Theme Analysis of Charles Dickens "Hard Times".

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About the author

Charles Dickens was born on the 7th of February 1812, in Portsmouth, England. His parents were John and Elizabeth Dickens. Charles was one of eight children, and his father had a rather rough time making ends meet working as a pay clerk in the navy office. This forced the family to move around England until they settled in Camden Town, a poor neighborhood in London.

At the age of twelve, Charles worked in a factory that handled "blacking" or shoe polish. While his father was in prison for failure to repay debts, the rest of the family moved to live near the prison, leaving Charles to live alone. This experience of hardship and loneliness was the most significant event of his life and it would later be portrayed in a variety of his novels. Charles went back to school once his father received a heritance and repaid his debts. But in 1827, at age fifteen, he was again forced to leave school and work as an office boy. The year after that he became a freelance reporter and stenographer (using shorthand to transcribe documents) at the law courts of London.

By 1832 he had become a reporter for two London newspapers and then began to write a series to other newspapers and magazines, signing some of them "Boz." He finally had these published in 1836 as Sketches by Boz, which would become his first book. Once success became evident, Charles married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he had ten children.


Theme Analysis

The consequences of nineteen century England’s overzealous adoption of industrialization are exposed in Dickens’s novel through the philosophy and actions of the characters Mr. Gradgrind and follower Mr. Bounderby, as they explore their Utilitarian views and turn humans into machines by educating children in the ways of fact and treating factory workers as emotionless matter that is easily exploited for his own self-interest, creating boring,  uniform existences,  that know nothing of the pleasures of life, as their fantasies and feelings become dull. Hard Times gives a rather unsympathetic look at Utilitarianism; this philosophy was also called Philosophical Radicalism or Benthamism and was influential in the mid-Victorian period. The goal of Utilitarianism was "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." This no-nonsense movement relied heavily on statistics, rules and regulations. Individualism and imagination were not highly valued in this radical philosophy, the novel’s main theme.

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As Thomas Gradgrind raises his children he stresses facts over imagination and function over feelings, creating an opposition between the Utalitarian concepts of Fact and Fancy:

Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder.”  (Ch.8)

“You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. ...

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