, The Ultimate English Notes

By Fenech, Stoneman & Ring

Hard Times

By Charles Dickens

Teaching notes compiled for VATE members by Warren Whitney

CONTENTS
1. Introduction Page 2
2. Ways into the text Page 5
3. Running sheet Page 8
4. A perspective on the text Page 11
5. Characters Page 14
6. Issues and themes Page 19
7. Language and style Page 22
8. Close study of three scenes Page 23
9. Further activities Page 25
10. Key quotations Page 26
11. Essay topics Page 28
12. Guided essay responses Page 29
13. References and resources Page 31 Text referred to in these notes is Charles Dickens' Hard Times, Penguin Classics, 2003.

Purchasers may copy Inside Stories for classroom use.

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Section 1 . Introduction

The spectre of social facts haunts the pages of Hard Times, in the form of their urgent reality and most potent philosophical expression. The imaginary city of Coketown stands as Dickens's supreme image or allegorical representation of industrialisation and the revolutionary changes it had wrought in the lives of ordinary people:

'The smoke-serpents were indifferent who was lost or found, who turned out bad or good; the melancholy-mad elephants, like the Hard Fact men, abated nothing of their set routine, whatever happened. Day and night again, day and night again. The monotony was unbroken. Even Stephen's Balckpool's disappearance was falling into the general way, and becoming as monotonous a wonder as any piece of machinery in Coketown.' (p. 247).

As one of the expanding multitude of workers in Co ketown , Stephen Blackpool becomes their singular representative, an individual embodying their experience in its most extreme and cruel form. Stephen suffers physically in the novel in ways that certainly evoke Christ-like parallels, his death combining both aspects of crucifixion and resurrection when he is finally rescued from 'Old Hell Shaft'. Dickens certainly invites the reader to compare Stephen's persecution to that of Christ, yet there are few messianic elements in the character of Stephen, or 'Old Stephen' as he is known among his fellow workers of Coketown. Stephen's physical suffering is acutely allegorical but not simply to evoke religious parallels of personal salvation, though such a limited interpretation appears to be offered by Dickens. Stephen's true symbolic resonance is caught when the reader is invited to establish a direct parallel between Stephen and generations of labourers. Stephen individually incarnates for the reader the workers' historical suffering as the original 'victims' of the first phase of massive industrialisation. 'Old Hell Shaft' itself is a haunted echo chamber of the past, and Stephen's resurrection from its depths is principally to remind Dickens's readers of the scale of suffering during Britain's rapid and recent seismic changes.

'When it were in work it killed wi'out need; when 'tis let alone, it kills wi'out need. See how we die an no need, one wayan another-in a muddle-every day' (p. 263).

The name of the abandoned pit is yet another example of Dickens's intensely metaphorical use of language in the novel. But it also points the reader to the directly social function of this type of literary language. 'Old Hell Shaft' is the perfect image for the historical juncture at which Hard Times appeared. Published in 1854 the novel can be read most explicitly as Dickens's literary assessment or 'balance sheet' for the nation at mid-century. And such terms, or the type of thinking they represent, are precisely the focus of the novel's most vehement criticism.

lt is difficult for the reader to resist the impression that with Hard Times Dickens was striving for a type of novelistic reach that would be equal to the task of addressing the subjects he had set for himself. It is the only one of Dickens's novels not to be set at least partly in London, a choice that seems to have originated from Dickens sense that Coketown is intended not just to be seen by readers as a typical version of a 'thriving' industrial city with it's own particular social problems, but as near to a universal symbol of the underlying 'ills' of such rapid social change that had so Hardradicalfy revolutionised the lives of all people over so short a period of time. Dickens's own autobiography is compelling in it's parallels with the developmental ills of nineteenth century industrialisation, Dickens's family itself having suffered that most feared of

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middle-class nightmares, having 'fallen' into the working-class from a previously 'secure' position among the British middle-classes. Yet as with all biographical referencing this should only be used to assist in illuminating what broader sympathies such 'direct' experience of the world of the labouring classes emerge from the language of the novel.

The action of Hard Times takes place after the first, or principally textile stage of British industrialisation had been effectively completed. The second and even more intense phase was based on the capital goods industries of coal, steel and iron. It was also the era of the massive capital investment in the construction of railways that became the very symbol of modern industrialisation in a way that no previous form had been able to project. This period of industrial growth was also marked by the unprecedented levels of capital surplus that by the 1850s had resulted in a wave of public investment, particularly in municipal buildings such as schools. That the novel opens in Gradgrind's school appears perfectly appropriate for 'these times'. Gradgrind the former businessman, eventually to tum politician, presides over his own highly personal system of education, one that appears perfectly suited to the era.

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.' (p. 9).

This extremely confident proclamation that opens Hard Times will of course prove to be the very social formula that the novel, according to its own version of a system, forcefully denoted by Dickens as the imagination or more poetically, 'Fancy', will question, expose, and ultimately dismantle. The social philosophy of 'Facts' disconnected from genuine human experience is repeatedly identified in the novel as the principal cause of the most blighted aspects of industrialisation at the mid-point of the century. Though economic prosperity and technological development were at previously unimaginable levels, the condition of the working classes remained scandalously abject and deficient in the mid-Victorian period.

Hard Times focuses directly on these conditions in what may be described as the typically Dickensian manner - a literary style steeped in pathos and sentimentality. Nevertheless, these distinctive literary choices should not be seen simply as the 'individual' artistic choices of Dickens himself, but far more significantly as the most appealing of the available narrative paradigms or literary 'thematics' that themselves characterised the Victorian period and defined what were the terms of literary engagement with such genres as the 'social problem' or 'condition of England' novel.

Dickens's style in Hard Times is fascinatingly concentrated around the task of producing a narrative that self-consciously addresses the most urgent social problems in the most explicit public fashion, yet its underlying narrative structure, characterisation, evocation of setting and most importantly, the language of the novel itself, develop complex responses in the reader. These frequently return to a principal concern of the narrative, one that was deeply 'rooted' (to employ the type of organic metaphor that was so appealing to the mid-Victorian period) in the troubled understanding of a writer such as Dickens, but also more broadly, of sections of the concerned middle class. And that pre-occupation was an attempt to come to grips with the exact character of the type of society that modern industrial Britain had become.

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By the mid 1850s Britain had effectively become a fully industrialised economy, which increasingly appeared to many observers, including liberal writers and commentators, artists, politicians and the business class itself, as well as the masses of ordinary labouring people, as a permanent, indeed irrevocable state of affairs. Dickens is certainly no exception to this newly formed mid-century consensus. Dickens would, like many of contemporaries, have observed the gradual acceptance of industrialisation as the newly dominant social form, despite many recent legislative reforms that sought to 'improve' the condition of the labouring poor such as the Ten Hours Act of 1847. These reforms notwithstanding, the vision that is developed in Hard Times is one that might be more readily compared to that of a later writer, the German sociologist Max Weber who defined the image of an Iron Cage as the most suitable to describe the rigidity and the 'discipline' that now characterised all aspects of modern life.

Dickens, whose novel predates Weber's classic work, expresses a similar view that the most basic conditions of life are now threatened by a type of all-encompassing rationality and discipline that will be sharpened by the Fact Men, whose collective project, nothing less than the complete transformation of society and its citizens into Facts, their emissary Gradgrind appears determined to complete. It is the spectacle, or the spectre, of the mass adaptation to Facts that Dickens abhors in Hard Times, particularly when this adaptation is presented as a scientific and therefore natural process, inevitable, unquestionable, cordoned off from the play of the imagination and for Dickens, the far more natural process of human sympathy.

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Section 2. Ways into the text

Historical or background research

It is important to remember that a novel such as Hard Times was written in the full recognition that the conditions it describes were vividly known by Dickens's contemporary readers. This understanding on the part of both author and reader is a pact dramatically acknowledged in the famous final paragraph where the narrator suddenly declaims: 'Dear reader it rests with you and me, whether in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not.' (p. 288) This deliberately theatrical appeal should not be seen as a distraction from the equally clear acknowledgement it also expresses that writer and reader are bound in what might be termed an 'unmediated' relationship, or more simply, a common understanding, of the clearly threatening nature of the period in which they both live. The conditions described in the imagined Coketown were those which most of Dickens's readers would have confronted as the reality of their everyday lives, if not as labourers within the mills, then as witnesses to the expansion of such working conditions across all the cities of Britain.

Given such an intimate and shared understanding between writer and reader at the time of the novel's publication, it cannot simply be assumed that the same note of intimacy can be immediately communicated to students of the novel in the early twenty-first century. Rather than conceiving of background research as an essentially ancillary technique for the reading of literary fiction, teachers may approach this aspect of preparing students for a detailed reading of the novel as a means of assisting them to understand the very nature of the literary relationship that Dickens shared with his readers and which comprised such a significant aspect of his unparalleled popularity, both during his lifetime and as it has continued since then. The gathering of historical 'facts' by students would certainly be to emulate exactly the type of educational practices Dickens pillories in the novel, but developing a deeper historical understanding in students of the actual experience of working women and men during the mid-Victorian period is necessary.

As stated in the introduction, Hard Times is a novel that attempts to confront directly, the consequences of an unprecedented experience of 'total' social change, and one that appears to have few positive characteristics that can be said to counter-balance the ravages that have torn through long standing traditions of community and family life. It is important for students to gain a sense of how profound these changes were, their origins in the preceding decades and the sheer speed and rate of industrial transformations. The critical and historical literature on the Industrial Age is voluminous and students should not be allowed to feel swamped by the sheer mass of this archival material. Two texts that I have found invaluable for providing both accessible and compelling accounts of industrialisation are Industry and Empire by E.J. Hobsbawm (Penguin Books) and Europe: A History, by Norman Lewis. Relevant sections/chapters are fluent and highly readable, as well as detailed and providing students with useful explanations of the complex processes that marked this period.

The uses of such directed research can also include independent research by students exploring Internet history sites to evaluate competing versions of the period and to gain a sense of the 'contested legacy' of the Industrial Revolution as a period that was both celebrated and condemned, particularly in its own time. Information and material collected by students may be best shared in the form of a series of class

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debates that might be conducted across the course of reading and discussing the novel. This will assist students in gaining a clear understanding that while the text must be seen in its own right as a piece of literary fiction and not be simply 'reduced' to its historical context, a deeper understanding of its direct and immediate context will enable readers to deepen their imaginative sympathy with the distinct individuals who populate Dickens's world in Hard Times.

Examples of possible topics would be:

• 'That industrialisation destroyed far more than it created.' OR

• 'That education today still retains some of Gradgrind's philosophy.' OR

• 'That we now Jive in a post-industrial world far removed from the problems depicted in Hard Times.'

Hard Times as nineteenth century soap opera

A potentially strong point of connection with students is the novel's use of a classic repertoire of melodramatic devices and conventions. Students already possess a formidable understanding of how these conventions may still be recognised in contemporary TV soap operas and teen film melodramas targeting an adolescent audience. Hard Times, published in serial form against a weekly deadline, with each chapter or 'instalment' further deepening the entanglements and intrigue teased out by the narrative, can be compared by students with their experience of a not dissimilar genre of the TV soap with its heightened emotionality, complicit manipulation of the viewers' loyalties towards characters and situations, moral decisions and the ever present threat of betrayal or suspicion. Who can imagine Hard Times without the well nigh universal figure of Mrs Sparsit who is continually watching the affairs of others, hawk-like, awaiting her opportunity to strike? Or the wrenching pathos of Stephen and Rachel'S thwarted love, not only doomed but mocked by the presence of Stephen's wife who simply refuses to die?

Students can explore the importance of melodramatic conventions by analysing a typical episode of any of their favourite soap operas or teen films. Teen film comedies are often heavily reliant on melodramatic conventions and can be a useful reference point to examine narrative conventions and the importance they play in shaping readerlviewer sympathies or identifications; how they allow 'heightened' or exaggerated characterisations that are permitted to verge on the stereotypical to intensify the pleasure of the viewer's response; to mark out clear boundaries of what are acceptable moral codes of conduct and finally, perhaps most importantly, to resolve or to recontain any disturbing social issues or questions that may have been explored through the course of the narrative.

This type of critical evaluation of other media forms will assist students in making comparative judgements with the use of similar conventions and narrative codes in the novel. A brief oral presentation could include the analysis of a short scene from a TV serial or film to show the importance of a particular soap opera convention. This is not intended as an exercise in comparison that will conclude that Dickens was no more than a writer of soap operas; this is not an exercise in qualitative judgement. It should alert students to the importance of narrative conventions in general, but also prepare students for analysing how Dickens utilises a highly particular set of conventions himself in Hard Times that are typically expressed in a distinctly sentimental or melodramatic language.

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Attitudes to education and schooling

The educational philosophy of Thomas Gradgrind looms menacingly over the novel, and Hard Times will be remembered by many of its readers as one of the darkest evocations of education in English Literature However, it is remarkable how little of the novel is actually set in a school and how few references there are to actual school life, its detailed texture, atmosphere or the complex culture and hierarchy of students when not under the supervision of their instructors. The novel is passionately concerned with the oppressive phenomenon of educational instruction it satirises in the absurd figure of Gradgrind and the even more sinister figure of the memorably named M'Choakumchild. The latter's murderous conjugation of a name perfectly summarises the effects of Gradgind's system - mass suffocation. This is not to forget the even more insidious effects of psychological repression. We can detect this in the morbidity of Louisa Gradgrind's fascination with the dying embers of a fire, signifying for her the nothingness of existence, a very prescient theme evoked in the novel.

Class examination of current attitudes to education may develop a useful context for preliminary discussion. Students may research recent debates on education and the comments that issued from the Federal Government in recent years about the absence of 'values' education in our school. Considering that the prime minister's remarks about the lack of a SUbstantive system of values education in Australian schools was made in the context of a highly critical description of the teaching of English, this may provide an especially interesting discussion. Students may wish to consider the accuracy of these remarks in relation to their own experience of schooling. Have they been aware of such a lack in their education? Exactly what values should be 'taught'? How can the teaching of values be prescriptive in nature?

Another productive area of discussion might be the connection between education and the world of work. Are they completely separate spheres? Have they always existed in the same relationship to one another? Are there changes that can be detected between them? Should schools take it as their primary responsibility to 'prepare' all students for work? Are schools charged with the social responsibility to 'train' their students to accept the dominant norms of the working/business world? Hard Times is a novel that looks unflinchingly at the dire consequences of conceiving of schools as places of indoctrination and conformity to the unbending rules of a purely business society. Students may gain a heightened understanding of the metaphorical significance of Gradgrind's notion of schooling from such discussions.

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Section 3. Running sheet & structure of the text Sumrnarybf the text

Thomas Gradgrind, an educationist and parliamentarian, takes in the abandoned Sissy Jupe, whose own father, a clown and a member of Sleary's Horse Riding, has disappeared with the intention of allowing his daughter to gain an education at the school. The reader is introduced to life at Stone Lodge, an oppressive monument to Gradgrind's philosophy of education and family life, and to his children Louisa and Tom.

The local industrialist Josiah Bounderby harbours a long held fascination with Louisa and ultimately proposes marriage. Louisa is under the influence of her unscrupulous and callous brother who has absorbed his father's teachings to the extent that he is shown as incapable of acting in any other way than from self-interest. He encourages Louisa to accept Bounderby's proposal for his sake.

A subplot that runs parallel to this narrative concerns the plight of Stephen Blackpool, a working-man who is 'bound' to an alcoholic and criminal wife. He is a victim of the repressive social system that has been erected by both Gradgrind and Bounderby, and is manipulated by the young Tom Gradgrind to be his unwitting accomplice in a robbery of Bounderby's bank.

A visiting politician, James Harthouse, attempts to seduce Louisa, now married to Bounderby. His expression of worldly cynicism and indifference are initially attractive to Louisa who harbours her own defeatist worldview. His advances are ultimately deflected by Sissy Jupe who insists on the futility of his pursuit of a virtuous individual such as Louisa. Sissy's limitless faith and devotion are enough to send Harthouse away without questioning her conviction.

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Stephen Blackpool is rescued from an abandoned mining shaft, but lives to see his name cleared when the real thief is discovered to be the 'Whelp'. Gradgrind experiences genuine remorse when his son is revealed as the real thief and his daughter confesses the true extent of her miserable childhood. His reliance on Sissy and Sleary to rescue his son from Bitzer and Bounderby completes the cycle of his journey to self knowledge.

Structure

Students should begin looking at the structure of the text by considering the publication of the narrative in serial form. How has the structure of the narrative been affected by this publication format?

• In what ways does Dickens use the serial format to develop his broader concerns?

• How does this 'popular' form of publication affect the language and tone of the novel?

Hard Times contains thirty-seven chapters, divided into three 'books' or sections, 'Sowing', 'Reaping' and 'Garnering'. The 'organic' metaphors that furnish these titles suggest that this will be a narrative concerned with growth, time, work, the cycles of nature and the nature of communal labour. The novel addresses all these concems, yet in a setting that appears completely devoid of nature itself.

The main narrative interest concerns the family of Thomas Gradgrind, his relationship with Josiah Bounderby and the 'adoption' of Sissy Jupe. An important subplot concerns Stephen Blackpool and his stoic endurance of the injustices of Industrial society. The narrative moves regularly between these two plot lines. The intended effect is to provide an overview of the society of Coketown. Dickens is not solely interested in the plight of the working masses, and the choice to include the treacherous union leader SJackbridge, who serves no essential or even important narrative function, clearly expresses the writer's ambivalence towards the organisation of labour and the type of mass solidarity that unions attempt to articulate. However, by drawing these two narrative lines into tandem Dickens can suggest the underlying connections that persist even in so fragmented and alienated a society as Coketown. The constant movement between the two storylines also generates a sense of mounting suspense, which the further subplot of the Bank robbery intensifies.

Questions fordiscussion:

1. Does the episodic structure of the novel prevent Hard Times from achieving an overall narrative coherence?

2. Is it accurate to describe Stephen Blackpool's story as a subplot in the novel?

3. Does the narrative rely on sheer coincidence to bring its parallel stories into contact, or is there a deeper narrative logic at work?

4. The titles of the three sections of the novel suggest cycles of both nature and work. How does the narrative achieve a sense of resolution and renewal?

In addition to its development of the two major plot lines, Hard Times explores the subplots concerning three minor characters: Mrs Sparsit, Slackbridge and James Harthouse. Mrs Sparsit is the 'guest' of Bounderby, a former member of the upper classes with aristocratic pretensions. She maintains her position in Bounderby's household by a combination of her benefactor's own repressed fascination with social rank, and her mimicry of the standards of taste belonging to her former elevated status. Mrs Sparsit plots the demise of Louisa who has usurped her privileged position in Bounderby's house.

The plotline concerning Mrs Sparsit reinforces the fraudulent identity and pretensions of Bounderby, but also suggests the concem in the novel with falsity, artificiality as opposed to artifice, and the corrosive effects of resentment and blind self-interest. The subplots concerning these three characters also flesh out Dickens's interest in assembling a representative array of characters while showing how life in the Industrial Age is becoming increasingly a matter of the pursuit of self-interest. AU these narrative lines are also suggestive of entrapment and deception.

It will be argued in the next section that Dickens was centrally concerned with providing a complete picture of life in the Industrial Age. What may be described as the relatively fast-paced tempo of the story-line also accords with this underlying intention. The structure of the narrative mirrors what Dickens views as one of the most threatening aspects of Industrialisation, the unprecedented rate, or 'speed' of social change, combined with a sense of the intensifying constrictions of modern life. The imagery of the great machines as 'melancholy-mad elephants', moving to an inhuman rhythm, expresses through metaphorical language what the organisation of plot

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events seeks to achieve through the depiction of Jives spiralling out of the control of individuals themselves.

The structure of the narrative, reflecting its original form of publication, also seeks to express the shocks of modern industrial life. The short, episodic chapters typically focus on moments of conflict, but these may often be experiences of inner conflict such as those expressed by Louisa, staring into the dying embers, or Stephen, 'dreaming' of a desperate solution to his misery. Elsewhere in the novel Dickens evokes the constant experience of change through the constantly shifting focus of the chapter structure. The novel's narrative projection of the image of lives intertwined is reflected in the shifting tempo of changes from each chapter to the next.

Hard Times, like other novels by Dickens, can be mistaken for having a loose narrative structure, an apparently random collection of situations that somehow intersect. This view might claim as evidence the unlikely configuration of Sleary's circus, the parliamentarian Mr Thomas Gradgrind and his family, the outcast labouring man Stephen Blackpool, and the city's leading Industrialist Bounderby all coming into close and destructive contact. The separate chapters can also at times appear to resemble 'sketches' of industrial life: the disconnected, separate sketches of modem school experience; a union meeting with speeches from delegates; the physical and emotional fatigue of the labouring classes. All these details of the Industrial Age are vividly present in the novel, and comprise an important aspect of the narrative interest in evoking not only scenes of industrial experience, but the lived texture of that experience. The episodic narrative structure is true to the incessant, disconnected rhythms of modern industry.

