Hard Times PDF

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Charles Dicken's Hard Times...

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Félix Rodríguez Rodríguez Introducción a los textos literarios en lengua inglesa 19/December/2013

Charles Dickens: Hard Times. Charles Dickens is the best Victorian novelist. He has contributed to create an image of the époque he lived in. The hallmarks of his writings are the pathos that characterizes many of his characters, and an acute social criticism. Hard Times is his tenth novel, it is set in the first industrialization of England. In this novel, there are two totally different points of view, worker’s point of view represented by Esteban and Raquel and owner’s point of view, represented by Bounderby . This novel also criticizes the education that was taught in that moment, destroying children’s feelings and imagination, and giving a priority only to facts, this is specially represented by Grandgrind. The book is divided in 3 books . He uses caricatures to speak about his characters and not only does he describe physically appearance but also psychological one.

I have chosen the second chapter of the first book, the setting is a classroom in where Grandgrind was teaching his class, a lesson, like the rest of his lessons, which was destroying children’s imagination, which was destroying his feelings and his innocence day a day. In the first part of this chapter we can find Grandgrind’s psychological description, he is described as ‘a man of realities’ as we can see on the first line, and that is why he is trying children to be. In this setting is in where he first meets Cecilia, a girl who belonged to a circus family, with whom he is going to be, in the following chapters, more related than he thought to be. He asked Cecilia about his father’s occupation and when she said he worked in equitation, he asked Cecilia to define

what a horse was, something she was not able to answer. Bitzer was the one who answered that question .In here, we can see one of Dickens’s caricatures, Charles Dickens’s describes Bitzer as ‘so light-eyed and light-haired, cold eyes, short-cropped hair, skin so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge’ while he describes Cecilia as ‘Dark-eyed and dark-haired, she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun when it shone upon her’ .The first description, Bitzer’s one, makes us to imagine a boy without illusion, without imagination and the second one, Cecilia’s description makes us imagine an innocent and cheerful girl, a child with a lot of imagination. Later, Charles Dickens speaks about M’Choakumchild, he is a teacher in the same school as Grandgrind and he has the same principles as him, utilitarism principles, and speaking about M’Choakumchild I must say that this name is a symbolic one compounded by ‘choke’ and ‘child’, his name tells us what he does with children, depressing them, destroying their imagination, their innocence …, so that name has to do with the role he does in the novel. Besides, I want to speak about how Grandgrind and M’Choakumchild allude to children as numbers , we can see the example in the phrase ‘Girl number twenty’, referring to Cecilia , they are named as numbers as if they were in a jail, and if we try to analyze this novel, we must realize that they are in a jail, not a real one but a sentimental one because children’s nature is being curious , innocent , happy , without preoccupations … and this two men want to repress them. Also, we can notice that they are named as numbers to avoid their individuality , to destroy their own person, because individuality is the only thing that belongs to us , so I have to say that they want them to be as machines , as people who all follow the same steps, living between facts and no more, in a world in where there is no space for our feelings.

Cecilia is the figure of opposition to the education system I have mentioned before, she is a girl full of generosity and tenderness ,she is representing Charles Dickens’s positivism , a hope that not all minds are the same as people as Grandgrind’s mind. We can see in Cecilia an ‘open door’ to a social change because in the last chapter of the book we realize that although she was surrounded by utilitarism ideas , she never changed her mind. Also, her father’s occupation is symbolic ,suddenly in Coketown , which is dominated by factories and companies and which is not a place for imagination and illusion , a circus appears. As we all know , a circus is a symbol of entertainment, magic and fantasy ,everything a member of a circus does involves imagination . We can say a circus is the opposite of this society Charles Dickens’s novel is showing us . Moreover , Cecilia’s father abandons her and Grandgrind takes her home and tries to educate her as he had educated his children but he was not able because she was an imaginative girl, so , she was catalogued as not clever. Most of the readers feel identified with Cecilia because we all have our imagination and nobody follow a life style governed only by facts .

To conclude, Charles Dickens’s novel shows us what he was living in that time, in the chapter I have chosen , we can know how education was in that moment and how different types of people faced it. Also , we can see an example of pathos when Cecilia was abandoned by her father .Besides , we can see his caricatures when he describes that two children, linking their physical appearance with their manner of view life, so we can say that this book is one of the best in the world....