all coming home by Louisa laying it out “in this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel into a demand. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting, what I have not learned”. She has kept it all bottled up inside as she had been programmed to do in her earlier life, but her program has gone back to its foundational settings to revile the truth about how the “industrial system of facts” has some serious flaws about it. From the second chapter of the first book Dickens has tried to show us using symbols of the light shining upon Sissy as he wanted us to see the light which was fancy from the dark side of facts. This is hard for Gradgrind to accept but in the end he does so and this also helps to see that Mr Bounderby is bound to this system with no moral capacity to change where as it is now different for Gradgrind now that this moment came around.
Dickens has brought over symbols relative to the present day life has to have a balance of fact and opinion witch was the main idea brought over by the book.