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Section 4. Perspective on the text

It should not be surprising in reading Hard Times that a novel that rails so passionately against the social effects of the classificatory mentality that had achieved dominance by the middle of the nineteenth century should itself be so difficult to classify, Written in 1854, the novel continues the aims of Dickens's earlier work in developing complex and sympathetic characters as well as focusing critically on the reality of these characters' lives as they were affected by the massive changes wrought by industrialisation. Yet the critical tone of these earlier novels reached a fever pitch here in the language Dickens uses to evoke the misery of Coketown and its inhabitants. This misery is seen both in the labouring classes through the struggles of Stephen Blackpool and Rachael, but also, and here most dramatically for the attention it receives in the novel, precisely among the families of the ruling elite, the new masters of industry and public affairs, of whom Thomas Gradgrind is introduced in the novel as an exemplar. Despite his prestige, the intimate world of his family that such a Titan of the Industrial era has created is described in far less than celebratory language:

'Their shadows were defined upon the wall, but those of the high presses in the room were all blended together on the wall and on the ceiling, as if the brother and sister were overhung by a dark cavern. Or, a fanciful imagination ... might have made it out to be the shadow of their subject, and of its lowering association with their future.' (pp. 55-6)

The Gradgrind children have been raised in a 'monstrous' cavern created by their father, a fact that is further reinforced by the menacing image of their father whose eyes 'found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wail', At many points in the novel Louisa and Thomas appear just as trapped in their respective social worlds as the more immediately sympathetic characters from the world of the labouring classes, Stephen and Rachael. The many scenes depicting life at Stone Lodge, a piece of architectural design firmly based on the owner's stated aim of rooting out any trace of fancy or the imagination, are painful evocations of the combined rigidity and aridity that define the children's lives to the last detail. Gradgrind's crowning success in achieving his aim so completely are his two children from whom any residual trace of fancy has been terminally eradicated, with devastating consequences for all three family members.

The narrative proceeds by entwining the lives of all its characters with the ultimate object of revealing how divided and separated the lives of contemporary people had become. The depiction of Stephen's lonely isolation, particularly before his being 'sent to Coventry', evokes a powerful image of individual desolation in modern times. Hard Times however, is not a straightforward critique of either the factory system or of the social relations specific to a modern, industrial capitalist economy. Its unalloyed contempt for the Union leader Slackbridge and his equally hollow rhetoric akin to Gradgrind,s own 'unnatural' language, because it has become a 'dead' language, makes the novel difficult to enlist in the cause of organised Labour and the competing claims to be a modern family structure, indeed an alternative to family, that the Union represents. This is one of the reasons that the novel resists any easy classification as to its presenting an alternate political vision to compete with or succeed the current dominance of a rationalist conception of political economy. The novel emphatically rejects the era's dominant thinking, the ruling ideological beliefs of the day as these are most clearly defined in the Utilitarian philosophy of John Stuart Mill with its focus

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on the supreme importance of the individual's freedom to pursue their own individual betterment, construed in economic terms.

'Whether it is read in the context of mid-Victorian fiction, or with attention to its own internal linguistic operations, the double movements of Hard Times render this novel peculiarly resistant to interpretive certitude.' (p. xxxii)

In her Introduction to the Penguin edition Kate Flint acknowledges the difficulties of interpretation that Hard Times represents:

As previously stated, this should not be a surprising feature of a novel that unrelentingly identifies the very discourse of the scientific classification of facts as the key cause of the moral degeneracy exhibited by Gradgrind's son Tom and, even more disturbingly, the almost complete absence of 'affect' shown by Gradgrind's daughter Louisa. At times, Dickens's characterisation of Louisa has surprisingly modern overtones, verging on existential elements. When Louisa is described gazing endlessly into the fire, watching its dying embers turn to ash, this image can be taken as another allegorical representation of the cruel reality of a heart turned to ash, and the tragic consequence of the impossibility of romance (a theme played out in the subplot concerning James Harthouse) or more dramatically as Dickens's haunted conception of the human mind cut off from its most essential nature and characteristics:

'I was encouraged by nothing mother, but by looking at the red sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do in it.' (p. 57)

This is a remarkable passage, not for its evocation of dying embers to signify mortality and familiar Biblical invocations, but for the last phrase, 'how little I could do in it'. Dickens 'compares the oppressive situation of both suffering characters in the novel, Louisa and Stephen, and concludes that they are both marked by the loss of hope and both by almost the complete loss of feeling. Stephen's visions of suicide are more than matched by Louisa's sense of cosmic futility that anticipates many later schools of modem philosophical thought. The resistance to interpretive certitude is also expressed through the novel's embodiment of such resistance to any comforting system of 'belief in a character such as Louisa.

Against this expression of futility Dickens employs one of his most familiar narrative responses - that of the 'Angel of the Hearth' in the character of Sissy Jupe. Sissy is indeed the presence in Stone Lodge who is the source of the mysterious changes that Gradgrind himself begins to notice within his household, an influence that begins to reintroduce those elements of human feeling and sympathy that the father had thought to eradicate as superfluous. Sissy's own origins are profoundly important to Dickens'S efforts in the novel to locate a social arrangement and an image of family and community that is somehow outside the repressive factual norms of Coketown. This external space is conjured through the exotic conception of 'family' represented in Sleary's 'Horse Riding'. The lack of a separation between family and work is reminiscent of older social arrangements with traditional bonds. Sleary's family is imagined as a distinctly pre-modem entanglement in which individuals form part of a collective group with an emphasis on cooperation and interdependence:

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'There were two or three handsome young women among them, with their two or three husbands, and their two or three mothers, and their eight or nine little children, who did the fairy business when required.' (p. 40)

The lack of differentiation among them is of another order to the image of the labouring masses, anonymous in their hardened version of collective toil. Dickens's conception of the Sleary circus is far more physically intimate than the social relations among the 'Hands' who have been reduced to one body part, signifying the lack of wholeness in their lives, not their own personal Jack of genuine individuality. At 'Sleary's Horse Riding' in contrast, there is the image of families 'balancing' atop others, of all members contributing to the overall performance - 'All the mothers could (and did) dance' - and the abiding sense of a pleasure and satisfaction taken in the work, which of course is intended for the pleasure and diversion of the audience.

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Section 5. Characters

Thomas Gradgrind

He is the very singular embodiment of the crippling mentality of the 'Fact Men'; of a conception of knowledge isolated from 'sentiment' as the necessary precondition for a scientific world view that sees the world, and its inhabitants, only as facts to be calculated and classified. Nevertheless, Gradgrind receives a more than even-handed treatment from Dickens in Hard Times. It is important for students to explore the profound transformation that is undergone by Gradgrind in the novel. When he first appears before the reader, lecturing to an anonymous mass of students identified only by number, Gradgrind is described as stone-like, his eyes sheltering in caves beneath a granite forehead. This concentration on physiognomic details is in the classic Dickensian style of literally reading a character's inner self through the physical expression it has created. Gradgrind is the representative of a stony social philosophy, a set of beliefs that have turned him to stone.

The vision of the Gradgrind presiding over the school at the opening of the novel is one that is almost wholly changed by the novel's end. Gradgrind is entitled to be seen as the novel's major protagonist if only because, in narrative terms, he is the character who undergoes the most profound and most significant transformation. This is a novel in which many characters undergo a miraculous transformation, not least Gradgrind's daughter Louisa. But it is Gradgrind himself who appears as one of the most wretched of all the souls in the novel when he finally appreciates how completely he has destroyed the lives of both his children through his inhuman/inhumane philosophy of education and the family.

Questions

1. Who was John Stuart Mill and what were the main principles of Utilitarianism?

2. How does Dickens maintain some element of readerly sympathy toward Gradgrind?

3. What experience of family life have Gradgrind's beliefs provided for his own children and how is this shown?

4. What are the causes of Gradgrind's eventual transformation?

5. At the end of the novel how has Gradgrind changed and in what language does Dickens express this?

Louisa Gradgrind

'Her remembrances of home and childhood, were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The golden waters were not there. They were flowing for the fertilisation of the land, where grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.' (p. 192)

Dickens creates enormous sympathy for the character of Louisa Gradgrind. She and her brother are the victims of their father's experiments in social engineering that have resulted in the emotional suffocation of their childhoods. Though the effects are shown to cause a type of moral degeneracy in her brother, Louisa remains a figure of readerly sympathy through her stoic obedience to a father who has crippled her emotional self and her spontaneous compassion for the trials of Stephen Blackpool, an act of human feeling that ultimately ends her marriage to Bounderby. Louisa is a richly developed character in the novel. At times Dickens portrays her almost as an

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automaton, a strangely robotic child and young woman who has been 'programmed' by her father to respond only to facts.

Louisa also gains significant sympathy and understanding from the narrator and the reader as she must withstand both marriage to Bounderby and the seductive advances of Harthouse. One of the most poignant, and typically Dickensian moments in the novel, is Louisa's consent to her father's wishes that she accept the proposal of marriage from Bounderby. In this scene Louisa confronts her father with the grim logic of his own system, insisting that the marriage proposal be considered only as a matter of factual calculation. Gradgrind's crucial moment of 'misrecognition' when he cannot discern his daughter's true feelings, or even conceive that she might possess such fancies, is the truth Louisa forces her father to demonstrate. In this moment Louisa is trapped in the same iron cage of repressive social logic that entraps Stephen Blackpool in a marriage he cannot escape, and as such establishes Louisa as the novel's heroine. She provides a bridge between the worlds of Coketown through her identificatory compassion for Stephen, despite the fact that her visit to Stephen's home is the first time in her life she 'had come into the dwelling of the Coketown Hands'. Louisa knows of the existence of the Hands as an abstraction:

'She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nest, like ants or beetles. But she knew from her reading infinitely more of the ways of toiling insects than of these toiling men and women: (p. 155)

It is through her exposure to the variegated social world of Coketown and its working population, to Stephen and Rachael, to the members of Sleary's Horse Riding, and to Sissy most importantly, that Louisa ultimately escapes the emotional and psychological entombment she had endured at Stone Lodge.

Questions

1. What qualities in Louisa's character entitle her to be viewed as the heroine of the novel?

2. In what ways does the narrative contrast the respective childhoods of Louisa and Sissy Jupe?

3. How has Louisa been shaped by her father's educational beliefs?

4. What explanation does the narrative provide for Louisa's genuine empathy towards Stephen?

5. What purpose in the narrative is served by the sub-plot involving Louisa and James Harthouse?

Mrs Gradgrind and Thomas Gradgrind

Both these characters, like Louisa, are depicted as the products of Gradgrind's stultifying views on family life. His wife is shown always in a state of mental agitation and physical frailty; she has been effectively ground down, 'milled' by her husband's rigorous methods. Tom Gradgrind, or 'The Whelp' as he is contemptuously referred to throughout the novel, is a peculiar case-study in moral degeneracy and embodies an absolute and ruthless dedication to self-interest (a true product of the Gradgrind School), even if it means sacrificing Louisa, the only person to ever show him warmth and love.

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Questions

1. What is it about the family life depicted at Stone Lodge that most appals the narrator

of Hard Times?

2. What language does Dickens use to portray the sterility of Gradgrind's family r relationships?

3. What ideas was Dickens trying to question in choosing to have a member of the educated middle classes such as Tom Gradgrind guilty of committing criminal acts and finally being 'saved' by the members of a travelling circus and an illiterate girl?

Sissy Jupe

When Sissy Jupe is asked to determine the first principle of the science of Political Economy, she replies with the 'absurd answer': To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me.' This answer perfectly expresses the role Sissy plays in the novel: to confound and to transcend the constricting language and mentality of the Fact Men. Sissy incarnates one of Dickens's most enduring narratives devices, 'the angel of the hearth'. There is a certain irony in selecting the member of a travelling circus whose father is a clown and a 'Cackler' to embody this all important narrative function. While it appears that Sissy has been rescued by Gradgrind (abducted seems closer to the facts) it becomes clear very soon that it is Sissy who will rescue the blighted Gradgrind family.

Sissy plays such an important role in the novel because she also exists outside the dominant social forms of the novel - the hive-like, 'insectivaJ' world of the toiling masses, and the airless, suffocating atmosphere of the educated middle-classes. Sissy exerts an almost mystical force in the novel where her essential goodness is a sufficient bulwark against the advances of James Harthouse on behalf of Louisa and in discovering the injured Stephen Blackpool in the abandoned shaft or allowing Gradgrind to 'see' the emotional and psychological wreckage of family life his beliefs have created. Sissy represents an older, traditional understanding of mutual support, loyalty and devotion. In contrast to Louisa in the opening sections of the novel, Sissy is defined almost completely in terms of her deep and authentic emotional responses. Her refusal to part with the bottle of lotion she was sent for on the day of her father's disappearance is a symbol of her innocent devotion and love of her father.

Questions

1. How does Dickens explain Sissy's 'failure' to absorb the teaching methods of Gradgrind College?

Sleary and members of the circus

SJeary expresses the Dickensian ethos of cooperation and community that is contrasted with the naked self-interest that is shown to follow from the system of Gradgrind's philosophy. Sleary himself looks after an extended family of performers whose children are also incorporated into the acts as 'fairies', an image of a highly sentimentalised and enduring version of childhood dominant in the Victorian period, and one calculated to incense a character such as Gradgrind. Yet, while family life at Stone Lodge has been rendered as desert, Sleary's circus is an intimate network of family associations, where working life and the raising of children are in close connection to each other. A simpler way of putting this is to contrast Sissy as a

product of the Horse Riding troupe and Louisa as product of Gradgrind College and Stone Lodge. Sleary's distinctive speech, an asthmatic lisp, is the most direct expression of Dickens's sense of celebrating the unpredictability, the resistance to routine and necessary communality, of the travelling life of the circus troupe. Sleary's stated philosophy, to make the best not the worst of a situation, is a quietly damning rebuke of the naked self-interest and individualism of Gradgrind's philosophy, which produces such graduates as Bitzer.

Stephen Blackpool and Rachael

Stephen Blackpool and Rachael are undoubtedly the most idealised characters in Hard Times. Stephen's archetypal embodiment of generations of endless toil is accompanied by the portrayal of Rachael as a figure of limitless devotion and moral goodness. Some critics have described the story of Stephen Blackpool as essentially a sub-plot in the novel to the major narrative interest with the fortunes of the Gradgrind family. Both Stephen and Rachael are clearly intended as the most allegorical figures in the novel. They incarnate a type of residual common decency that continues to survive in the otherwise blighted working classes. These attitudes of common humanity that both characters express so consistently in the narrative are an important counterbalance to the hollow values espoused by braggarts such as Bounderby, false seducers such as Harthouse, and the sterile maxims of Gradgrind.

As with the importance of this theme across the novel, it is clear that one of the most poignant aspects of Stephen and Rachael's abject situation is that they are fated never to establish a family of their own, with both characters being portrayed as naturally qualified for the responsibilities. Students should consider carefully the exact symbolic importance that Stephen plays in the narrative, especially since his death provides the dramatic climax of the novel.

Questions

1. Do Stephen and Rachael ever become more than just stereotypes?

2. What social views are suggested by Dickens's exposure of the 'cruelties' of the legal system in relation to Stephen's marriage?

3. In what ways does Rachael embody ideal feminine values for Dickens?

4. How is the discovery/death of Stephen represented in the novel? What type of language does Dickens employ to express the wider tragedy Stephen's death symbolises?

Bounderby and Mrs Sparsit

The novel reserves a special type of contempt for these two characters. Bounderby is unquestionably the villain of Dickens's melodramatic treatment of the struggle between capital and labour and the newly dominant social discourses of individual self-interest and enterprise. Unlike Gradgrind, Bounderby never shows any capacity for change or for even a sympathetic hearing of any other character. He physically expresses the voracious appetite of Coketown itself, a blustering, sputtering figure forever expanding the reach of his power. Bounderby's ruthless pursuit of Stephen Blackpool, replete with the manipulation of public consciousness through advertising media, suggests the repressive mentality that Bounderby's version of individual freedoms is founded upon. Stephen, in contrast, refuses to be an informer/spy for Bounderby, stirred by his emotive vision of the alienation of his fellow workers.

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The ultimate scandal of Bounderby's character rendered in strictly Dickensian terms is the final revelation that he has lied all along about the privations of his earliest years, having been raised in comfort and security. Bounderby's endless bragging about his impoverished origins, delivered as part cautionary tale, part admonition to all his listeners, is finally exposed by Dickens as the most vulgar hypocrisy, originating in the school of thought that Bounderby represents, with its emphasis on the merits of individual effort and the promise of the example of the speaker's own achievements despite early disadvantage. Bounderby is a figure suggesting class treachery and betrayal; even his generous annual compliments to Mrs Sparsit convey the character's need for class legitimation. Mrs Sparsit is an equally deplorable character, trading off the class prejudices of her benefactor and expressing a meek-aristocratic disregard for the fate of others.

Questions

1. In what ways does Dickens portray Bounderby as a character who expresses the spirit of the Industrial Age?

2. The way all the characters use language is important in Hard Times. How does Bounderby's speech reveal his character?

3. How does Dickens establish a symbolic parallel between Bounderby and the city of Coketown?

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Section 6. Issues and themes

While recognising that Hard Times is a social problem novel it is also necessary to recognise that the text is not easily summarised into an inventory of its themes. The following headings are intended to generate discussion and the critical analysis of Dickens's literary style in expressing his central concerns in the novel.

Industrialism: progress versus dystopia

Hard Times is Dickens's 'State of the Nation' literary address. The voice of the narrator strives for the unmediated connection with his audience throughout the narrative. of Hard Times, culminating in his impassioned final address for cooperation. Hard Times is a novel in which Dickens directly invites his readers to contemplate the true face of British society in the Victorian Era, an era that made claims to its greatness on the back of unprecedented economic and productive growth driven primarily by the labour of masses of anonymous workers. This daily reality of the Industrial Age is confronted directly in the novel. Dickens offers his readers the characters of Stephen and Rachael, the descriptions of the sinuous, serpentine spirals of smoke emitted from the furnaces of Coketown, suggesting its reversion to a more primitive state, and the growing threat of mass unrest and discontent among the labouring classes incited by unscrupulous labour unions.

Hard Times makes a strong case for the prosecution in any debate over the good or ills of the Industrial Revolution. Dickens paints an astonishingly prophetic vision of the destruction of the natural environment, a destruction that he explicitly connects with a withering of the inner nature of his human characters. The image of Progress that Dickens satirises is that of Scientific Knowledge liberating human society from ignorance, with its claims to factual certitude, universality and potential for the creation of wealth. Dickens registers the emptiness, the essentially inhuman qualities of this type of language and describes the dystopian social world that such a new religion of Facts will create.

Questions

1. Does Hard Times suffer in the eyes of contemporary readers for its apparent rejection of scientific systems of knowledge for something more 'mystical' in the human spirit?

2. In what ways is the city of Coketown rendered in dystopian language?

3. Is it fair to claim that Dickens exaggerates the worst of the Industrial Revolution without acknowledging its more positive achievements?

4. What is the social cost of progress as shown in Hard Times?

5. What evidence is there in the novel to suggest that Dickens saw Industrialisation as a permanent state in Britain?

Family and education: social reproduction/social change?

Hard Times can be read as a passionate defence of the inviolable rights of the family. In Stone Lodge Dickens detects and exposes a perversion of family life caused by the eradication of feeling, the imagination and the free play of childish fancy. The novel's concentration on the school and the home raises questions about its underlying concern with the question of how a society reproduces itself. Both social spaces are

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highly emblematic of the new conditions of life under industrialisation. The school represents the public sphere, the proud achievement of a modernised civil society, its 'mission', to educate the masses of children being born into cities such as Coketown. The family in its many guises in the novel represents the private sphere, an area of social life held to be sacred in Dickensian terms, not to be violated by the calculating, rational logics of the public sphere.

The political unconscious of the novel might be located in this well nigh haunted fascination with the idea of social reproduction. The school in Hard Times is a factory for producing individuals such as Bitzer, (see p. 278 for his account of the effects of his schooling) devoid of any moral conscience and instructed in the rigorous application of objective logic. It is clear that in the text Dickens is recording his own scandalised shock at the condition of the country, fixated on purely economic growth and technological progress. This is a society that has become a producer of diseased social relations, just as Coketown itself pollutes the lives of its inhabitants, their imaginary lives, and the very landscape they walk upon, which 'devours' Stephen and almost claims Sissy.

The emotional disturbance that Dickens detects in the family life of Stone Lodge is caused by the father's systematic dismantling of the separation of public and private spheres. Ironically, both Tom and Louisa complain that they have seen nothing of the outside world or been exposed to the society of other people. In Tom this has bred a view of other people as existlnq primarily for his use and profit; in Louisa it develops an uncannily neutral persona. She is seemingly devoid of emotional response, a character who might later provide a psychoanalytic case study. Dickens expresses a clear abhorrence at the state of Gradgrind's family life and this is registered in the father's eventual realisation at what he has created.

Where Hard Times does register a number of troubling unconscious elements is in this area where the narrative is clearly fascinated by what the consequences are for society if the dominance of the Fact Men, and their new recruits such as the opportunistic Harthouse, goes unchallenged. The question of how a society reproduces itself, its values and most defining beliefs, its cultural identity, asserts itself again and again in Hard Times. This is where the novel is at its most intensely allegorical. Any fictional representation that concentrates on the twin themes of education and the family can be expected to be working through numerous questions about social change also. The unparalleled changes that had been unleashed by the Industrial Revolution are the precise situational conditions in mid-Victorian Britain that Dickens is directly responding to.

Questions

1. Nature imagery is used throughout the novel. What purpose does it serve?

2. What are the different versions of family life shown in Hard Times?

3. What are the forces that the narrator suggests are threatening the modern family?

4. How does Dickens present Gradgrind's theory of education?

5. Is the essential emphasis of Gradgrind on a scientific understanding of the physical world incompatible with current models of education?

