'Hard Times' by Charles Dickens - Explore how Dickens establishes the characters of Gradgrind and Bounderby in the opening five chapters

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‘Hard Times’ by Charles Dickens

Explore how Dickens establishes the characters of Gradgrind and Bounderby in the opening five chapters of ‘Hard Times’ and how he influences the reader opinion of them.

The purpose of this assignment is to consider what the author of ‘Hard Times’; Charles Dickens in actuality thinks of the two characters Mr Thomas Gradgrind and Mr Josiah Bounderby in the opening five chapters of the novel. Furthermore I am trying to explore how Dickens tries to influence our view on the two characters on our first impression.

In the opening chapter, ‘The one thing needful’, we start to discover Mr Gradgrinds harsh and unpleasant personality. On the first line Gradgrind, who we don’t identify at this stage of the book, says,

“Now, what I want is, Facts, Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts, Facts alone….

….. root out everything else.”

This implies to us that Gradgrind doesn’t want his pupils to have a single element of enjoyment inside them, and suggest that the children will be sorrowful rather than in high spirits whilst being educated. Dickens also starts to bring an element of gloom into the book for the reason that on the second chapter he starts describing the classroom as prison like, when Dickens give emphasis to the scene by describing it, “The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school room”.

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Dickens goes on to speak about how the speaker fitted in well with this room, by saying how,

“The emphasis was helped by the speakers square wall of a forehead, which had its eyebrows for its base, while his eyes were found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, over shadowed by the wall.”

In chapter two, ‘Murdering The Innocents’, Thomas Gradgrind is portrayed and introduced by Charles Dickens. He commences by telling us how Gradgrind is a man of realities and of facts and calculations. Dickens then tells us how Gradgrind would deposit himself as a model citizen. ...

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