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Culture, diversion and the imagination

One of the abiding images of Coketown is as a place of darkness:

'Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun's rays ... A blur of soot and smoke ... murkily creeping along the earth ... a dense formless jumble ... that showed nothing but masses of darkness.' (p. 111)

This is a darkness that covers not only the city, but the minds and souls of its inhabitants. Dickens evokes Coketown in pestilential terms, a place of death ('shrouded' in its own polluted air) that extends to the death of the human spirit under such conditions. To counter this Dickens employs another of his tested narrative devices - the appeal to a 'renegade' social grouping that exists outside of the alienated world of capital and labour. The values of political economy that govern the extraction of profit from the workers' labour time contrast with the organic values and social relations inherent in Sleary's Horse Riding troupe. Sleary himself expresses the need for diversion from the daily routine of work and the provision of leisure to allow for the necessary play of the imagination - an activity that has been proscribed under the educational strictures of Gradgrind.

While there are unmistakably dystopian elements in the narrative of Hard Times, there are also suggestions of more utopian energies in the reminder that the imagination is the source of a character such as Sissy's great strengths. Given her background at the circus, it is not possible for her to not establish an empathetic connection with those around her. She is shown as possessing a gift for imaginative projection, as when she and Louisa share a moment of understanding that causes Louisa to distance herself from Sissy as a result. Hard Times is a novel that can be viewed as a direct result of a generalised social anxiety among concerned sections of the educated middle classes that a fundamental coarsening of human nature must accompany the brutality of industrial life for its workers. While this attitude could also be used to supply evidence for the essential differences between classes, Dickens maintains a steady focus on the affirmative values of working class characters such as Stephen and Rachael and the members of the circus.

Questions

1. Where in the narrative is there evidence of the imagination and fancy?

2. How does Dickens demonstrate the importance of the free play of the imagination in Hard Times?

3. Is the novel's focus on the relations among members of the circus troupe a convincing alternative to 'normal' social relations?

4. What does Dickens present as the worst consequences of the suppression of the imaginative sympathy in individuals?

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Section 7. Language and style

Dickens's trademark literary style is on full display in Hard Times. Students should carefully explore how the language of the novel is so important in conveying the text's complex effects. Hard Times exemplifies Dickens's satirical characterisation of oppressive institutions. The language of the novel evokes constant references to the natural world and to its despoiling. The metaphorical power of Dickens's writing is the linguistic counter-response to the deadening use of language exemplified by Gradgrind and Bounderby in their respective fields of endeavour. Bounderby uses language to appeal to a non-existent personal past that is styled on a distillation of Victorian patriotic national emblems and ideals of self- reliance. Both mythic narratives are hollow and propagandistic. Dickens's evocation of Coketown and the misery of The Hands is a permanent rebuke to any stirrings of national pride.

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The sentimental tone of much of Dickens's language will also be an area of important discussion. Dickens was an author of unparalleled popularity, writing for one of the largest popular audiences in Britain. His language constantly strives for emotive effect in a manner that appears hyperbolic by contemporary standards of literary taste. Dickens makes direct appeals to the reader's emotions and sympathies by his use of a language that focuses closely on the sufferings of his characters, by heightening these experiences to almost saintly proportions and exploiting the maximum dramatic effect from the rhetorical flights of his prose. Such heightened literary prose was familiar to Dickens's readers and that the manipulation of its effects was an expected convention of the genre. The pathos invested in a character such as Stephen was understood to reinforce the broader relevance of the narrative as a modern parable of alienation and the experience of that distinctry modem, industrial phenomenon, the loneliness of the individual amidst the urbanised crowd.

It is clear that the fanciful array of metaphors developed throughout the novel - machines described as 'melancholy-mad elephants', Coketown as a City dispensing a plague upon the natural landscape, 'the monstrous serpents of smoke' trailing themselves over Coketown - evoke a world out of balance, driven by maddening rhythms of work and production. In this use of language, demonstrating the power of literary language to summon the full imaginative force of the changes caused by this unprecedented period of social transformation, Dickens challenges the language of the Fact Men who claim that the new social reality needs only to tabulated, classified, measured and calculated to direct the chaotic energies that have been released.

Activities

1. Collect a representative range of statements by Gradgrind and examine how Dickens attempts to express the hollowness of his language.

2. Discuss Dickens's evocation of a dystopian industrial world. How does the writer Describe this world? What are its dominant characteristics? What imagery is chosen to express its dark features?

3. Ask students to write a speech that Gradgrind might deliver to parliament on the subject of educational reform.

4. Dickens provides moving accounts of the destructive effects of industrial social relations on the most intimate areas of his character's emotional lives. What type of language does he employ to describe these psychological conditions? What imagery is developed to express the essential pathos and humanity of their lives?

Section 8. Close study of selected passages

Gradgrind and Bounderby visit Sleary's Horse Riding. pp. 38-46

Here Dickens reveals to the reader the extended family of the circus, the environment that has shaped Sissy Jupe and which provides a contrast between the logic of Gradgrind's system and the more organic social relationships that flourish within Sleary's family of performers. Dickens is careful in this section of the narrative not to over-idealise the characters who comprise this alternative social space and configuration of intimate relationships. But it is equally clear that the novel presents the performers as having retained some residual aspects of pre-industrial authenticity in the way they live.

Sleary's circus is represented as an exotic space, peopled by such strange characters as E.W.B. Childers and Master Kidderminster. The defining differences of language as symbolic of deeper class and social differences are foregrounded in this passage. Both Gradgrind's and Bounderby's speech patterns are characterised by the repetition of simple, negative phrasing: 'No. I say no. I advise you not. I say by no means.' (p 39.) This type of language use, characterised by its inherent negativity and oppressive simplicity is contrasted with the far more expansive and humane speech of Sleary: r ••• they can't be alwayth a learning. Make the betht of uth; not the wurtht. I've got my living out of horthe-riding all my life, I know; but I conthider that I lay down the philosophy of the thubject when I thay to you, Thquire, make the betht of uth: not the wurtht!' (pp. 45-6.)

Questions

1 What structural importance does the sub-plot focusing on Sleary's Horse Riding serve in the wider development of the narrative?

2 How does Dickens express the profound differences between the classes that Bounderby and Gradgrind represent and the unassimilated group that Sleary's represents?

3 The flight of Sissy's father suggests that even in this marginal area of industrial society the individual's sense of isolation, anxiety and despair can take hold. What is Dickens suggesting about the expansion of the repressive social logics that have established Coketown and elevated its citizens such as Josiah Bounderby?

Bounderby attempts to enlist Stephen as an informer. pp 144-156

This passage might be usefully compared with other Victorian novels concerned with the effects of industrialisation such as Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South also published serially in 1854-5 in Dickens's own periodical Household Words. The representative of Industry, John Thornton, is a very different character to Bounderby, far less of a caricature and though still stubbornly intransigent when it comes to the demands of the labouring classes, he is shown to capable of modifying his attitudes through an appreciation of human suffering. Yet both novels stage the dramatic moment when class antagonism is embodied in individual characters seen in direct and immediate opposition. This scene in Hard Times is also pivotal because it is when Louisa witnesses the humanity and suffering of Blackpool and Dickens brings both characters into immediate orbit in the narrative, establishing their understanding, but also asserting the degrees of sameness that define their lives as prisoners of Industrial social logic.

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Questions

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1 What aspects of the class system under industrialisation does Dickens highlight in this scene?

2 Why is this an important point in the narrative for Louisa's development as a character?

3 An argument about the authenticity of character (or lack thereof) stemming from that individual's use of language is developed across the novel. How in this scene does Dickens contrast the respective uses of language among his characters?

4 What specific role does James Harthouse play in this scene?

5 How does Dickens achieve the novel's underlying purpose of making Stephen Blackpool its most convincing and incisive observer of the horrors of industrialisation?

Gradgrindappeals to Bitzer's humanity. pp.276-78

In this chapter, entitled 'Philosophical' Gradgrind experiences something of a Victor Frankenstein moment when he is forced to confront his own monstrous creation in the form of Bitzer. This scene of final confirmation for Gradgrind of what his system has created echoes his opening exhortation, 'Now what I want is Facts ... stick to Facts.' Bitzer is a strangely disturbing character in the novel, not only for his obviously repugnant characteristics, but for his status as a social prototype, an example of the new race of men that industrialisation and rational systems of education will create. He is also an uncannily modern character, anticipating much later literary creations such as those of existentialist literature. Bitzer does not suffer simply from moral apathy, or even the sort of degenerative psychology that the Whelp' embodies. Bitzer is rational and motivated, subordinate to the reality of facts and the social hierarchy that accompanies them.

'I beg you pardon for interrupting you, sir ... but I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person's self-interest. It's your only hold. We are so constituted. I was brought up in that catechism when I was very young, sir, as you are aware.' (p. 277)

Questions

1. What view of society and its likely future is Dickens expressing through Bitzer's acknowledgement of the success of Gradgrind's philosophy?

2. Does the novel suggest that Gradgrind never anticipated the sort of attitudes that his model pupil would develop?

3. How does Dickens make it clear to the reader that Gradgrind is just as equally shocked with the results of his educational system?

4. What changes to the system of modern, mass education do the values of Bitzer appear to demand?

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Section 9. Further activities

1. Create a dramatic monologue

in line with Unit 3, Area of study 1, Outcome 1, spoken by one of the following characters:

• Gradgrind addresses the students of his school in the light of his experiences in the novel.

• Louisa explains her reasons for visiting Stephen after hearing him speak at Bounderby's.

2. Research

the ideas of another important Victorian writer and critic of industrialisation such as Thomas Carlyle, to whom the novel is dedicated, or Matthew Arnold, author of such books as Culture and Anarchy who also advocated the importance of cultural practices for the necessary civilising effects they produced. This research can then be presented for class discussion, in which the ideas of these writers on such subjects as the importance of education, the urgent requirement to address the needs of the working class through mass public schooling and the abiding significance of cultural traditions that connect a community and sustain common understandings and values can be considered. These can then be compared with current debates in Australia over the teaching of a 'values based' education or the issues that have arisen around the 'correct' teaching of Australian History.

3. Debate the following topic:

'That Globalisation shares many common features with the much earlier period of the Industrial Age.'

4. Discuss the following questions:

• Is Hard Times an accurate or an exaggerated representation of the world of midVictorian Britain?

• Does Dickens underestimate the significant problems of inventing a system of mass public education in Industrial Britain? Do his suggestions, implicit as they are, provide any practical basis for improving the system of mass education?

• Is it accurate to claim that Hard Times represents the bleakest possible vision of Britain's modern, industrial future?

• Can Hard Times be considered in any way as the possible precursor to the dark vision of political oppression that Orwell evokes in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

• What idealistic image of Britain's past is conjured up by Sleary's Horse Riding?

• What is the significance of the final authorial address to the reader? Exactly what type of relationship is envisioned by the claim: 'Dear Reader! It rests with you and me'?

• What difficulties does the language of Dickensian sentimentality and melodrama present for younger readers in 2006?

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Section 10. Key quotes

Book the First 'Sowing'

Chapter 1 'The One Thing Needful': 'You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts, sir!' (p. 9)

Chapter 2 'Murdering the Innocents': 'We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You must have nothing to do with it.' (p. 14)

Chapter 5 'The Key-note': 'All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, and the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.' (p, 28)

Chapter 8 'Never Wonder': 'There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy. Mr Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library: a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up sane.' (p. 53)

Chapter 9 'Sissy's Progress': ' "Did your father love her?" Louisa asked these questions with a strong, wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a banished creature, and hiding in solitary places.' (p. 61)

Chapter 13 'Rachael': 'Wandering to and fro, unceasingly, without hope, and in search of he knew not what (he only knew that he was doomed to seek it), he was the subject of a nameless, horrible dread, a mortal fear of one particular shape which everything took.' (p. 87)

Chapter 15 'Father and Daughter': 'But to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap.' (p. 99)

Book the Second 'Reaping'

Chapter 4 'Men and Brothers': '''Oh my friends and fellow-men!" said Slackbridge then, shaking his head with violent scorn, "I do not wonder that you, the prostrate sons of labour, are incredulous of the existence of such a man. But he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage existed, and Judas Iscariot existed and Castlereagh existed; and this man exists!'" (p. 139)

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Chapter 6 'Fading Away': 'Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog'seared creeds, the poor you will always have with you. Cultivate in them, while there is

yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you!' (p. 160)

Chapter 9 'Hearing the Last of It': 'Neither as she approached her old home now, did any of the best influences of old home descend upon her. The dreams of childhood - its airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond: so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown ... what had she to do with these?' (pp. 191-2)

Chapter 10 'Mrs Sparsit's Staircase': 'She erected in her mind a mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa coming.' (p. 195)

Book the Third 'Garnering'

Chapter 1 'Another Thing Needful': '''Louisa, I have a misgiving that some change may have been slowly working about me in this house, by mere love and gratitude; that what the Head had left undone and could not do, the Heart may have been doing silently. Can it be so?" (p. 218)

Chapter 3 'Very Decided': '''Education! I'll tell you what education is - To be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon the shortest allowance of everything except blows. That's what I call education." (p. 233)

Chapter 4 'Lost': 'His hair had latterly begun to change its colour. As he leaned upon his hand again, looking grey and old, Louisa, with a face of fear and pity, hurriedly went over to him, and sat close at his side. Her eyes by accident met Sissy's at the moment. Sissy flushed and started, and Louisa put her finger on her lip.' (p. 246)

Chapter 5 'Found': 'Luisa had never spoken of harbouring any suspicion of her brother, in connexion with the robbery; she and Sissy had held no confidence on the subject, save in that one interchange of looks ... but it was understood between them, and they both knew it.' (p. 255)

Chapter 7 Whelp Hunting': 'Aged and bent he looked, and quite bowed down; and yet he looked a wiser man, and a better man, than in the days when in this life he wanted nothing but Facts.' (p. 266)

'He raised his eyes to where she stood, like a good fairy in his house, and said in a tone of softened gratitude and grateful kindness, "It is always you, my child!" (p, 267)

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Section 11 . Essay topics

Part One:

1. 'Sissy has effected it, father.' Louisa is right to recognise the central importance of Sissy in transforming the Gradgrind family. Discuss.

2. 'Gradgrind's belief in the sole importance of the rational mind brings his family to near destruction in Hard Times.' To what extent do you agree?

3. 'It is the plight of Stephen and Rachael that most profoundly affects the reader of Hard Times.' Do you agree?

4. 'In Hard Times Dickens reveals the psychological trauma of industrialisation through his working class characters.' Discuss.

5. Hard Times is really the story of Gradgrind's personal salvation. Discuss.

Part Two:

1. 'Hard Times calls for the humanising of social institutions in the name of our true nature.' Discuss.

2. 'Dickens suggests that positive change will never occur unless we recognise the importance of the imagination and fancy.' Discuss.

3. 'The nightmare vision of Coketown described in Hard Times stands as Dickens's rejection of the Victorian idea of progress that the city rests upon.' Do you agree?

4. 'Dickens sympathises with the individual but is still wary of the labouring masses in Hard Times.' To what extent do you agree?

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5. 'The society Dickens describes in Hard Times is not intended to be seen as an exaggeration but as typical of the Industrial Age.' Discuss.

Section 12. Guided essay responses

Part 1: Hard Times is really the story of Gradgrind's personal salvation. Discuss.

This topic clearly focuses the students' attention on the central importance of this character. And therefore the complex relationships that define this character to his family, to the public institutions of school and parliament; to Bounderby and to Sleary all require exploration in any response to this topic.

Students might also like to consider the religious connotations of the topic. Does Dickens hold out the promise of genuine redemption for Gradgrind? In what ways does he atone for former sins? The topic may be qualified to argue that the possibility of salvation was not within Gradgrind's own personal reach; it was the intervention of the 'Angel of the Hearth' in the form of Sissy Jupe that accomplished the act of salvation.

Particular attention might be paid to Dickens's language in such a Part 1 essay. The various passages describing Gardgrind as granite-like, stony and impenetrable, cavern-like and peering from an immense darkness can be examined to evidence the exact characterisation Dickens was attempting in personifying the spirit of Utilitarian rationality. His home is depicted as a mausoleum of family life; the setting of Stone Lodge can also be explored for its connotations of living death, the suppression of the human spirit that Gradgrind has so successfully achieved, particularly with his two children.

Similarly, Dickens introduces different patterns of imagery to suggest Gradgrind's gradual transformation, principally the imagery of time, which is spoken of generally in the novel as a force shaping human destiny on vast planes of historical experience. Gradgrind embodies this notion of time as fate.

In any developed argument on this topic the student would be expected to discuss the wider symbolic importance Gradgrind's transformation has for other characters in the novel. What changes are evident in other characters such as Louisa and Tom, Sissy and Bitzer? Does Bounderby alter his attitudes in any way?

Sample introductory paragraph: The question of personal salvation is explored throughout the lives and situations of many characters in Hard Times. Louisa is aware that her distinctive up-bringing has frozen or neutralised her capacity for an emotional response, even when faced with the worst of her fears; Stephen Blackpool must abide by the promises he has made despite their part in his expulsion from society. However the novel reserves its keenest interest in the fall of Mr Thomas Gradgrind from the lofty and fortified heights of his belief in Facts. The absolute certainty of his beliefs when the novel opens ensures that the depth of his fall will be greater than that of others, but also that he stands to learn the most.

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Part Two: 'The nightmare vision of Coketown described in Hard Times stands as Dickens's rejection of the Victorian idea of progress that the city rests upon.' Do you agree?

As a Part 2 question this asks students to consider the broader world of the text, its wider concerns with the actual social reality the characters inhabit. Students will have the opportunity with a question such as this to consider Dickens's own attitudes to the world of Coketown and its rulers.

A character such as Bounderby will be important in developing a response. Bounderby is not only an embodiment of the worst aspects of the city, he is also its most relentless advocate, not of the workers labouring in his factories, but of the repressive divisions of the class system itself that the city so darkly incarnates.

In what ways does the novel question the idea of progress? In its depiction of the routine of work as unnatural and oppressive? How does the perspective of the narrative voice contribute to this sense of condemnation?

Is there evidence to suggest that Dickens is attempting to contrast alternative conceptions of progress to the dominant notions of industrial and technological progress?

Where in the novel does the writer explicitly state what he feels has been lost because of the industrial creed? Students might consider the depiction of the inhabitants of Coketown, especially as they appear to stand as one undifferentiated mass before the blandishments of Slackbridge. Or more particularly at Stephen himself, whose body metaphorically represents the physical suffering and mortification of all workers.

The very idea of an abstract idea of progress that can only be measured in the tabulation of facts is criticised throughout the novel. Evidence for this can be found whenever the issue of education arises. Sissy's immunity to this educational logic suggests that she preserves the best traditions of humanity, while the Fact Men are in fact, agents of regression, as enemies of human promise.

Sample introductory paragraph: In Hard Times two versions of social progress dominate the narrative and its characters: Gradgrind's philosophy of educational perfection and eradication, and Bounderby's fixation with the disciplinary repression of his workers. While Coketown does stand as the most explicit image of the waste of industrialisation, it is the philosophical darkness of these characters that Dickens most clearly rejects as destructive of authentic human nature.

Section 13. References

As previously mentioned, there is a voluminous literature on the history of industrialisation. This breadth of material is matched by the critical commentary on Dickens and Victorian Literature. Teachers will need to consider the specific needs of their students, evaluating exactly what degree of background reading is necessary. It is to be stressed that while Hard Times is a novel that develops a portrait of the Industrial Age that is complete unto itself, students should benefit from being able to situate the novel in relation to vast historical changes that the novel can be seen as responding to in a specifically literary manner.

C. Dickens: Hard Times, ed. Kate Flint, Penguin classics

N. Davies: Europe: A History, Plmllco, London, 1997

F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Penguin, London, 1987

E.J. Hobsbawm: Industry and Empire, Penguin, London, 1990

F. Jameson: The Political Unconscious, Cornell University Press, 1983

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,/Josiah Bounderby: "a boastful, hypocritical, callous, condescending humbug - a fraud, a braggart"

" When he is first mentioned in the novel, he is established as the standard by which the behaviour of others should be measured.

"

ItWhat would Mr. Bounderby say?" (pg. 20), Gradgrind asks when Tom and Louisa are caught in the act of sneaking a glimpse of the circus.

It is part of Bounderby's self-image to regard himself as the adjudicator of what is right and wrong. He is the "bully of humility" (pg. 21) and sees it as his role to offer a supposedly definitive view on all subjects.

Bounderby's character is implied in his name; in 19th century usage, a "bounder" was a man of low character who conducted himself poorly, particularly towards women.

His treatment of his mother and Louisa would appear to place him firmly in this category. In addition, he is linked to notions of bounds and boundaries: he is a limited man who wants to see others - particularly his workers - kept firmly in their place, devoid of the prospect of social mobility He does not change throughout the course of the novel. This is only appropriate because he is a character full of "windy boastfulness" (pg. 21) and self importance

He is "inflated like a balloon" (pg. 20) and swells up "like an immense soap bubble, without its beauty" (pg. 266). Essentially, he likes the sound of his own voice.

Bounderby's boasting is of a particular kind. Instead of dwelling on his superiority to others, he prefers to emphasise his humble origins. He happily announces "I have no connexions at ali, and 1 come ofthe scum of the earth" (pg. 51).

When in company with the aristocratic James Harthouse, Bounderby is quick to establish that he is a "bit of a dirty riff-raft, and a genuine scrap of tag, rag and bobtail" (pg. 126).

He is of the belief that nobody should expect him to be polite, because he wasn't raised so as to acquire such accomplishments. According to his own account, he was abandoned by his mother and raised by his "she-wolf" of a grandmother. Under her cruel regime, he knew only harshness and mistreatment. She was, he maintains, a drunkard, and the "wickedest and the worst old woman that ever lived" (pg. 22)

By emphasising the disadvantages of his upbringing, Bounderby is able to lay claim to personal heroism in rising above them. He tells Mrs. Gradgrind that he has been a "determined character in later life" and adds that "1 suppose I was then. Here I am .. and nobody to thank for being here but myself" (pg. 22).

The message that Bounderby wants to convey is that he is a "self made man" (pg.zo) who owes nothing to anyone.

This may even be true - although not in the sense that he intends. It has been suggested that Bounderby is so detached from reality and so much in the grip of the fantasies he has spun around himself that he may be said to be, in the worst possible sense, a creature of his own manufacture. Bounderby's account of his early life is certainly his alone. When his mother, Mrs Pegler, appears later in the novel, we learn that she made endless sacrifices for her "darling boy" (pg. 252).

Far from abandoning him, she supported him even as a sole parent and agreed, once he became prosperous, to keep her distance lest he be disgraced by her. Once this is revealed, it becomes dear that Bounderby has "built his windy reputation upon lies" (pg. 254)

Even before Mrs Pegler's revelations, there has been an air offalseness about Bounderby. Dickens writes that he had an "infection of clap-trap in him" (nonsense and hypocrisy)

Everything he does seems designed to prove a point. He even grows cabbages in his flower garden to show what a plain and unassuming man he is. Bounderby professes to despise social rank but he is obviously pleased to have Mrs Sparsit - a lady of genteel birth who has lost her fortune - in his

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More than this, he is determined to ensure that his workers don't rise above their station, although he has risen above his. He represents their work as trifling - "the lightest work there is" (pg. 126)and regards any hint of dissatisfaction as a sign that they expect to be "set up in a coach and six, and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon" (pg, 72)

He prides himself on being a "straightforward man" (pg. 190). In fact, he is a stunted man, deficient in qualities of kindness, respect and consideration.

From the earliest stages of the novel, the reader is positioned to dislike and distrust him. When he kisses Louisa on the cheek, she tells her brother that he could cut out the affected portion with his penknife and she "wouldn't cry" (pg. 27).

When she eventually marries him, it is as if she is being carried off to the "castle of the giant Bounderby" (pg. 144). Louisa has known not to expect any "imaginative sentimental humbug" (pg. 37) from Bounderby. But what she encounters is a man who has taken "particular pains to harden himself at all points" (pg. 232). It is little surprise that the marriage is a failure

When the disadvantages of his youth are unveiled as lies late in the novel, He moves from being merely detestable to downright bizarre. Why concoct such a tale in the first place? While the other men of his class are playing down their origins and buying themselves titles, Bounderby does the -,pposite - he invents for himself an origin far below the one he knew.

It can only be because he wants to make his achievement seem greater than it is, greater that the other robber barons of Coketown. He uses the lowly origins he claims as justification to make pronouncements on other people's behaviour/position

There is a viciousness to Bounderby that cannot be so easily explained. He truly relishes the fall of Nickits from a position of success similar to his, and how he forces Mrs Sparsit to revisit and even embellish her privileged origin, so as to take maximal satisfaction in her current position as housekeeper.

He advises Gradgrind to kick Sissy out of the school, unmoved that her father has left her. He accuses any worker who complains about the terrible working conditions in his factory, or any other matter, of having aspirations to "turtle soup and venison". He even accuses Louisa of such ambitions when their marriage fails, although she has shown no interest in his wealth

The most important thing about Bounderby is his secret. Far from having a terrible childhood and a mother who deserted him, he was the product of a supportive, sacrificing family. He has been paying his mother a pittance wage under the condition that she never come to Coketown. This is the cruellest of Bounderby's many cruelties.

As a bachelor, he has been supporting Mrs Sparsit as his housekeeper - a job his widowed mother, alone and suffering ill health could be occupying.

Unlike Gradgrind, Bounderby doesn't learn from experience. His last envisaged act is to make a will naming 25 legal heirs, "each taking upon himself the name, Josiah Bounderby" epg. 286) and living forever in Bounderby.

Buildings on the Bounderby estate, Bounderby's egocentric attitudes remain undiminished, but - in a final twist - they also remain unsatisfied.

His last will and testament is destines to become embroiled in a long legal battle. Dickens doesn't want to reward Bounderby with any lasting tribute to his inordinate self-infatuation.

A person who has elevated himself from the lowest position owes no consideration to anyone, and so Bounderby's myth allows him to give free reign to his inherent cruelty. In the bigger picture, Dickens might be suggesting that super-capitalism depends on just such cruelty, and that those who partake in it must create a myth of one kind or another in order to justify that cruelty.

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When Gradgrind eventually learns from Louisa the consequences of his actions, he is humbled to see her, "the pride of his heart and the triumph of his system, lying, an insensible heap, at his feet" (pg, 212) Gradgrind's focus isn't initially on the pain he has caused to his daughter, but on the failure of his educational methods.

The scheme of the novel requires that Gradgrind should be forced to confront his errors. He is softened by his contact with Sissy and humbled by the fate of his "model children" (pg. 274). That Louisa should come close to committing adultery and that Tom should resort to thievery is something that Gradgrind could never have envisaged.

Moreover, when Bitzer quotes Gradgrind's own philosophy back at him to assure him - on perfectly "reasonable grounds" (pg. 278) - that there is no reason why Bitzer should take pity on the son of his former mentor.

Gradgrind has to concede that a view of the world in which self-interest is paramount is both harsh and limiting. He finds himself relying on the kindness and wisdom of those - including Sissy and Sleary - whom he once held in low esteem

Conversely, he finds much to question in the people and principles he formerly admired. His sense of self also undergoes radical revision. In speaking to Bounderby - once his dearest friend - after Louisa's flight, he looks H~~nt" .. and q_ult~wbowed down" but he is RJ~O "awiser man, and a better man, than in the days when in this life he wanted nothingbut facts" (pg. 266)

He learns that life cannot be reduced to a set of "inflexible theories" (pg. 286) and becomes the compassionate man he has always had the potential to be.

He is)jyl!J.g Er.£~f that those with gOQd intent!Q.ns_can~do~tb_~_l)1_()st harm. Insisting that "Facts alone are wanted in life" he has outlawed fancy and imagination

Tom and Louisa are thus condemned to his method every waking moment to catastrophic result. A defining characteristic of Gradgrind is his lack of faith. If he himself isn't categorically evil, his philosophy certainly is. There is more to life that facts and statistics; Gradgrind's reduction of his children's education to these elements renders them ~UY and s,Qiritually_Qgfurme9 adults. Young Tom is the worst example of this, though we see the idea more fully treated in Louisa.

Good and evil can seem to struggle for ascendancy in each of Gradgrind's actions. This contradiction is well illustrated by his treatment of Sissy: if it is a kindness to take her on at Stone Lodge, it is a cruelty to set as a condition that she never refer to her past. He sees Sissy less as a person than as an opportunity to prove his method.

We realise the greatest failing of the adherents of Gradgrind's perspective is their lack of humanity, especially when they think of themselves as acting in the service of humanity. Gradgrind isn't evil by intention; his lack of humanity results from his lack of imagination. He is simply incapable of understanding that the "teeming myriads of human beings around him" consist of more than the statistics that can be kept on their behaviour.

Over the course of the novel Gradgrind undergoes a change, coming to realise that with Louisa's breakdown, came the self destruction of his system

Where he had previously seemed a dynamo, he is now cautious, unsure of himself and often lost for words. It can therefore be concluded that he had been fairly weak all along, and that he has merely gone from the orbit of one strong character to that of another, namely from Bounderby to Sissy. The pugnacious, inhuman Gradgrind, the one who would defend the rightness of his system against all evidence, who used students for experimentation, is a protege of the worse Bounderby. The defining moment for this version of Gradgrind is when he advises Louisa to marry Bounderby upon the utility of the marriage, rather than on love.

But over the course of due time, Sissy pulls him into her orbit from Bounderby's. After Louisa's bombshell accusation leads him to question the foundations of his philosophy, Gradgrind puts himself and Louisa, in the care of Sissy.

It turns out that Gradgrind was the subject in the experiment that he thought he was performing on Sissy. Her inherent humanity, undamaged by his callous nature and arbitrary philosophy, ends up providing a model for the better man he becomes

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" Louisa Cradgrind: "thwarted, resentful, strong minded, emotionally starved"

co Louisa is first seen committing an act of defiance, contrary to her father's express wishes. She and her brother have managed to sneak a glimpse of the visiting circus. In certain respects, this acts sets the key tone of Louisa's character

e She sustains feelings that her upbringing has done nothing to cultivate and feels a desire to act upon them. She is also honest about her motives and actions. Despite the fact that Louisa is Gradgrind's favourite child and the "triumph of his system" (pg. 212), she is not altogether a conformist

o After noting the "dissatisfaction of her face", Dickens adds that "there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its expression" (pg. 19). From the outset, there are hints that Louisa has the capacity to challenge the rules of conduct that she has been raised to respect

I) Although Louisa is, at the start of the novel, a "child .. of fifteen or sixteen" (pg. 19), she describes herself as having "been tired a long time" (pg.zo). She says she has "never had a child's heart" (pg. 101) and that she is accustomed to the "ordinary deadened state of mind" (pg. 210).

Her joylessness is the outcome of a childhood ruled by facts to the exclusion of "sentiments and affections". Gradgrind has taken care to ensure that she should not become "self-wllled" or prone to imagination. One of his key dictums is "never wonder!" but Louisa cannot help it. She has "an ardent impulse to wards some region where rules and figures and definitions were not quite absolute" (pg. 210).

.. When Sissy enters the Gradgrind household, Louisa seizes on the girl's tales of circus life and family affection. She finds that she cannot help but exercise her imagination and when reproached by her mother, argues that even gazing into the fire feeds this tendency. This fire is an image of her life as she sees it at present: "looking at the red sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying, made me think ... how short my life would be, and how little [ could hope to do in it" (pg. 57). Louisa is thus oppressed by a sense of hopelessness and futility.

I) "All closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy" (pg. 219); that is, instincts that are forcibly suppressed are likely to break out in damaging ways. Thus it is with Louisa - her feelings smoulder "within her like an unwholesome fire".

.. ln a way, Louisa may be compared to Coketown. When she is discussing Bounderby's proposal of marriage with her father, she catches sight of Coketown - that "triumph of fact" (pg. 27) ~ and tells Gradgrind: "There seems to be nothing here, but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out" (pg. 99). Like Coketown, Louisa may seem prosaic and pedestrian.

.. Meaning to praise her, her father states "You are not impulsive, you are not romantic, you are accustomed to view everything from the strong dispassionate ground of reason and calculation" (pg. 96). Yet Louisa is not as she seems. She too, has the potential to flare out in unexpected ways.

.. tt is true Louisa is "crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust" (pg.13S) and that she can "shut herself up within herself" (pg. 134), but there is more to her than this would suggest. Harthouse is curious about Louisa because he imagines that she has reached Ita grim and stony maturity" (pg. 122). When he meets her, the reality is different.

.. Louisa in a nutshell: "She was so constrained, and yet so careless; so reserved, and yet so watchful, so cold and proud ... her features were handsome; but their natural play was so locked up, that it seemed impossible to guess at their genuine expression. Utterly indifferent, perfectly self-reliant, never at a loss ... she baffled all penetration" (pg. 127)

o She is unfathomable to Harthouse, and he is something of an enigma to her. He is a kind of man that she has "had no experience of; used to the world; light, polished easy" (pg, 211). Before she meets him, Louisa has had little exposure to society. This is evidenced by her response to Bounderby's proposal: "vvhom have [ seen? Where have I been? What are my heart's experiences?" (pg.1QO)

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There is a serious danger that Louisa, trapped in a loveless marriage, may become romantically attached to Harthouse. He offers her an alternative to the orthodoxies of her father's teaching and she finds this very attractive. Harthouse may be cynical, but this too has a certain appeal to Louisa. "Upon a nature long accustomed to self-suppression, thus torn and divided, the Harthouse philosophy came as a relief and justification. Everything being hollow and worthless, she had missed nothing and sacrificed nothing" (pg. 163)

Louisa has very few resources to call upon in resisting Harthouse. What, after all, is there "in her soul for James Harthouse to destroy, which Thomas Gradgrind had nurtured there in its state of innocence!"? (pg. 163).

louisa has been very badly prepared for life. She seems to suspect this as a child but - once she becomes a woman - she knows it. She realises that she is defective in essential emotional capacities. She challenges Gradgrind: "Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart?" (pg. 208).

Although she does not reproach her father, who after all intended no harm, she does hold him responsible for her stunted emotional growth. As far as Louisa is concerned, her "remembrances of home and childhood, were remembrances of drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out" (pg, 192). She feels that her father's training has condemned her to "the frost and blight that have hardened and spoiled" (pg. 209) her nature. In a place of a garden, she finds within herself a "great wilderness" (pg. 208)

Desperately unhappy, she judges herself harshly for being "so proud and so hardened, so confused and troubled, so resentful and unjust to everyone and to myself!" (pg, 220). Much as she wants to believe in a "wider and nobler humanity than she had heard of", Louisa struggles with doubts and resentments: "With doubts, because the aspiration had been so laid waste in her youth. With resentments, because of the wrong that had been done her" (pg, 163).

She observes that her "sister's was a better and brighter face than hers had ever been" (pg. 193) and knows that this is due to Sissy's influence. Louisa cannot help wishing that her own early life could have been different.

For his part, Gradgrind comes to understand that he has harmed his daughter. He speaks of "qualities in Louisa, which have been harshly neglected and a little perverted" (pg. 234). He has trained her from the "cradle" and must take his share of the blame for what she has become. louisa has reached adulthood unable to make sense of her own emotions, in confessing that she has formed a closer bond with Harthouse than is strictly appropriate, she states "if you ask him whether I have loved him, or do love him, I tell you plainly that it may be so I don't know!" (pg. 211). She is unacquainted with her own heart. It is indicative of her inner strength that she manages to

esist her attraction to Harthouse even though he has activated in her feelings long dormant and only partly understood.

In judging louisa, it is hard to distinguish between "the original stock" of her nature and the ugraft of circumstances upon it" (pg. 199). Who would she be if she hadn't been subjected to her father's educational practices? What kind of person might she have become had Gradgrind not suppressed her self-will and much of her identity?

She knows her life could have taken a different course, but she cannot know what that would have been. At the end of the novel, Sissy is the mother of a happy family, but louisa is not. It may be that Dickens wishes us to understand that Louisa has suffered a degree of emotional damage that cannot easily be repaired. Or it may be that he is censuring her inability to be the "truly feminine centre of the home".

Whatever the case may be, a sense of waste hangs over Louisa. She appears to possess various kinds of potential that are never to be realised.

She is the great prisoner of Hard Times. Her life in the novel is mostly spent captive to one character or another. It begins when she and her brother are imprisoned by their father's teaching methods, which extends beyond the schoolroom to their home at Stone Lodge. Louisa spends most of her time staring at the ashes of the fire, reflecting on the pointlessness of life. Her only consolation is

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~ediia Jupe: "compassionate, ruled by the heart, loyal? spontaneous"

" Sissy enters the text temporarily devoid of any personal identity. Initially referred to as "girl number twenty", she is not destined to stay a faceless number. We soon learn her name and background. From the beginning, she is identified with those things that Gradgrind's education system would seek to exclude. Her father "belongs to the horse-riding" and accordingly, she is linked to the world of fancy and imagination. Her very name is an offence to Gradgrind. He tells her that "Sissy is not a name. Call yourself Cecilia"

e She is a "stroller's child" (pg. 220) - the daughter of an itinerant performer - and cannot lay claim to any social distinction. It is also dear from her performance in the classroom that she has no natural aptitude for the kind of learning that Gradgrind aims to instil. Despite the fact that she has a deep understanding of horses, she cannot give the definition that springs so readily to the lips of Bitzer:

"Ouadruped, graminivorous, forty teeth .. age known by marks in mouth"

.. Sissy's knowledge is of a deep, intuitive kind and she cannot adept herself to the requirements of a constraining style of academic achievement. When she is taken into Gradgrind's family, it is assumed that she is very much the raw material from which, in time, a more satisfactory being may emerge. Gradgrind treats her as a blank slate upon which anything may be written and tells her that "from this time you begin your history"

<II As it happens, Sissy is not so easy to mould. Her childhood influences remain with her and render her resistant to Gradgrind's precepts. Try as he may to re-educate her, she persists in the seemingly irrational hope that her father will one day return. This vexes Gradgrind, who maintains that if Sissy's "training in the science of arriving at exact results had been more successful" she "would have been wiser on these points" (pg. 92).

" Nevertheless, it is precisely because Sissy cannot be trained to abandon her hope of reunion with her father that she sustains within herself the emotions that are her distinguishing characteristic. " Unlike Louisa and Tom, she has been exposed to the world of the imagination. Her childhood - spent in the seemingly fairy tale environment of the circus - has fostered a love of reading about "the Fairies, the Dwarf, the Hunchback and the Genies" (pg. 52).

" She herself is a kind of Cinderella whose goodness of heart eventually triumphs (irony of being a similar character from a fairytale). Sissy has been accustomed to a world that values the power of entertainment. It is this that provides the sole rationale for the existence of the circus. This is something that neither Bounderby nor Gradgrind can, or wish to, appreciate.

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Tom. Later, after he has gone, she takes her first opportunity to escape Stone Lodge: the disastrous decision to accept Bounderby as her husband

This begins her second captivity, as Louisa Bounderby, married to Coketown's worst citizen, staring at the falling leaves instead of the fire. That her decision to marry was made to protect Tom rebounds against her when her ungrateful brother starts making more demands.

Along comes Harthouse, who seduces her less with his good looks and refinement that with his empty philosophy. There is one thing that Louisa has come to believe during the course of her unfortunate life, it is that "nothing matters". There is a great difference between Louisa's nihilism, born out of her constricted circumstances and Harthouse's fashionable apathy.

Louisa has never had a choice in life and has been exposed to nothing but Gradgrind's soul-killing education. Still, Louisa sees Harthouse as a kindred spirit, and more importantly, in his pose that everything is "hollow and worthless", she finds a "relief and justification" for the very nihilism she has embraced.

In the way that damaged people often find solace in the very beliefs or substances that are destroying them, Louisa finds confirmation of her philosophy in Harthouse. And so she nearly allows herself to move from captivity to Bounderby to captivity to Harthouse, only waking up to the reality of her life when Harthouse's seduction pushes forward to a different kind of fulfilment.

It is ironic that she returns to the scene of her initial captivity in order to be freed from her new captor Bounderby and her would-be-captor Harthouse.

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As a product of Gradgrind's education system, Sissy is "altogether backward and below the mark"; however, this is more a criticism of the system than of her. Through her simplicity, Sissy exposes the false values and limited understanding of others. Thus, Sissy's apparently inadequate answers to M'Choakumchild's questions are more astute than he supposes. When asked whether the country

is in a prosperous state, she replies: "I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether J was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money and whether any of it was mine"

Similarly, when asked to reflect on the proposition that, of a million residents of a town, only 25 might starve to death in a given year, she says HI thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million". In other words, she thinks in terms of human beings rather than figures.

Although Gradgrind feels that Sissy has, to some extent, failed by emerging from her schooling as no more than "affectionate, earnest, good", it is this kind of disposition rather than the acquisition of facts that is lithe one thing needful". In addition, Sissy has great clarity of perception and purpose. Her inner certainty is as a "clear sky" (pg. 227) in the presence of the dissolute Harthouse and she is easily able to recognise that Louisa's marriage to Bounderby is a sham.

Sissy's qualities of compassionate understanding are what Louisa needs to assist her in recovery when she returns to her family home. Without naming Sissy, Gradgrind acknowledges her influence as a ~~~ within his household: "some change may have been slowly working about me in this house, by mere love and gratitude; that what the Head had left undone and could not do, the Heart may have been doing silently" (pg. 218)

Eventually, Gradgrind is forced to recognise that it is he who has been deficient, particularly in relation to the key Christian values of "Faith, Hope and Charity" (pg. 286). When, at last, he perceives that "there is a wisdom of the Head, and a wisdom of the Heart", Gradgrind implicitly concedes the limitations of his perspective and the validity of Sissy's.

The happy home that Sissy proceeds to establish is the antithesis of Gradgrind's household and a reminder that the heart ultimately counts more towards happiness than the head.

She acts as a ministering angel to more than one character. Her essential feature is fidelity and is the comfort and moral support of her father. This loyalty to her father is evidenced in her acceptance of Gradgrind's invitation to look after her because it is what he would have wanted. Dickens wants us to understand that these qualities are the foundation upon which she is able to achieve her considerable good deeds. She performs good deeds throughout the novel- eg: rehabilitating Louisa after her breakdown and guides her to a moral perspective, takes an active role in trying to clear Blackpool's name, tries to prevent Tom's arrest and dispatches the diabolical

Harthouse from Coketown ~ ___

Sissy is a failure at Gradgrind's school, and this is the best demonstration of its~ effect as the school's 'successful' people are the shattered Louisa, the amoral Tom and the-scheming Bitzer.

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""'''"Tom Gradgrind Jnr: "disconnected, resentful, self-indulging ingrate"

.. As the male counterpart to Louisa, the young Thomas Gradgrind provides another insight into the deficiencies of their upbringing. Although he is initially presented as something of a victim who attracts sympathy, Tom hardens into a less attractive character. At the outset, Tom is linked to feeling of profound dissatisfaction. He states til am sick of life" (pg. 54).

.. He maintains his education is to blame; all it has left him with is a desire 'for violent revenge. He wishes he could "collect all the Facts we hear so much about, put a thousand barrels of gunpowder under them and blow them up all together!" He has a poor self image and likens himself to an anima!: "l am a donkey, that's what I am. I am as obstinate as one, I am more stupid that one. I get as much pleasure as one and I should like to kick like one" (pg. 54)

.. While Tom may perceive these faults, he seems powerless to amend them. His later nickname - the 'whelp' - suggests that his bad characteristics have only become more entrenched, like the qualities of an ill-natured dog

e Tom is selfish. It suits him to believe that a "girl can get on anywhere". If he did not believe this, he might have to recognise that his sister's situation is at least as bad as his own, and is, in fact, worse as she is manoeuvred into marriage with the odious Bounderby.

" This marriage seems to promise advantage to Tom and so, with whatever consequence to Louise, he chooses to regard it as "uncommonly jolly". By this stage, Tom has grown into "quite a young gentleman of pleasure and not quite a prepossessing one". He is an unlovable character determined to make up for the harshness of his upbringing with a round of petty amusements

.. His sister retains tender feelings for him; perhaps this is partly due to the face that she can trace the source of his bad traits to their shared childhood unhappiness. She notes: (II knew so well how to pity him" (pg. 210). It is clear that Tom doesn't really deserve Louisa's sympathy; this is made explicit on her wedding day when she "clung to him, as she should have clung to some far better nature"

(> Indulgence does not soften Tom. As numerous descriptions indicate, he just goes further downhill.

He is a "dissipated, extravagant idler"; a "sullen young fellow"; a hypocrite who is "heedless, inconsiderate and expensive". His admiration of the worthless but stylish Harthouse confirms the poverty of Tom's values. He looks upon Harthouse as an "easy swell"· a sophisticated and nonchalant man of fashion - and states: "There was something so very agreeable in being so intimate with such a waistcoat; in being called Tom, in such an intimate way, by such a voice .. that Tom was uncommonly pleased with himself"

L) The fact that Louisa is ultimately able to resist Harthouse's apparent charm when her brother is so susceptible to it points to her superior strength of character.

" Tom's essential weakness is shown in the fact that he is both prepared to commit robbery in order to maintain his lifestyle and to impute the blame for this crime to an innocent man, Blackpool. .. When he is accused of being a m~Tom retorts that everyone-is mercenary, including his sister.

.. As Tom has come to see it, society is a competition for resources in which all persons serve their self interest. It is, however, particularly brutal of him to imply that Louisa has married for financial advantage, when, in fact, she has given particular consideration to what would benefit him. He tells her that it would be a "splendid thing" for him if she were to marry Bounderby and that brother

and sister "might be so much oftener together"

.. Louise acquiesces in this, only to be told later that she has failed Tom: "Leaving old Bounderby to himself, and packing my best friend Harthouse off and going home, just when' was in the greatest danger. Pretty love that!"

.. Louisa's excessive devotion to her brother goes unrewarded because Tom is unable to grasp and acknowledge the extent of her self-sacrifice. Despite the occasional glimpse of awareness that she is a "brave, kind girl, worthy of a better brother", he loves her "grudgingly" because her good qualities are a reproach to him. He is both "graceless and ungrateful"; incapable of responding to her offers of kindness. In a final selfish display, Tom tells Louisa "you never cared for me".

.. Although Tom eventually repents, he does so too late. Only on his deathbed does the "lonely brother" tell his sister that "all the treasures in the world would be cheaply bartered for a sight of her dear face".

e Unappealing and self centred though he may be, Tom is not altogether to blame for the way he turns out. He is the product of an unfortunate upbringing; unlike his sister, however, he seems unable to transcend it.

o Tom shows a different way of dealing with his upbringing. From the outset, there is violence in him.

Compared to Louisa's submissive gazing at the fire, Tom likens himself to a donkey who wants to kick and aspires to revenge. As he becomes an adult, the desire for revenge is diluted by aimless and self destructive "pursults'tsuch as gambling and other unnamed vices. Dickens calls him a "monster of grovelling sensualities".

e Denied a childhood, Tom ends up weak and snivelling, hating the world (childlike). On the night of the robbery, Louisa begs him to tell the truth, but he turns to the wall (again, childish).

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,j Bitzer: "opportunistic, calculating, (old, unernotlonal, cunning"

.. Bitzer is an unpleasant young man. His name is meant to typify the fragmented nature of the knowledge. He is a prompt and ready pupil of M'Choackumchild - as his sharp definition of a horse indicates - but his capacity for memorising facts is not matched by any notable emotional development.

.. Early in the novel, he is caught chasing Sissy who claims that he has made "cruel faces" at her. It seems - even at this stage - that Bitzer will commit any unpleasant action if he has a chance of getting away with it. Whereas Sissy is linked to images of the sun, Bitzer is unnaturally pale. His skin is so "unwholesomely deficient of the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white". From the outset, Bitzer is presented as lacking in ordinary human qualities.

" As he matures, Bitzer is notably free of "affections or passions", As his complexion would indicate, he is oddly bloodless and he declares that the common people should have no need of relationships because til don't want a wife and family. Why should they?". More than this, he is a "general spy and informer" who has arranged for his own mother to be sent to the workhouse.

Q Bitzer has derived from his education the view that "the whole social system is a question of selfinterest", Accordingly, he is "buslness-like and logical" about everything and always puts his own interests first. When Gradgrind - appealing to him to let Tom go free - asks: 1I •• have you a heart?". Bitzer treats the question in purely literal terms. He doesn't acknowledge the role of emotion in relationships at all. Mrs Sparsit regards him as a young man of the "steadiest principle she had ever known"

" He is "extremely clear-headed, cautious and prudent" and "safe to rise in the world". At the end of the novel it is Bitzer who steps into the place in Bounderby's firm left vacant by Tom. He is definitely the "rising' young man" careful to be "devoted to his master's great merits". At whatever cost, Bitzer is a survivor who looks after number one. Dickens perhaps intends it as a critical reflection on the values of society that Bitzer is able to succeed as he does.

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'Mrs Sparsit: "snobbish, conniving, perceptive, genteel"

e Mrs Sparsit and Bounderby form what they termed a "double act". While it pleases him to deplore the circumstances of his upbringing, he inflates those of hers. He asks her to confess that she was "born in the lap of luxury" and lived in "Devilish high society" because this enhances his own importance. That a lady who formerly attended the "Italian opera in white satin and jewels" should be 'his housekeeper flatters his ego immediately

e She is obliged to work but is too refined to acknowledge that she receives a salary, preferring to think of her wages as an "annual compliment". Although she has come down in the world, she still condemns the "irnprovldent" poor and peaks harshly of the "impiety of the people"

<1> Her relationship with Bounderby involves a considerable degree of calculation. She is careful to demonstrate a great interest in hearing of his "instructive experiences". She goes so far as to tell him that "trouble in your service is to me a pleasure, and hunger, thirst and cold a real gratification". Privately however, she may have other ends in view. She resents Louisa and treats Bounderby with "determined pity" from the time that the engagement is announced. It seems to be her intention to make him uneasy and lead him to question the wisdom of the marriage.

<1> Whether or not she has entertained hopes of snaring Bounderby for herself, she feels that Louisa has usurped her place and she waits for Harthouse to accomplish the girl's moral ruin. Although she seems self-effacing, she is not. She may behave like an angel, but she is more like a "bird of the hook-beaked order". Her face - with its stern eyebrows and "bold rock" of a nose - hints at her determined character.

.. When Bounderby moves to dismiss her, she tell him: "If that portrait could speak .. it would testify, that a long period has elapsed since I first habitually addressed it as a Noodle. Nothing that a Noodle does can awaken surprise or indignation; the proceedings of a Noodle can only inspire contempt"

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_;... James Harthouse: "indifferent, suave aristocrat"

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Is summed up by Mrs Sparsit as "Five and thirty, good looking" with "good figure, good teeth, good voice, good breeding". He is also a "thorough gentleman" but this is meant in a very specific sense. Harthouse is not a man of finer feeling whose good manners stem from a genuine concern for the well-being of others. Instead he is a polished and suave individual who has cultivated an elegant demeanour for effect. He is all facade and - despite the first part of his name - lacks a heart. He has no settled occupation and he becomes involved with Gradgrind and the "hard Fact fellows" on a recommendation from his brother. He declares himself "quite as much attached" to their cause as if he believed in it. It is not in his nature to become deeply attached to people or principles. His dominating characteristic is a tendency to CQL[~e. b9~. Before arriving in Coketown, he had: tt ... tried life as a Cornet of Dragons, and found it a bore; and had afterwards tried it in the train of an English minister abroad, and found it a bore; and had then strolled to Jerusalem, and got bored there; and had then gone yachting about the world, and got bored everywhere" (Cornet of Dragons = minor officer in the army)

He actually regards his capacity for boredom as an attractive quality. It is his conviction - "the only conviction that he had" - that "lndifference was the genuine high-breeding". He sees it as aristocratic to be aloof and disdainful. This quality impresses the susceptible - including Mrs Sparsit and Tom - but is challenged by the more observant.

Louisa asks: "Have you an interest in anything, Mr Harthouse?". Although he has a romantic interest in Louisa, he is wholly apathetic for the majority of the novel.

His apparent concern for Tom is merely a means to get to know his sister. In essence, Harthouse is a shallow man of fashion, tithe model of the time; weary of everything and putting no more faith in anything than Lucifer (the devil)'

He is a "drifting iceberg" with the potential to do great harm. Louisa succumbs to his charm party because she has been so sheltered. As she tells her father, chance led her to make contact with "a new acquaintance; a man such as I had had no experience of; used to the world; light, polished, easy; making no pretences. There seemed to be a near affinity between us"

He is not "troubled with earnestness" but he does appear to be candid. He asserts, for instance, that the only difference between himself, Louisa and tithe professors of virtue or benevolence is that we know its all meaningless and say so". However this is not real honesty, but "assumed honesty in dishonesty"

Thus Harthouse will make seemingly frank - even self-damaging - statements but with a dishonest purpose. He freely admits to his selfishness, saying that "every man is selfish in everything he does, and I am exactly like the rest of my fellow creatures"; he adds that he is "not a moral sort of fellow:. These comments aren't offered by way of self condemnation, but with the intent of justifying his proposed courses of action

He doesn't base his behaviour on moral considerations and is puzzled by those who do. He cannot grasp the "better and profounder" parts of Louisa's character, nor can he employ his "usual weapons" against Sissy. In the presence of both these women he finds himself "disgracefully thrown out, for a gentleman who had seen so much of the world"

When SiSSY orders Harthouse to leave Coketown and stop troubling Louisa, he is rather='ashamed of himself" for performing a good action. She manages to "touch the cavity where his heart should have been"; a place no more than a nest of "addled eggs".

Louisa, however tempted to do otherwise, has been right to run from him. He has no genuine emotions to offer her - not even those that might stem from "energetic wickedness"

Sissy sees how powerless Harthouse is, despite his credentials. Dickens therefore wants the reader to see that the greatest authority is moral authority. The aristocrat's internal 'devil' has no answer to the character most imbued with the "virtue, benevolence and philanthropy" he ridicules

Dickens repeatedly refers to him as a demon or even as the devil himself, suggesting that people who don't believe in anything are more dangerous than those who start out with evil intentions. Pursues the ideal of "never wonder" from pure laziness. Even opium cant induce any wonder in him

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~achael: "patient, loyal and Iong-suffering"

.. One of the Coketown 'Hands' - is loyal, patient and devoted. She is "gentle, good and self denying" and has long waited for Stephen Blackpool, who is not free to marry her because he cannot afford to divorce his drunkard of a wife. Stephen thinks of: "the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quiet path - for him - and how he had sometimes seen a shade of melancholy on her blessed face"

" Rachael is Blackpool's ideal. In every way, she is the opposite of the "disabled, drunken creature" to whom he is married. With her "quiet oval face, dark and rather delicate, irradiated by a pair of very gentle eyes, and further set off by the perfect order of her shining black hair", Rachael is notable for her poise and refinement. Her "neat figure and her sober womanly step" are further in accordance with her steadiness of character.

e To Stephen, she transcends the "common experiences of his life" as the "shining stars" outshine a candle. In turn, Rachael has undoubted trust in Stephen

e Her pleasant and orderly appearance is an index to her nature. She is calm and steadfast. She has learned compassion through suffering. Her younger sister was killed in an industrial accident and her working life has been hard and she has taken upon herself the task of assisting Stephen to care for the very person whose existence is a bar to her own emotional hopes.

co Even after Stephen's death it is envisaged that she will go on "sweet-tempered and serene", taking pity on Stephen's wife and "working, ever working .. until she should be too old to labour any more" Rachael has never known an easy life. For all this, she is consistently uncomplaining. To some this may make of her a "highly sanitized, unthreatening member of the masses" and her persistence in the face of continual adversity is admirable.

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__ Sleary: "kind, practical, discerning circus owner"

" Mr Sleary is the proprietor of the circus in which Sissy's father is employed. In many respects .he and his world are the antithesis of everything that Gradgrind stands for. When he first sees that the circus has come to town, Gradgrind dismisses its "trivialities" and passes on "as a practical man ought to pass on, brushing the noisy insects from his thoughts". Gradgrind's life however is destined to be bound up with Sleary's more closely than he can imagine

.. In his appearance and manner of speech, Sleary is the opposite of the almost respectable Gradgrind. He is: Ita stout man, with one fixed eye and one loose eye, a voice like the efforts of a broken old pair of bellows, a flabby surface, and a muddled head which was never sober and never drunk". Nevertheless, he is a kindly man and an astute judge of character. He sums up Bounderby quickly and warns him to take a gentler line with Sissy lest Sleary's "good natur'd people" push him out of a window

e He doesn't pretend to be "of the angel breed" but he is honest and decent. Although he asserts that he is not much of a talker, Sleary makes some key statements. These mainly concern the role of the imagination in daily life. As he explains to Gradgrind: "People mutht me amuthed. They cant be alwayth a learning, nor yet they cant be alwayth a working, they an't made for it"

" Gradgrind, who has spurned the circus and all that it represents, learns the truth of this when he calls on Sleary to aid Tom's escape. The circus folk are said to have an "untlrlng readiness to help and pity one another" and Sleary complies with Gradgrind's wish. He does however, take the chance to tell him that "You mutht have uth" and that therefore, it is sensible to "make the betht of uth, not the wurtht".

e Whatever he may think, Gradgrind cant eliminate the need for leisure. He needs to learn more about the bonds that link people, even those as different as Sleary and he. His forced reliance on Sleary is humbling. Sleary's actions and Sissy's love for her father show Gradgrind that people can act from sheer good will; that "there ith a love in the world, not all Theft interetht after all.

" Sleary causes Gradgrind to revise his philosophy on many points, if not all.

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Stephen Blackpool: "honest, upright, unfortunate Hand"

.. It is no coincidence that he bears the name of a Christian Martyr. Despite his virtues, his life is marred by much unhappiness and is, ultimately lost through no fault of his own

e He is only 40 but is known as "Old Stephen" in recognition of the fact that he has "had a hard life".

One of his chief sorrows is his wife - a woman who has changed beyond recognition since he married her some eighteen years earlier. Her drinking has left her a "creature so foul to look at that it was a shameful thing even to see her';

e Although Stephen has made provision for her, and has "paid to keep her awam, she continues to haunt him. The existence of his wife makes it impossible for him to marry Rachael, whom he truly loves. When he approaches Bounderby for help, he is told that divorce is only for the rich. This is all the more i!,Qn..isbecause Bounderby, too, has paid someone - his mother - to stay away and will eventually find himself embarrassed by a marriage that he no longer wishes to prolong. It is sadly typical that Stephen should find no solution to his problems

" He is "a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity". He is chivalrous to Rachael and considerate of others; for example he fears he may have upset Mrs Pegler by asking whether her son is dead. Although Stephen is "faithful to his class", he opposes the formation of a union and is consequently shunned by his former workmates. He is vilified for this decision by the troublemaker Slackbridge and ostracised (excluded) at the factory. He finds this "abandonment by all his fellows" hard to bear, but he is led to his actions by a promise he has made to Rachael

" Yet Stephen defends the unionists to Bounderby, telling him why there is such discontent in the slave camp he calls a factory. Before he can leave Coketown forever, one more Insult awaits Blackpool; young Tom Gradgrind contrives to set him up as the fall guy for the robbery he is planning at the bank.

Q Despite their bond, neither Rachael nor Stephen sees that there may be strength in numbers. Both rely on their personal integrity in meeting the challenges. Hence, Hard Times holds up little hope for public solutions to public ills

" Stephen's personal creed is to "bear and forbear"; that is, to endure what comes to him and not seek to harm others. This is not how others treat Stephen - when he dares to criticise a state of labour relations that sets a "black unpassable world" between boss and worker, Bounderby labels him a "waspish, raspish, ill-conditioned chap" and fires him on the spot. It is particularly unjust that the uncomplaining Stephen should be considered "one of those chaps who have always got a grievance" and that a person of honesty is implicated in Tom's bank robbery.

.. Stephen never does arrive at a satisfactory understanding of why things are as they are. Dickens however makes use of him to point to the injustice of the world. When Stephen is brought up from the mine shaft accident that proves fatal, he states - "without any anger. .. merely as the truth" - that he is one of many: "See how we die an no need, one wayan another - in a muddle - every day!"

., Stephen is depicted as a man of perfect integrity and forbearance; one cant help feeling he would've been a more influential character has he been given a little less of each

I) He is made to bear the load of so many of the injustices that Dickens wants to address such as inequitable divorce laws, hideous working conditions, unscrupulous union activities and the absolute power wielded by factory owner, that he is less a character than a vehicle for discussion or portrayal of Dickens' ideals.

e "He had known, to use his words, a peck of trouble" - introduction of Blackpool

.. "Now a God's name show me the law to help me!" - contemplating divorce from his wife

" "He had been for many years a quiet silent man, associating but little with other men" - innocence e lilt was even harder than he could have believed possible to separate in his own conscience his

abandonment by all his fellows, from a baseless sense of shame and disgrace"

.. itA muddle! Aw a muddle!" - Blackpool's swansong; writes all his problems off as just a muddle

Anthony Harh Yr 1'2

Purton 1

Houses:

Machines:

Fancy:

Images:

Student Sheet:

nll1lla~~{:: §ymb@nTI3E~ TIrn 'JHI~lrd 'flimes9

Gradgrind

-"A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the principle windows, as it's master's heavy brows overshadows his

eyes" ,

-"Square coat, square legs, square shoulders"

- Rigid as own conceptions

Bounderby

-Capital letters on front plaque are "very like himself'

- Bold and assertive

Coketown:

-Furnaces, gaslights, steam engines, looms, chimneys, warehouses, narrow streets, railways and above all its suffocating smoke convey its dangerous; violent, ugly, monotonous and stifling way of life.

- Turn people into either of two things:

-Servants for machines, so that men are simply referred to

as "hands"

-Machines, so that they respond and do as they are told. "Gave himself up to be taken home like a machine"

Literature:

-"Flying into town on a broomstick" (like a witch)

- "The red brick castle of the giant Bounderby" (like a fairy tale)

-Babes in the wood is part of Sleary's company's repertoire (lost,

alone, outcast etc.)

- Tom ends up in a minor role of Jack the Giant Killer (always running from him mistakes, some of monstrous proportions, such as the gambling debt and bank theft)

"Fairy Palaces":

- Used for factories because they look pretty from passing trains when lit by gas lamps at night

-False mask given to the factories where the surrounding people have become so accustomed and unaware of the dangers

Contrast [Coketown/Circus J:

- Machines are contrasted with horses

- Weary labourers with daredevil riders and acrobats

-Division and conflict contrasts with community

-Gradgrind sees the circus as a symbol of dangerous corrupting

fancy. His dependence on Sleary at the end is a symbolic submission.

Elephant heads:

- The elephants "in a state of melancholy madness" becomes a symbol of all that Stephen means by "muddle"

Anthony Harb Yr '2

Purton 1

Colours:

The Old Hell Shaft:

-Seen as another symbol of the mess that rapid unrestrained industrial development has brought about.

The Smoke Serpents:

-Symbol of the moral blindness of factory owners,

-Bounderby is so determined to make money that he sees the

smoke as a positive sign

-Acts as a screen limiting his vision of the unhealthy pollution that it causes as well as "the abuse and miserable poverty of the, so-called, "Hands" in his factories.

Light VS. Dark:

-Sissy's lustrous dark hair and eyes = her warmth and liveliness

-Bitzer's unnatural lightness = his bloodless servitude to fact

Red:

-anger in Bounderby

-Blushing in Sissy

-fire

Fact and Fancy: from one to the other

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The nove! opens with a statement that Dickens intends to explore: "Now, what [ want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts, nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts"

These are Gradgrind's words at the peak of his confidence and self-assurance. He is convinced that facts are "the one thing needful". Dickens however undercuts this notion from the start. The phrase "one thing needful" is derived from the Bible and has nothing to do with facts. Instead, it refers to a willingness to attend to the things of the spirit over and above the things of this world. This is far from what Gradgrind is recommending. As the story unfolds, he will be forced to recognise that human beings do not live by fact alone

He believes that reason is tithe only faculty to which education should be addressed". He encourages his children to have totally disregard imaginative literature (poetry in particular) and does his best to ensure that they "never wonder". The effect of absorbing "facts all day long so very hard" is to make life seem nothing more than a "closely ruled ciphering book" or maths textbook.

It is certain that "No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly little jingle, Twinkle, twinkle little star. No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject". None of these things form part of Gradgrind's system. Instead, he wants "the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it".

Hence, not even flowered carpets are allowed "You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets"

As the novel unfolds, it becomes evident that Gradgrind has a narrow conception of reason. As he sees it, reason is a "grim idol, cruel and cold". Dickens believed that, ideally, the young mind should come upon" Reason through the tender light of Fancy" but Gradgrind's children are barred from this experience.

When Louisa, fleeing Harthouse, returns to the family home, she doesn't feel the "best influences of old home descend upon her". There is no comforting nostalgia because she has never known the "dreams of childhood - its airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond". Her emotions and imagination have been equally starved

In this, she is entirely unlike Sissy who has had early acquaintance with the "Fairies and the Dwarf and the Hunchback and the Genies" of children's literature. Dickens clearly implies that those such as Sissy, whose imaginations are fuelled from childhood by the power of fancy become more resilient and emotionally healthy adults than those deprived of such stimulation.

Sissy, whose on children will eventually know all forms of "Innocent and pretty fancy", possesses the "wisdom of the Heart". Her influence on Gradgrind and Jane, Louisa's younger sister, proves that facts and reason are not enough. There is - as the heading of book the third "Garnering" indicates - "another thing needful". This is kindness

It is important to note that the two most admirable characters of the novel, Sissy and Blackpool, have either not received the kind of education Gradgrind would consider ideal or have not profited from it. Stephen is not a "particularly intelligent man" - his response to most difficulties is to declare them Ita muddle". Likewise Sissy - in a schooling respect - is "altogether backward"

These two characters display firm principles and exhibit a high capacity for compassion. Contrasting these two characters are the 'model' products of the Gradgrind system are either odious or emotionally damaged. His son Tom becomes a thief and Louisa - the "triumph of his system" -lies at

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his feet declaring "your philosophy and your teaching will not save me" upon escape from Bounderby

Perhaps even more importantly, Bitzer, who easily outperforms Sissy in the classroom, turns Gradgrind's system against him. When Gradgrind tries to plead with Bitzer for Tom's sake, Bitzer refuses to help him. This is because his mind is "so exactly regulated, that he had no affections or passions. All his proceedings were the result of the nicest and coldest calculation".

Thus when Gradgrind attempts to appeal to Bitzer's compassion, it makes no sense to him. He is merely "businesslike and logical". Gradgrind, who has always insisted on the importance of reason, is reduced to asking "Bitzer, have you a heart?". He replies: "circulation couldn't be carried on without one"

Bitzer may have been educated under Gradgrind's system, but he sees that as no basis for any sort of gratitude. As far as he is concerned, "My schooling was paid for; it was a bargain; and when I came away the bargain ended". There is no way of appealing to Bitzer's finer feelings - the logical outcome of a system that never sought to develop them

Although this confrontation demonstrates the inadequacies associated with such an approach to life in which the importance of emotion is denied, this is also apparent elsewhere. When Gradgrind is forced to consider the desirability of Louisa's marriage, he tries to analyse the situation from his preferred point of view; that is, "one of tangible Fact". There is nothing, he assures Louisa, at all "fanciful, fantastic or sentimental" about Bounderby's offer; it is more in the manner of a business proposal

All she needs to do - confining herself "rigidly to fact" - is ask "Does Mr Bounderby ask me to marry him? Yes he does. The sole remaining question then is: Shall I marry him? I think nothing can be plainer than that". This highlights the deficiencies of handling such a matter as if it were a maths or science problem

Lacking both emotional guidance from her father and any strong sense of her own desires, Louisa agrees to the marriage. It is "all Fact, from first to last" and has "a manufacturing aspect". We are told that "Dresses were made, jewellery was made, cakes and gloves were made and an extensive assortment of Facts did appropriate Honourto the contract". This however is one area of life where "Fancy" cannot safely be ignored.

When Sissy hears of the impending marriage, she looks at Louisa "in wonder, in pity, in sorrow, in doubt". She knows that the marriage lacks any true emotional foundation and cannot be expected to bring much happiness. That Gradgrind fails to recognise this highlights how his devotion to facts has made him.

The truth is that no matter how much Gradgrind may labour to make "people .. People of fact", the claims of emotion and imagination will asset themselves. This can be seen not only in Louisa but also in the inhabitants of Coketown. The town is a "triumph offact" and is about as "severely workful" as any place could very well be

Yet to Gradgrind's dismay, its workers - when their shifts end - turn not to factual reading but to: "mere fables about men and women, more or less like themselves and about children, more or less like their own. They took Defoe to their bosoms, instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith that by Cocker"

Dickens' tone endorses this preference: "I entertain a weak idea that the English people are as hard worked as any people upon whom the sun shines. I would give them a little more play". Certainly we know from Dickens' own life that he put a very high value on reading to nurture the imagination. If we allow imagination to prosper, we will "sit with lighter bosoms out on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold". Without imagination and the development of the emotional life that accompanies it, our lives will be only the poorer. The world of fact, Dickens assures us, is a cold and empty place without some element of fancy.

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The head and the heart:

e While chatting with Louisa late in the novel, Gradgrind states: "Some persons hold that there is a wisdom of the Head, and that there is a wisdom of the Heart. I have not supposed so. I have supposed the head to be all-sufficient". By saying this, Gradgrind acknowledges that he has been wrong - acquiring wisdom requires a greater acceptance of the role of emotion in life.

e Initially, Gradgrind mistakenly believes that "reason is the only faculty to which education should be addressed". His children and pupils, however, feel otherwise. Louisa states: "if you had only neglected me, what a much better and happier creature I should have been this day!"

.. She tells her father that he had not trained her to "strive against every natural prompting", she "should've learned to be more humble and more trusting". This school of nature, Louisa contends, would have helped her to become "a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contented, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I have".

e The qualities Louisa lists are very like those Sissy possesses. As a newcomer to Stone Lodge, Sissy stands in awe of Louisa's academic awards and declares: "it would be a fine thing to be you, Miss Louisa. I should know so much. All that is difficult to me now, would be so easy then". Yet even in this early interaction, Louisa is aware that what we might call Sissy's emotional intelligence is greater than her own. She responds: "You are more useful to my mother, and more pleasant with her than I can ever be. You are pleasanter to yourself than I am to myself". Louisa knows, if Sissy does not, that book learning is not the most important of human skills

.. There is, therefore, a fatal flaw in an educational method based solely on the development of the memory and intellect. Dickens goes to some trouble to list the many accomplishments of M'Choakumchild, chief schoolmaster at Gradgrind's academy. Described as having been put "through an immense variety of paces", he knows: "all about the Water Sheds of all the world and all the histories of the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass". These facts don't make him a better man or teacher

e If anything, a narrow focus on facts tends to stunt the other faculties. Bitzer is capable of retaining vast amounts of information, but proves to be a most unsatisfactory human being. Similarly, Bounderby - who prides himself on lacking any "imaginative sentimental humbug" - is sadly deficient in compassion. In telling Sissy of her father's departure, he is blunt to the point of cruelty: "let the girl understand the fact ... Your father has absconded - deserted you - and you mustn't expect to see him again as long as you live" This speech earns him the censure of Sleary's circus folk who care "so little for plain Fact" that they seem inclined to push him out of a window

The circus performers, though none too devoted to "facts", are "good-natur'd people". What they lack in education, they make up in natural kindness. The same is true of characters like Sissy and Stephen. The characters who have the most reason to think well of their intellectual capabilities are often lacking in empathy and awareness. Even Gradgrind - who is said to be "not unkind" - causes his wife and children problems.

.. Mrs Gradgrind - who is of "surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily" - is intimidated by her husband's glance, which to her is a "wintry piece offact". As for Tom and Louisa, they both live as if "overhung by a dark cavern". The creation of an oppressive atmosphere within his family is the natural side-effect of his philosophies.

e In Gradgrind's view, lithe Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist". It makes no sense to him that one man should help another at his own expense, least of all when there is no close connection between the two parties. As the story progresses, however, Gradgrind is forced to rely upon people such as Sissy and Sleary, who once ranked very low in his esteem. He come to see that "what the Head had left undone and could not do, the Heart may have been doing silently".

e It's a difficult realisation for him and doesn't overturn the habits of a lifetime. It suggests that Gradgrind's values have been modified by Sissy's presence and example. (student teaches teacher)

o Eventually, Gradgrind - who has resisted the implications of the parable of the Good Samaritan - achieves a closer acquaintance with the Christian virtues of "Faith, Hope and Charity"

.--Thomas Gradgrind Snr: "factual, arid, eminently practical, misguided"

e As is often the case with Dickens' characters, ~l]J,e hints at his personality. He believes in "the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge" (pg. 59); indeed he tries to grind all matter of things in "his dusty little mills" (pg, 286)

" He is a believer in the power of statistics and holds that "Facts alone are wanted in life". Even Gradgrind's appearance underscores his no-nonsense approach to life. His head is "covered with knobs" as if it had "scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside".

.. His "obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders - nay his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp" (pg.9) mark him out as a man who has no time for frivolity.

.. Gradgrind has retired from the "wholesale hardware trade", but he seems to have transferred his business principles both to education and his domestic life. His "matter of fact" home - the dour Stone Lodge - resembles its owner.

.. It is a "great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the principal windows, as its master's heavy brows overshadowed his eyes" (pg. 16). There is nothing fanciful about its architecture, just as there is nothing fanciful about its owner's mind. At stone lodge, Gradgrind presides over the upbringing of 5 children. In keeping with their father's precepts and mode of life, the two eldest of these have reached a "grim and stony maturity" (pg. 22)

.. Gradgrind is "not-unkind" but he is misguided. We are told that his nature "might have been a very kind one indeed" (pg. 32) if he had not been led astray by the rigidity of his views. As it is, he is "eminently practical" and has raised his children to be the same.

e Although he is (Ian affectionate father", it is not part of his system to feed his children's emotions or imaginations. He has done everything possible to ensure that they acquire knowledge of a factual kind, but has left them ':!')acgb!_g!nt.~.d with their own hearts.

" The consequence is that both Tom and Louisa are troubled by long-suppressed needs. Tom becomes prey to "grovelling sensualities" (pg.132) and Louisa very nearly succumbs to James Harthouse because her feelings have been allowed no other outlet.

" What Dickens says ofthe Coketown workers is equally true of Tom and Louisa: u"when romance is utterly driven out of their souls ... Reality will take a wolfish turn" (pg. 160). Gradgrind hopes to raise sensible, capable children. Instead, he renders them ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of life.

" Gradgrind thinks its possible by "means of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division" to "settle everything somehow, and never wonder" (pg. 52). To him, life is lea mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic" (pg. 10).

Harthouse views Gradgrind as no more than a "machine". Gradgrind tends to dehumanise others and is himself dehumanised. The children in the schoolroom are known to him as numbers. Sissy for instance is "Girl number twenty".

e Gradgrind in a nutshell: "seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away" (pg. 10)

" The image!): of weaponry suggests that Gradgrind has the potential to be deeply wounding and destr~~~~radgrind is at his worst in his closest personal relationships. He married his wife partially because she "was most satisfactory as a question of figures" (pg. 24) and he is "business-like" (pg. 199) in burying her.

e His own experience does not put him in a position to offer any valuable advice to Louisa when Bounderby seeks her hand in marriage. Gradgrind, seeing the proposal simply as a "question of Fact" (pg. 98), supports Bounderby and doesn't notice Louisa's discomfort. To do so would entail overcoming "the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting between himself and all those subtle essences in humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra".

" His "unbending, utilitarian, matter of fact face" (pg. 99) makes it impossible for Louisa to confide in him, and the scene is thus set for her to commit herself to the marriage that blights her life.

Men and machines:

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Throughout Hard Times, Dickens establishes parallels between places and the people who inhabit them. As an industrial centre, Coketown is vital to the scheme of the novel. However, Coketown - when lit up at night - looks like a "Fairy Palace". It is actually "severely workful" and a "triumph of fact". Nature is shut our and the town labours under a "sun eternally in eclipse", In its place there is an imitation of the natural world, The "forest of looms" works without ceasing and the: "measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round .. the whirr of shafts and wheels". Where nature is entirely shut out, human nature cannot thrive

Deafened by the melancholy mad elephant of the steam engine and inhaling the fumes of the "interminable serpents of smoke", the workers of Coketown toil "long and monotonously", There is no acknowledgement of any "Fancy in them demanding to be brought into healthy existence". Although they may nurture this through their private reading, they are not encouraged in such pursuits. Bounderby, who identifies himself as a "Coketown man" born and bred, sees only trouble in the desire for something beyond the working life. He states: "I know 'em all pretty well. When a man tells me anything about imaginative qualities, I always tell that man, whoever he is, that I know what he means. He means turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon, and that he wants to be set up with a coach and six"

Bounderby sees the imagination as a dangerous faculty, likely to lead to social unrest, Workers who use their imaginations may challenge the status quo and make unfavourable comparisons between the material comfort of their lives and that of their bosses. This is a prospect that Bounderby - however much he may exaggerate the consequences - cannot tolerate.

Instead, the Coketown workers are to be accustomed to a routine of the utmost monotony. Coketown, we are told, encompasses: " .. several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day were the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next."

The local buildings are virtually indistinguishable from each other: "the jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction". The effect of such surroundings is to reduce everything to uniformity and to render the individual worker inseparable from the mass. Personal characteristics are lost or submerged. The Coketown workers - no matter how old they may be - are collectively seen as a "considerable population of babies" who must wait on guidance and direction from their "betters",

Taken as a group, they are known as "the Hands" - a race who would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands. To employers such as Bounderby the workers are of interest only so far as they serve his ends. If it is their hands that operate his factory machinery, then "Hands" they are.

They have been transformed into mere machines, or extensions of machines. This is a dehumanising perspective and is explicitly challenged by Dickens, Men cannon be judged like machines: "so many hundred Hands in this mill; so many hundred horse steam power. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but not all the calculators of the National Debt can

tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred ... at any simple moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions, there is an unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, for ever"

Dickens says we should "reserve our arithmetic for material objects" and not measure human beings as if they were things. The tendency of those who treat men like machines is to become mechanical themselves. Bitzer snores like a Dutch Clock and Slackbridge is also compared to a timepiece, As for Gradgrind, who Is always "ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human rlMurei'j h(:! not. oriiy owns a "deadly statistical clock", he is one. Harthouse condemns Gradgrind as

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a "machine".

" These men all ignore that there are circumstances they cant control. While they imagine that they can run their own and others' lives on a model of smooth efficiency, they are blind to the fact that they are the raw material of time; that time also has a factory but his "factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless and his Hands are mutes". Eventually, an approach to life based on "rules and figures and definitions" is shown to be insufficient.

Parents and chlldren:

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In a novel so concerned with questions of upbringing and education, the relationships that exist between parents and children are of key importance. Hard Times offers few examples of truly satisfactory two-way relationships; in most cases, parents fail children or children fail parents.

At the centre of the novel are the family connections of Gradgrind, who is described as "an affectionate father, after his manner". He is capable of truly appalling miscalculations however. With the best of intentions, Gradgrind has reduced his children's lives to sterile misery: "Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run to the lecture room. The first object with which they had an association, or a remembrance, was a large black board with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it"

Gradgrind aims to suppress his children's imaginations, but he himself becomes a fairy tale figure of horror - an ogre - to them. This creates barriers between father and child. Louisa and Tom are his "model children" but neither of them achieve happiness or readily confide in him. Where Mrs Gradgrind is sadly ineffectual - a II light that had always been feeble and dim" - Gradgrind is unapproachable.

When he and Louisa discuss Bounderby's proposal, Louisa is tempted to give expression to the "pent-up confidences of her heart" but Gradgrind doesn't perceive her inner turmoil and pain. To do so would require overcoming the "artifkial barriers he had for many years been erecting between himself and humanity"

Louisa does not blame him for her downfall or failure, however she does acknowledge that he has done her irreparable damage. In forcing her to "strive against every natural prompting", he has altered her nature. She never entirely loses her affection for her father, nor her for her. Tom, conversely, is resentful in his dealings with Gradgrind. He is never reconciled to him. As for Gradgrind himself, he is forced to recognise the limitations of his "system" and to "bear the responsibility of its failures". It is part of the tragedy of his situation that Gradgrind has only ever "meant to do right"

A very different parental figure to Gradgrind is Sissy Jupe's father. Where Gradgrind is too controlling, Mr Jupe is too relaxed or at ease. His intentions also seem to be honourable; he doesn't apprentice Sissy to the circus, but prefers that she obtain an education. He is a fond father - {the seemed to dote" upon Sissy - but he is emotionally weak. He is over-reliant on his daughter and depends on her reading to keep him "from what did him real harm.

Although Sissy is too discrete to say so, the source of this harm would seem to be alcohol. She always speaks of her father in the highest regard and insists that he was "Kinder and kinder than I can tell". In light of this, it is hard to know what to make of the fact that he abandons her. It may be that he has, as Sleary suggests, simply deserted her for his own convenience, but the most likely possibility is that he leaves her "rather than pull her down along with him" (i.e: he thinks he will be a burden in the years ahead)

Long before her father leaves, Sissy and he have swapped places; she has taken on the nurturing role and he has become dependent on her for emotional support. Perhaps it is this early experience that leads Sissy to "mother" nearly all the members of the Gradgrind family.

Where Sissy and Louisa retain affection even for unsatisfactory parents, other characters display a complete absence of natural affection. Bitzer, for instance, sees to it that, upon his father's death, his mother ends up in the workhouse - an institution of the utmost severity designed as last resort accommodation for the poor. Bitzer's transgressions in this regard are touched on lightly, but in

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Bounderby's case they form a keynote of his character (CHAPTER TITLE). It is vital to Bounderby that he should seem a self made man who owes nothing to anyone.

Q He therefore denies that he received any assistance from his family; in fact, he vilifies them at every opportunity. He boasts that he comes of lithe scum of the earth" and describes his mother as tithe very worst woman that had ever lived" - with the sole exception of his grandmother who was a "she-wolf" and a drunk. In Bounderby's eyes, his mother deserted him and his grandmother would "lie in her bed and drink her fourteen glasses of liquor before breakfast"

.. The truth is more confronting. In fact, Bounderby's parents sacrificed much in order to give their son all possible advantages; indeed his mother persists in her "affectionate championship" and considers it very generous of Bounderby to pay her a pittance each year in order to ensure her distance

Q There are some happy families in the story but these are marginal to the action. The circus families that form part of Sleary's clan and the family established by Sissy in the near future fall into this category. Sissy's children are to be happy because they will never suffer the privations Tom and Louisa endure. Their lives will be graced by "those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up". This prospect of good fortune, however, lies in the future. The emphasis within the novel's time frame is on the breach of full sympathy.

Kich and Poor:

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When Louisa first meets Blackpool, she realises that she knows nothing of the actual lives of the Coketown workers. She has always viewed them as a collective entity: tI •• she had scarcely thought more of separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into its component drops". Until this time, Louisa hasn't regarded the workers as people but as "Something to be worked so much and paid so much". They may figure as an element in calculating labour costs, but they don't emerge as human beings. Louisa has known of the workers only en masse and from a distance:

"She knew of their existence by hundreds and by thousands. She knew what results in work a given number of them would produce, in a given space of time. She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or beetles"

Louisa's views are the product of her upbringing and social class. Her circumstances have never exposed her to poverty and material want. In this she is unlike Rachael who "tolled as such people must toil, whatever their anxieties" Louisa's contact with Stephen and Rachael furthers the growing compassion that Sissy's presence has initiated.

We are frequently reminded of the unjust inequality of rich and poor. In hard times it is only the most obnoxious characters who suggest that the poor are responsible for their own misfortunes. Thus Bitzer is convinced that they could prosper if "they were more provident, and less perverse". He cannot see why they require recreation beyond because he himself does not, nor does he grasp why they should care for their families: H I don't want a wife and family. Why should they?".

In Hard Times the lives of rich and poor are very different. In the hopes of earning honest money, Stephen innocently cooperates in a criminal scheme engineered by Tom. He must then answer to the law. Conversely, when Gradgrind learns of Tom's misdoing, his first thought is that he "may be got abroad" and this is, in fact, what happens. No such possibility exists for Stephen. lt is the same with respect to divorce. Although it was not unknown, it was expensive and remained the prerogative of the wealthier classes. Bounderby reminds Stephen, although there is a law permitting divorce "it costs a mint of money" and since he lacks the funds, he must remain married to his wife "for better or worse". Hence different standards apply to the behaviour of rich and poor Dickens explores the possibility of rising above socio-economic circumstance. Characters such as Sissy and Bitzer demonstrate that social mobility is possible to a certain degree. Yet for the majority of the working poor (Rachael & Blackpool), it remains that to be born into poverty is a life sentence. Dickens hence doesn't see any closing of the gap between the two groups of Victorian England.

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2009 Exam, Hard Times Sections

Some notes from the examiners

Students' understanding, deconstruction and organization of responses in relation to the set topics are the areas that require the most work. Students should be taught to look critically at the wording of the topic and to consider what assumptions are being made within it. It is still a problem that too many students want to respond to their own question rather than grapple with the ideas of the set topic. Students should have the confidence to challenge the position of the topic instead of simply accepting or disregarding it. It was evident that students would benefit from more practice analyzing and distinguishing different topics and approaches to topics. Students must also ensure that they explore all of the elements presented in the topic. Too often students took a key point from the topic and produced an essay which did not include discussion of a significant idea that had a major bearing on the topic itself.

Hard Times

'In Hard Times Dickens suggests that it is through compassionate individuals rather than institutfons that people can be helped I

Discuss.

Through Hard Times, Dickens explores the dehumanizing utilitarian regime in Britain, as a result of the rapid industrialization during mid-19th century. In writing this novel, Dickens attempts to communicate to his audience his political message of the need for social reform. He employs both characters and institutions to embody the ideologies he rejects, whilst he also makes use of other characters and institutions as constructs, through which he is able to convey the values and mores which he endorses, and seeks to establish within society.

Dickens uses the schoolroom and the philosophy of Fact as vehicles through which to convey his critique of industrialised social mindset that serves anything but help people. The institution of Grandgrind's school functions as the root of the efforts to disseminate the philosophy of Fact. The philosophy encapsulates the social, moral, financial and educational problems which Dickens implies accompanies an ideology motivated by

profit and economy. The classroom itself is described as a 'plain, bare, monotonous vault,' and could be likened to a jail, where the doctrine of Fact functions as the bars which keep its adherents locked in. The children are indoctrinated to believe 'the Head to be ali-sufficient,' to 'stick to Fact' and 'never wonder'. We come to understand that in 'rooting out' the children's natural proclivities, their ability to empathise and feel compassion is enervated; this attempt to eradicate the people's abilities to feel is critiqued by Dickens through the satirical name M'Chookumchild, through which he clearly condemns the attempted suffocation of people's imaginations and sentiments. Bitzer is presented as the system's greatest success. His physical description serves to reflect his mindset; that just as 'his skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge,' so too were his heart and mind been purged of their natural inclinations and abilities to feel compassion. Through the institution of the classroom and Bitzer, we come to understand Dickens' primary concern rests with the industrialisation's potential to dehumanise society, and heavily disable its members from functioning in a contented and compassionate manner.

Through this we are able to see the destructive and unempathetic nature of the industrial mindset. Louisa serves as a depiction of the terrible consequences of the doctrine in regards to emotions and imagination. From her youth, we are made aware of her 'struggling disposition to believe in a wider and nobler humanity.' Her education was premised upon a diet of Fact, and we come to realise that the education and upbringing which she received served to only emotionally cripple her. Her deprivation of all things natural is evident in her fascination with fire; the fuel which is needed for the fire to burn is all the things she has been denied, therefore the embers are emblematic of her lack of reason to live; she was 'a fire with nothing to burn'. Ultimately it is in her cognizance of her deficiencies that we come to understand that the institutions needed in utilitarian ideals prove only to disable people from flourishing, rather than helping them, Louisa cries that she should have been 'a million times happier, more loving, more contented, more innocent and more human in all good respects.' Her father also stands as a perpetrator of Louisa's emotional state, who limited her education and upbringing to the ambits of 'reason and calculation.' Through Louisa, Dickens suggests that it is through

institutions and individuals which are concerned only with Fact and statistical analysis that people suffer.

Stephen serves as a martyr of Dickens' cause; as Dickens wrote Hard Times with the aim of social reform. Stephen operates as an archetypal representation of the working poor, through whom we are better able to recognise the dire suffering of the proletariat as a result of the system's inability to view them as human beings, rather than meagre 'figures in a room, or machines.' Stephen exposes how the industrialists and patrons of utilitarianism take it upon themselves to be 'right', evincing that as a result, it is the working class who are therefore 'unnaturally' branded as 'forever wrong', suffering in both social and financial spheres. Through Stephen, Dickens is able to communicate that in continuing to deny that the members of the working class are individual people with unique 'loves and liking ... memories and inclinations,' the disparity between the classes will persist, and if the situation is not solved, the 'middle' will become an irreparable abyss. Stephens is employed by Dickens, in order to highlight that compassion needs to take precedence not only in an individual's mindset, but within social institutions also, in order to prevent the dehumanisation of society; through Stephen, Dickens implores his audience of the need to revise ideologies focused solely on Fact and reason, and warns that if the polarity continues, a 'black impassable world' will be erect between the classes, and society as it stands, will only last, 'as long or as short as stitch-like misery can last.'

Whilst it is clear that Dickens decries the philosophy of Fact, the circus is presented as an alternative social universe in which Fact and Figures work symbiotically. Indeed, Dickens does suggest that people can be helped through compassionate individuals, however, the circus is portrayed as a compassionate institution which also comes to the aid of others. Dickens highlights the presence of Fancy through likening Childers to the fantastical creature of a 'Centaur' whilst the names Childers and Kidelerminster are themselves reminiscent of youth and innocence; these physical descriptions serve to further highlight that the institution of the circus was comprised of people 'who had a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practise.' Sleary I presented as Dickens' mouthpiece and it is the world view espoused by Sleary which serves to embody the

values system which Dickens endorses. Sleary's eyes may be seen to reflect this ideology where Fact and Fancy co-exist is synergy; his 'fixed eye' is suggestive of his understanding for the need to focus reason, whilst his one 'rolling eye' is indicative of his ability to see beyond tangible fact and access imagination and sentiment. It is evident that within the circus, emotion is opening expressed. In comparison to Louisa and Grandgrind's relationship, Sissy and her father overly express their love and loyalty for one another;'those two were one ... they were never asunder.' Through the institution of the circus, Dickens illustrates that empathetic institutions, rather than industrial, oppressed inhumane ones, also are able to nurture people to flourish.

Sissy is presented as the incarnation of the virtues which Dickens endorses, and the values and mores which he attempts to instill within society. He goes to great lengths to emphasise that it is Sissy specifically, and her subsisting sense of humanity and compassion, who is responsible for the permeation of love and imagination into the doctrine of Fact. Dickens highlights this through Mrs Grandgrind's epiphany, that 'there is something ... that your father has missed. I have often sat with Sissy near me and though about it.' Whilst it is Sissy who is responsible for Louisa's self-awareness and it is Sissy who is responsible for Grandgrind's transformation, it is because of her rearing in the institution of the circus that she is as compassionate and as loving as she is. In Hard Times, Dickens demonstrates that it is through empathy and compassion, whether embodied by individuals or institutions, that people can be helped.

Assessor comments

This upper-range script demonstrates that the student has confidence in their knowledge of the text and aptly uses the novel to support the ideas of the topic. There is excellent control of language and a broad, incisive vocabulary which supports the concepts presented well.

Hard Times Intros & Plans

1. "Emotions count for more than facts in human life" Is this the lesson of Hard Times?

Plan:

P1 - Hard times professes that a life without emotion, purely based on facts can lead us into moral disfigurement.

• Tom - 'whelp' 'graceless' as a young boy the sole teaching of facts have left him devoid of the ability to be responsible in his actions, he needed his motions to be nurtured

• Bounderby - 'built his windy reputation upon lies', 'self made man' he is full of self-infatuation he is arrogant boastful and uncaring. Disregards his mother and the hands.

• 'Bounder' in that century meant a man of low character

P2 - Emotional development, as evident in Louisa, is necessary for a person to truly experience sentiment and feelings and develop meaning to their lives.

• Louisa - lack of emotional development. Shows that there are more important things than facts, Dickens makes this clear through her inadequacies.

• "where are my hearts desires?" "what have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once" "if you ask me whether I do love ... 1 don't know"

P3 - Hard Times dwells upon the notion that only emotions can

adequately make someone happy and a life governed by tangible facts is hopeless.

• Sleary/Circus people - they are truly happy as they live in a world of compassion and love, "untiring readiness to help and pity one another"

• Blackpool - emerged as personification of the working class, a result of living in this fact driven world, without compassion or regard for humans as something more than their monetary worth, life is a 'muddle'

lntro:

The utilitarian philosophies of 'the greatest good for the greatest number', which upheld only tangible fact and disregarded the imagination and human emotion, profoundly influenced the Victorian Era. Charles Dickens devised his serialised text Hard Times to

impart and important lesson. Dickens' lesson though Hard Times was one that

downplayed the sole utilisation of facts and stressed the incumbent need for human

emotion in ones life. Dickens accentuates that emotions ultimately count for more than facts and by adhering to his message illuminates the pathway to a truly human

experience. Dickens maintains that a life without emotion, purely based

upon facts will inevitably lead to ones moral demise. He insisted in a lesson

that professed the nurturing of ones emotional wellbeing as paramount in enabling a life in the future that is fulfilled and meaningful. Finally

Dickens argues that it is through emotional appreciation people will find true happiness and a life governed by facts is utterly hopeless.

2. "The bleak setting of Hard Times reflects the leak lives of the characters".

Discuss.

Plan:

Pi - The monotonous and gloomy environment of Coketown, in Hard Times, is directly reflected amongst the hopeless lives of its people and in particular the 'hands'.

• For the workers in Coketown everything is the same day in day out, living only to work.

o Coketown - 'The piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down'

o The 'hands' - 'worked long and monotonously' 'everyday was the same as yesterday'

• It is a town 'of brick that would have been red if the smoke ... allowed it' as a result it is shrouded in darkness and an overvvhelming sense of hopelessness. In the same manner Stephen is also shrouded in bleakness he is a 'poor, crushed, human creature' - the nature of Coketown is soul-destroying

P2 - Coketown was a setting that was infectious and it fostered the corruption of the human soul leading to moral disillusionment.

• Coketown had tall chimneys which leaked 'interminable serpents of smoke'

• It had a 'black canal' and a 'river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye' this bleak and dark imagery represent the corruptive and almost evil nature of Coketown.

• This is reflected in Tom and his lack or moral discernment he is described as a 'whelp' and 'graceless', he is also manipulative believing a 'girl can get on anywhere'

P3 - To its very core Coketown was devoid of any sentiment, it was totally encapsulated by facts and this was reflected though the bleak and barren lives of its pupils, in particular Louisa.

• It was so devoid of anything other than fact that it was 'impervious to the suns rays' essentially anything natural was non existent or unable to penetrate the barrier that facts had created

• 'Fact, everywhere in the material aspect of Coketown ... everywhere in the immaterial aspect of Coketown'

• Its pupils where 'trained to mathematical exactness'

• Louisa was bleak sentimentally, the facts bestowed upon her, and the 'root[ing] out [of] everything else left her emotionally barren

• Bitzer is another example of its effects

Intro:

The industrialised world of the Victorian era can be described as bleak and unforgiving. It had detrimental effects on the loves of all its inhabitants, its barren and hopeless nature was reflected in who its citizens became. Chares Dickens, in Hard Times, presents the fictitious setting of Coketown, the epitome of this industrial plague that starved 19th century England of its life. Coketowns bleak portrayal by Dickens is mirrored amongst its residents. Dickens professes that the monotony and dullness of Coketowns surroundings was directly reflected in the hopeless lives of its people and in particular the 'hands'. It is also evident that the setting of Coketown is infectious in its nature and enables the corruption of its inhabitants leading to their moral disillusionment. Furthermore, Coketown, to its very core, is devoid of any sentiment and is totally encapsulated by facts echoed amidst its pupils.

HARD TIMES ESSAY

How does Hard Times explore the idea that there may be more to life than just facts?

Dickens' critique of the 1854 England industrial society, Hard Times explores the idea that there is more to life than just facts. This is effectively the antithesis of the utilitarian attitude where decisions are based purely on society's optimum for allocation and production. Here, intellectual growth in terms offact retention is prioritised over emotional growth for love, passion and imagination. Dickens uses characters such as

Bitzer and Stephen Blackpool to demonstrate the consequences of fact-based education where there is no emphasis on emotional growth. He uses Sissy Jupe and Thomas Gradgrind's thirst for retribution, to show the importance of an education of the 'heart' in creating well-rounded human beings. As such, Hard Times explores the need for emotional growth and the idea that there is more to life than just facts.

Dickens' characters, Bitzer and Sissy Jupe are polar opposites, who are used to show the consequences of fact- driven education opposed to the encouragement of emotional growth. Dickens uses Bitzer to show that there is more to life than his fact-driven education. Bitzer is a perfect product of the education system that involves "infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge". Finishing with a job at Bounderby's bank, Bitzer was "safe to rise in the world" but unable to express any emotional attachment outside the realm of fact. Hard Times explores the consequences of his facts-only education in that Bitzer ''was so exactly regulated that he had no affections or passions". As a result of his education that designed him for the industrial world, Bitzer sees nothing more to life than facts and is only, "accessible to reason". His decisions are based purely on self-interest as he states, "the whole social system is a question of self-interest" and as such cannot display any sympathy for Gradgrind. Dickens demonstrates that facts-only education has negative consequences and he shows the importance of human attributes such as compassion and sympathy through Bitzer's personality of a "prudent young man ... of the coldest calculation".

Sissy Jupe was raised in a circus and thus not subject to the mainstream facts-only education. Dickens uses Sissy to contradict the statement, "facts alone are wanted in life" because she is the antithesis of such teaching. When first attending Gradgrind's school, Sissy is labelled as "girl number twenty unable to define a horse". Bitzer, who has had no experience with horses, is able to define a horse perfectly. Dickens shows that there is more to life than just facts because Sissy, who despite being unable to define the animal has enjoyed numerous occasions with, and appreciated horses. He shows that Simple "grinding" or being "regulated by fact" is not enough to truly appreciate life, which requires emotional expression of "fondness" and "fancy". Such emotions are expressed by Sissy Jupe, who Dickens shows has been modelled by her upbringing in the circus. Her life was not "governed by facts" and although labelled, "totally backward"

she encapsulates all the values defined from her childhood. Her family in the circus was of "two or three husbands ... and two or three mothers" as Dickens demonstrates how the 'facts' of Sissy's family are irrelevant and it is only that they gave her "love and imagination" that is important to her development. Dickens shows the result of emotional growth as opposed to facts-only education, through Sissy's "love and gratitude", which leads to "happy Sissy's happy children loving here".

Hard Times demonstrates the consequences upon the poor working class from early England industrialisation. Dickens uses the workers in the novel to demonstrate the importance emotional qualities opposed to a facts-only life. Used purely as machines, Dickens portrays these workers as 'hands' to represent how they were valued. The utilitarian attitude of business owners meant that the 'hands' have been bred for maximum labour output. As such, their emotional growth is suppressed as they, ''were unable to see the circus or library". The emphasis on fact-based education has developed dull, indifferent human beings as "the smoke serpents were indifferent who was lost or found". This shows that the hands' are incapable of developing emotional bonds and thus Dickens demonstrates that there is more to life than just facts as this education has turned human beings into apathetic machines. The 'rebellion' against such education is Stephen Blackpool, who Dickens uses to portray the natural desire of love among humans. Blackpool, despite his education, truly loves Rachel and sees that ''t'hide a word of honest truth fro' one another would be a sin and pity". This demonstrates how the restraint of emotional expression is against the natural impulses of human beings because there is more to life including love; than just facts.

Thomas Gradgrind senior, the protagonist of the story is portrayed as the champion of the facts-only education system. He governs all who are affiliated with him including family, with facts and believes, "facts alone are wanted in life". Dickens uses Gradgrind to demonstrate both the flaws in this philosophy and how there is more to life than just facts. Teaching his children never to ''wonder'' or ''fancy'', Gradgrind believes in emotional suppression as a factor of utilitarian success. However, his views on the subject change through a series of ironic and 'emotional' events. Although taking in Sissy Jupe to amend her thinking, it is Gradgrind whose views change due to Sissy's "compassionate understanding". He becomes subject to her "love and gratitude", which

Dickens shows through Gradgrind's understanding, that such qualities are important in life. Gradgrind sees the effects of his teaching upon his daughter, Louisa who says, "you take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it [life] from a state of conscious death". As such, Gradgrind amends his thinking seeing the importance of emotional growth among human beings as he confesses the "head is not ali-sufficient". Dickens demonstrates through Gradgrind's changes, that there is more to life than just facts with the belief in ''wisdom of the heart".

Hard Times explores various conflicting issues of early England industrial society. Dickens particularly critiques the education system and its soul emphasis on facts. As such throughout the text, Dickens demonstrates that there is more to life than just facts. He shows the negative consequences of the utilitarian influence on education through Bitzer and his unyielding and selfish personality. The final product of the facts-only education is seen in the 'hands', who become mindless machines where natural emotions of love are suppressed. Thus Dickens shows that the growth in emotions such as love and compassion are important in human beings such as Sissy Jupe who develops into a well-rounded, caring mother. It is Thomas Gradgrind senior who Dickens uses to show that factual education is not "all-sufficient" and there is indeed more to life than just facts.

HARD TIMES

"I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self interest. " How does Dickens create a dystopic picture of Victorian England in Hard Times?

Set with in the bleak and depressing social atmosphere of Victo rian England, Hard Times, by author Charles Dickens, explores the detrimental effects associated with the financially motivate idealisms of industrialisation and utilitarianism - explain in your own words what these terms mean. The era was defined by the prioritisation of the global economy, over the importance of prevailing human rights and values. Dickens uses his text to critique the damage caused by the deranged and unbalanced society, whilst simultaneously promoting the importance of the human imagination and the freedom of expression. He addresses the distorted factitious

teachings of the utilitarian culture, emphasising its destructive influence on human development. He contrasts this dystopian depiction of society against the presence of "fancy" as a representation of the importance of emotional expression and morals. Dickens ultimates encourages that the ideal society is forged on the balance between factual and fanciful philosophies. Brilliant context and explanations of Dickens' views etc. However, stronger emphasis on key term 'self interest' needed.

Through Hard Times, Dickens exposes the flaws of the dystopian, mechanical idealised society known as "Coketown"; an ideal representation of the domination of an inhumane, utilitarian, industrial ethos Great vocab. Protagonist Mr. Thomas Gradgrind perfectly embodied the underlying principle of the philosophy characterised as the 'greatest good for the greatest number'. His Lancasterian education system was aggressive, dictatorial and destructive; a "cannon" loaded to the muzzle with facts designed to blow his pupils "clean out the regions of childhood at one discharge". Perfect. Dickens suggests that the idolisation of the "cold, hard facts" and suppression of emotional expression flaws human development. This notion is explored through the character of Louisa Gradgrind, who is sterilised in childhood by her father's teachings. As chapter title two suggests, "Murdering the Innocents", her mechanical upbringing lead to her adoption of the self-destructive motto, "nothing matters". Dickens used Louisa's nihilistic perspective to critique the destruction of the fact philosophy. He constantly refers to the "void" which had consumed her heart, as a symbol of her expressionless persona. His adopted motif of falling embers - and leaves in later life - signifies the lack of meaning Louisa attributes to her life. Like the short lived embers, her existence has no depth or reason. She is a "fire with nothing to burn", a "starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow". Louisa's disarray renders her unable to answer life's fundamental questions. Thus knowing nothing of "tastes and fancies; of aspirations and affections", she is forced to accept Bounderby's proposal for marriage. His dystopian portrait of Coketown is further emphasised through his employed character names, as "Gradgrind" suggests the hard and painful grinding of knowledge, and "M'Choakumchild" presents the negative imagery of a child literally drowning in the "imperial gallons of facts". Dicken attributes Louisa's emotional

demise to the idealisation of the utilitarian fact philosophy which forged the dystopian society. WOW - one of the best body para's I have read in a long time.

In light of the dystopian depiction of Victorian England presented in Hard Times, Dickens ultimately uses his text to promote an ideal equilibrium between intellect and emotion. He suggests that there are intangible elements to life that cannot be explained through the application of facts; endorsing that society's most positive reinforcement of achieving justice and equality lies within the expression of both knowledge and love. Dickens expresses this concept through Mr. Gradgrind's epiphany, as he is forced to realise the flaws of his eminently practical education

Dickens contrasted the bleak and destructive utilitarian culture of Coketown, against the presence of "fancy" to emphasise its misguided, irrationality. Fancy is a representation of Humanitarianism; which prides itself on the practice of emotional expression, virtue and benevolence. Whilst Mr. Gradgrind was the personification of "self interest", Mr. Sleary was the ideal embodiment of "love". A "man of realities", Gradgrind is in every respect square; with his square coat, square legs, square shoulders, a "square wall of a forehead", and a square finger with which he inflicts verbal emphasis on his vessels. An "uncompromising fact in the landscape", his cold and barren home, Stone Lodge, is a "great square house" whose portico darkens the windows as his brows overshadow his eyes. This utilitarian squareness is the metaphorical antithesis of the frivolous and "lively" ci rcus ring, occupied by the image of a Sleary with his "preposterous coat" and "mad cocked hat". Dickens employed such a contrast to emphasise the importance of emotional expression and the imagination. His views regarding the triumph of humanitarianism were illustrated by the irony in that Gradgrind was forced to seek refuge in Slearly's circus to save his self-interested son, Tom. Dickens used the emotional philosophy to provide perspective and contrast against the dystopian teachings of utilitarianism. He ultimately encourages that people are not machines, and cannot be evaluated through the application of statistics and facts. Dickens presented "fancy" as the inverse of the fact philosophy to emphasis the corruption of the flawed Victorian society. You need to take Gradgrind's self-interest further - this is a key part of the topic.

system. Louisa's emotional demise catalysed the beginning of a revelation which was solidified by Sleary's final words that, "there ith a love in the world, not all Thelfinteretht" that has its own capability of "calculating or not calculating". Dickens

draws parallels between James Harthouse's moral disassociation and Gradgrind's misconception. Whilst both pursue the ideal of "never wonder", Gradgrind essentially does so with pure intentions. He is not evil in nature but rather in his teachings. He was passively open to the influence of emotions, as originally exposed by his willingness to accept and raise Sissy against the logic of society. Gradgrind could be perceived as the most prevailing character, in that his vast knowledge, together with his new found sense of compassion allowed him to fight for the cause of justice and equality succeeding the events of the novel. Dickens utilises Gradgrind's adaption

as a symbol of reform against the corrupted, dystopian, utilitarian society.

Charles Dickens' critical response to industrialisation focused on the ideal balance between intellect and emotion in achieving justice in society. He explored the dystopic nature of Victorian England provoked by the idolisation of the financially motivated idealisms of industrialisation and utilitarianism, and contrasted them against the presence of humanitarianism within the novel. Dickens encouraged the importance of emotional expression and the human imagination combined with knowledge, as a suggestion of society's most positive reinforcement of achieving equality.

This is a fantastic effort. This would certainly be a 10 if you had of focuses more closely on the idea of self-interst. This term particularly relates to Bounderby, Harthouse and Tom. Ensure you don't miss any of the key words in the question.

Vocab., construction features, context, sophistication and confidence are

outstanding. Things are looking good for Friday .

English Examination 2008

the following is an example of an upper-ranking student response

Topic: "Facts alone are wanted in life."

How do Mr Gradgrind's theories affect others?

Even as Hard Times was being published in the 1850s, Victorian England was undergoing drastic changes. The Industrial Revolution was entering its second phase, bringing along with it not only increasing industrialization, but also new ways of thinking. Gradgrind's philosophy in Hard Times is an amalgamation of several of these emerging philosophies - Bentham and Mills' utilitarianism, the dismissal of charity as advocated by Malthus, and Smith's ideas of self interest. It is this amalgam of philosophies which has a profound impact on those it comes into contact with, exacerbating the negative traits of some while diminishing the positive of others. However, even as Gradgrind affects others, so too do others affect him.

The Gradgrind philosophy transfers itself directly into his school and what is taught there. When readers are first introduced to Gradgrind, he is teaching his students that 'Facts alone are wanted in life', and instructing them tp 'plant nothing else, and root out all else'. Among his students are his children, Louisa and Tom, Bitzer and Sissy Jupe, known to him as 'girl number twenty'. Although they all receive the same instruction at his school, this instruction has vastly different effects on each of them. Louisa, who is constantly described as having a fire within her, is initially moulde4d into "the triumph of [Grandgrind's] system'. He has so effectively imparted his ideology to her that she is indifferent to Bounderby's marriage proposal. However, due to her natural tendency toward rebellion, she is eventually able to combat the effects of Gradgrind' s fanciless and factual upbringing. After her breakdown - cum - epiphany brought on by Harthouse, the reserved and stony woman is replaced by a Louisa who reflects her nature.

In Tom, however, the effects of the Gradgrind philosophy are more long-lived. Through the descriptions of him, it is shown that tom does not have the same degree of resilience and defiance seen in his sister. He is selfish, proudly boasting to Harthouse that Louisa married Bounderby because he instigated it. He is also perpetually described as being sullen and resentful. It is these qualities which are then exacerbated by his education and upbringing. Gradgrind's theories lead to a stifling childhood for Tom, one which he will 'recompense' himself for. It is later shown that Tom's ideas of compensation are purely hedonistic, and that he will manipulate his sister and take advantage of her unrequited love for him without any compunction to sustain his lifestyle. His actions are so bad that even Harthouse, who admits that he is not a moral fellow, can see the error in Tom's actions. Similarly, Bitzer wholeheartedly accepts and practices the Gradgrind philosophy, and becomes so steeped in the ideology that all signs of nature have been eradicated from him - if cut, he would bleed white.

The effects of Grad grind's theories (and thus philosophies) on those of weaker spirits is also illustrated through his wife. His wife is consistently described as one who is frail, an 'indifferently executed transparency', 'a bundle of shawls', and who is always stunned by weighty pieces of fact falling upon her from both her husband and

Bounderby. Through his suppression of Fancy and strong emphasis on Fact, he has diminished any capability of thought his wife may have had.

However, the effects of Gradgrind on Sissy is questionable. Having spent many years among the circus people being educated in human emotions, she has a strong foundation - which resisits the force of Gradgrind philosophy. Although he claims he will educate her, he fails, and eventually accepts this fact. Despite not having been 'educated' by Gradgrind, Dickens portrays Sissy as the ideal which those in the novel (and readers) should strive toward. When she gives incorrect answers in the school room in relation to National Prosperity, it is her answers which Dickens believes to be the correct ones.

Sissy and Louisa are the twin instruments of change. Even as Gradgrind affected them, they forced him to reconsider his theories and redefine his philosophy. Louisa's breakdown was the catalyst for this change, causing him to think over his ideals, coming to the conclusion that the 'Heart may have been doing silently' what he did not. Although this is the visible sign of change, Sissy had already been introducing it within Stone Lodge, albeit 'silently' and unnoticed until Louisa returned ('What a beaming face you have, Jane').

Dickens shows us through Gradgrind and his philosophies that facts alone are not wanted in life. His ironically titled chapter, <The One Thing Needful', reflects this. Taken in its original context within the Bible, 'the one thing needful' referred to the necessity of spiritual needs above physical ones, the opposite of what Gradgrind propounds. The diminishing importance of fact to Gradgrind is also shown through capitalization. In the early stages of the novel, Fact is afforded a capital letter, but by its conclusion, fact is in lower case, with 'Faith, Hope and Charity' being afforded capitalization.

Through Gradgrind and his influence on others, Dickens demonstrates that there is more to life than facts alone, and that these other elements must be acknowledged. He also shows the dangers of spreading an incorrect philosophy - bad people are made worse, and good people are made to suffer.

English Examination 2007

The following is an example of an upper-ranking student response.

Hard Times

Hard Times demonstrates the importance of emotional as well as intellectual growth.

For a person to be well developed and achieve happiness in life, a well-rounded education and upbringing is pertinent. Without imagination and grace, it is easy for a person to become lost or worse, cold and empty a result. Development of the intellect is important for a successful career later in life, but ignorance of the need for imagination and creativity only creates incomplete and emotionally damaged human beings. In Charles Dickens' Hard Times, he demonstrates the importance of beauty and imagination in the lives of children as a factor in determining their happiness and ability to do well in life. Those we care only for factual education, however, and ignore emotional development will turn out to be cold and heartless human beings.

When facts alone are cared for in life, and emotionally development suppressed, the outcome can mean human beings who are unable to achieve happiness and whose well-beings are scarred. Dickens demonstrates through the characters of Louisa and Tom Gradgrind that when "facts alone are wanted in life", the result can be disastrous indeed. Louisa has a disposition to wonder and be imaginative, but she is instructed to "never wonder" from childhood and thus is suppressed early on. With "a light with nothing to rest upon, and a fire with nothing to bum", she is emotionally starved and later becomes a «cold impassive and proud" person. Without having developed her emotional side, Louisa enters into a Loveless marriage, where it is all" transaction from first to last". Without the cushion of better judgement for her feelings, she breaks down after being seduced by James Harthouse, and runs away to her father, condemning him for his methods of upbringing. She is unable to know her own heart, whether she loves Harthouse or not, and is consequently miserable as a result. It is only Sissy who can heal Louisa's scars, with her «brave affection" and «devoted spirit". It is significant that Sissy is Louisa's healing light since she is a person who has engaged in imaginative desires growing up, suggesting that because of it, Louisa can learn from her and recover.

Tom is another case for the failure of Grad grind's educational philosophy. He becomes a thief and a liar, and is eventually, sent away. Gradgrind is thus made to see the error of his ways, through these two examples of "model" children. Tom, like Louisa, is stifled from a young age and is only taught the "ologies" of the world. yet yearns for amusements, as demonstrated by his and Louisa's going to the circus. Tom is not a deep and moral character, who has never received any guiding and virtuous values in life and is thus vulnerable to a descent into vice and trickery. Because his emotional growth is limited, Tom becomes a hedonistic and careless person, indulging in smoking and drinking and gambling, getting himself into debt. Eventually. he is sent away as a result of his committing the bank: robbery Dickens shows that when "facts are the only faculty" to which one emphasizes in a child's education, the results can be devastating indeed.

Similarly, when facts alone are cared for in life, one can become self-interested and compassionless. Bitzer is an exemplary student in the Gradgrind school where only intellect is valued in terms of facts and statistics. He lacks all compassion for fellow human beings, however, and is completely self-interested. When his father dies he sends his own mother to the slave labour-like "workhouse" as it means he won't have to spend money caring for her. He does not care for "a family" and hence believes others to be the same. Because he is cold and selfish, society does not benefit from having a character like Bitzer. Dickens describes

...

his mind as "completely regulated and free from affections". condemning Bitzer to never knowing true happiness. Bitzer is not emotionally developed. and cares only for his own selfinterest Thus, he has no qualms in spying on Tom Gradgrind, even though it is immoral to do so. Gradgrind is made to see how much his system has failed when he appeals to Bitzer's emotions. This does not work since Bitzer only cares fay his own advancement, and does not have «a heart. Just like his definition of a house as "Graminivorous" and "Quadruped", Bitzer having succeeded in Gradgrind's educational system, becomes only an empty shell of a human being, unable to ever experience true happiness.

On the other hand, when one is able to fully develop both the emotional and intellectual side of themselves. this can lead to a fulfilling life and happy future. Sissy Jupe is able to have the best of both worlds, coming from the circus and receiving a factual education. At the circus, she is able to indulge in imaginative graces and read about "the Fairies, the dwarves, the genies and the Hunchback." The compassion for all those she loves in the circus has also helped her to come and emotionally well-rounded human being. Even though she is unableto achieve much at Gradgrind's school, she is till grateful and manages to finish.

Sissy, being emotionally rounded, can be a powerful influence upon others and help them too. She delights the younger Gradgrind with fancies and wonderment, thus insuring they will grow up happy and not emotionally scarred such as their sister, Louisa. Having grown up under the circus, and taught the values of "faith, hope and charity", Sissy is able to live a rewarding and happy life with "lots of happy children".

Emotional grOWill1sJust as Important as mtellectual groWth as lICreares well-i'bun~·-balanced human beings, who are able to rise above the challenges of life. Although, with only fact, one can become successful at life, it is only a life which is empty and incomplete. Dickens shows that the power of the imagination is just as great, ifnot greater, than factual knowledge.

Assessor comments:

$ the student has considered ·the topic and assuredly develops a response, never losing track of the topic.

$ there are qualifications and a detailed exploration of the topic.

$ the student has reached conclusions in respect to the individual "ideas presented.

$ there is excellent balance between a detailed use of text and the capacity to step away from the text to explore the ideas of the topic.

$ highly conceptual which is at the heart of Part 2

e confident control of language and expression.

Topic: 'Dickens presents a view of society that is unjust and unfair at its very core.' Discuss

The classic novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens can be described as a bleak diatribe in which the author exposes the shortcomings of utilitarian society. Set in the fictitious dystopia of Coketown, which ultimately represents industrial England, the text forms a criticism of the damaging, and often unjust, impact such a society has on its characters. Under the Gradgrindian education system, which is prevalent in this town, economic utility is upheld, whilst human decency and social obligation is systematically stormed away. Dickens denounces such a philosophy, contending that it devalues human life and ultimately breeds injustice. However, the author does not necessarily assert that the society is run by corrupt motives, rather he shows that in some cases ill-informed good will is at play, and hence Coketown has the positive potential for change.

The education system of Coketown is based upon the principle that 'facts alone are wanted in life' and aims to 'plant nothing else, and root out everything else'. Dickens attacks such a harsh and self-serving system likening it to an assembly line that churns out mechanised humans: people tailored to social ends but devoid of sentiment and a sense of social obligation. Whilst water is usually life-giving and natural, the 'imperial gallons offacts' that M'Choakumchild pours into 'the little pitchers' before him, blight rather than nourish them. TIlls educational water is likened to frozen and destructive precipitation; it 'hailed facts all day long so very hard'. Bitzer is the logical corollary of what would happen if such an unjust and self-serving method of education was allowed to continue unrestrained. Having been nourished with the corrupt water of Coketwon, and sown with the seed of Gradgrind's philosophy, Bitzer is bound to disappoint his would-be reapers. Though he is a model of Gradgrind's teachings, his refusal to help Mr Gradgrind and his son highlights the fact that the 'whole social system is a question of self-interest'. The education that the society of Coketown has offered is rooted in the idea that 'the heart is accessible only to fact', and hence its products are entirely self-serving and devoid of compassion and empathy.

The lower class people of Hard Times, collectively called the 'Hands', are individually represented by Stephen Blackpool. Stephen is the vessel through which Dickens presents his contention that a society focused on economic utility and pragmatism is ultimately unjust to its working class. Dickens' language continuously emphasises the loyalty and trusting nature ofBlackpool, a 'man of perfect integrity'. However; despite this admirable portrait, in Coketown he is forced to live a life of 'thorns', dispossessed of 'his roses' along the way. Married to a 'disabled, drunken creature', his sole desire in life is to marry the woman he loves, but that 'costs a mint of money' and is thus out of reach for an impoverished man. Dickens attacks the philosophy of Coke town in which social worth depends on one's contribution to capital, and their human rights vary accordingly. Furthermore, though Stephen is arguably one of the most admirable characters in the novel, the accumulated weight of social convention and injustice masquerading as ideology, ensure that he is plunged into the hellish depths of Coketown. In this society, which upholds industrial capitalism, there is no place for Blackpool's virtues, and through his descent into the 'Old Hell Shaft', Dickens criticises such a society for its treatment of the weak.

Curiously, Gradgrind is a source of hope in Hard Times, not for his adherence to selfserving utilitarian teaching theory, but for his reformation upon discovering that such a philosophy is ultimately destructive. In fact, though he does criticise his ideology, Dickens does not denounce Gradgrind himself, contending that rather than acting with corrupt motives, he is acting with ill-informed good will. Oradgrind's character was 'not unkind, all things considered' and it 'may have been a very kind one indeed had he only made some round mistake in the arithmetic that balanced it'. By refraining from denouncing Gradgrind, Dickens evidently does not denounce those in his society who uphold economic pragmatism above human decency and social obligation. Rather, like Oradgrind, Dickens asserts that these people are acting with injustice that is shrouded as utilitarian ideology, and hence have the positive potential to restructure their values. From a man who had assumed <the head to be all sufficient', Oradgrind became a 'better man, a wiser man, than in the days when in his life he had wanted nothing but facts'. Dickens' language suggests that, like Gradgrind, society can effect a similar reformation, ultimately becoming a well-tended garden where economic utility and desire for social capital are refracted through the prism of human decency.

It is clear that Charles Dickens is highly critical of the utilitarian philosophy that Coketown upholds, contending that it devalues human life and ultimately breeds injustice. However, at its core, Dickens does not necessarily assert that injustice is at play; rather, he is challenging the ill-informed good will of those who uphold Gradgrind's philosophy. "Whilst economic growth is important, the author states that it should be tempered by discretion and the view that all life is equal and precious, as otherwise it is rooted firmly in injustice. In Coketown, National Prosperity and Natural Prosperity are seen as different, but Charles Dickens maintains that once society adopts a more human calculus, the national and natural can, and should, be brought into a fruitful relationship once more .

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Question

c'Mr Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as Mr. Bounderby, His character was not unkind, all things considered ... " Do you agree?

Sample response

The opening chapters of Dicken's novel Hard Times introduce Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby as "bosom friend[s]" who are equally "perfectly devoid of sentiment". By the end of the text, however, whilst Bounderby remains the ruthless bullyhe was at the beginning, Mr Gradgrind, full of remorse, has dropped his rigid belief that people need only "Facts" and has come to understand that the "Heart" is as important as the "Head" for a healthy, happy life. The difference between the two characters begins with their professional and family situations. Mr Gradgrind, "though hard enough" "bad meant to do great things" for his own children and the pupils in the school whereas Mr. Bounderby never pretends to act out of anything other than self-interest and greed.

As patriarch of both his school and family Mr. Gradgrind set out to provide his children with what he understood to be all they needed in life, that is factual information. The imagination and anything provoking emotion he saw as a triviality and even immoral, leading to "idleness and folly". In training his children to understand the world of scientifically measurable fact alone, and preventing them from experiencing anything 'fanciful' he felt he was being a responsible and affectionate father. Thinking, as he did, of people as "reasoning animals" he felt it his duty to shape the minds of his children and that "nothing else [would] ever be of any service to them" other than facts. His children knew from infancy that they were expected to deny "every natural prompting that arose in [their] heart]s]", and their father believed this "inflexible, dry and dictatorial" regime was preparing them wel1 for life. When he accepts Bitzer's definition of a horse as the only way of seeing that animal he feels he has shown Sissy a valuable life truth and when she is deserted by her father his attitude in taking her in, to provide for and educate her, is kindly. In contrast Bounderby is heartless and brutal telling her that she must accept the fact that her father has gone for good, showing no consideration for the child's feelings.

Following the climactic scene with James Harthouse when Louisa comes to her father in abject distress and explains to him that she has struggled all her life with a hunger to find a place "where rules, and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute", Mr Gradgrind is genuinely stunned. The philosophy that has governed his actions throughout his life is dramatically revealed as the cause of intense unhappiness in his daughter and his anguished response to her collapse demonstrates his love for her. After listening to her explanation of the misery inflicted on his children by the upbringing he was responsible for "he bowed his head and groaned aloud". Being shown so unequivocally how unhappy his daughter is, he becomes a different man. Realising that he must now reap what he has sown he holds her tenderly in his arms asking what he can do to help her and make up for the damage done. He begins to speak "in a subdued and troubled voice, very different from his usual dictatorial manner" and admits that he no longer trusts his own judgement nor the philosophy of

measurable facts upon which it was formerly based. He accepts that he -has been mistaken and feels he has been changed through the "[ove and gratitude" of those around him so that he is now motivated by his heart as well as his head. He accepts that his hard and rigid philosophy has also led to the demise of his "poor boy" Tom and tries to make amends by helping him escape the law and leave the country.

Mr. Bounderby's reaction to his wife's collapse contrasts sharply with that of her father. Whilst Mr Gradgrind is softened by Louisa's suffering, her husband "took particular pains to harden himself". Bounderby is originally described as "a man made out of coarse material", he has accumulated his wealth through exploiting the hard labour of the "hands" in the Coketown factories; he bases his reputation as a selfmade man on the lie that he was abandoned by his mother and shows no pity to

Stephen Blackpool in sacking him from employment. In response to his wife's obvious distress he acts on the ultimatum to return her personal possessions within hours and "resume[s] a bachelor life".

The sacking of Stephen Blackpool is another of Bounderby's heartless actions which leads to death and suffering. Knowing as he does that Stephen has been blackballed by the "Combination" for standing up to their leader, Slackbridge, he is aware that by taking away his job he is condemning Stephen to extreme poverty. But he is so incensed by Stephen's courageous denunciation of the suffering caused to the workers by the exploitation of the wealthy capitalists such as himself that he has no compunction in casting him out of Coketown.

Possibly the meanest and most cruel of Bounderby's actions was his treatment of his mother. Not only does he deny her the respect and love expected to come naturally from a son, he perpetuates a false "pedigree" for himself dishonestly telling the world that his mother had abandoned him and that he had spent a miserable childhood "in the gutter" experiencing cold, starvation and abuse. So bullied by her son is Mrs Pegler that she resists with all her might Mrs Sparsit's effort to bring her into Bounderby's house where she has promised never to show herself. Even when he is exposed as "the Bully of humility, who had built his reputation upon lies", Bounderby makes no effort to make uIY~or the misery and suffering he has caused.

Bounderby begins the novel as an unfeeling and inflexible authoritarian who gives no consideration to the emotions or imagination in human life. He never swerves from

his ruthless path and by the end he is the object of contempt and ridicule in the eyes of the reader as well as the residents of Coketown. On the other hand Mr. Gradgrind, having been established as a man of similarly unsympathetic principles, redeems himself. He undergoes a transformation and becomes "a wiser man, and a better mao, than in the days when in this life he wanted nothing but Facts."

HARD TIMES ESSAY

.. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts; nothing else will be of any service to them. " -Discuss the impact of this philosophy on the main characters.

This quote encapsulates the world view of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby in Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times. Gradgrind sees it as his moral duty to spread this philosophy, promoting it in his school and in dealings with his friends. It suits Bounderby to apply it to his workers though he is less rigorous about applying it to himself. The novel tracks the cruel effects of this philosophy in the broader social sphere through the character of Stephen Blackpool, but its disastrous impact is most vividly played out in the lives of Grad grind's children, Louisa and Tom.

The "facts" of the quote (above) is Gradgrind's shorthand reference to the philosophy of Utilitarianism. By calling for "facts" he wishes to promote an exclusively materialistic view of the world where it is assumed that everything is quantifiable and may be assigned a precise objective value. Working from this premise it is (supposedly) possible to add together all the positives of any proposed course of action and then subtract the negatives to arrive at the most desirable Option, the one that offers the greatest happiness quotient. Obviously feelings, emotions, dreams, instincts, not to mention abstract moral principals and spiritual beliefs do not figure in such an equation. According to Gradgrind (and those of his ilk) the latter are mere "sentimental" distractions which must be "rooted out" so that moral calculations can be as simple as "Two and two make four and nothing over ... " How such a philosophy works differently upon a disposition inclined toward self-interest, compared to one that is disposed to value the happiness of others as equal to one's own, is a problem that Gradgrind does not seem to have considered. His children Tom and Louisa respond in very different ways to his indoctrination.

When Louisa approaches the question of whether to marry Bounderby she is "even more dispassionate" than her father expected. She is prepared to exclude "tastes, fancies, aspirations and affections" and consider only the "tangible Fact". Obviously the advantages the marriage will render to her family; especially her brother, carry weight in her calculations. whereas the lack of love is dismissed as an unimportant, even absurd consideration. The misery of her loveless marriage must be denied even though it often almost overwhelms her stoical self-control,

Louisa's attempt to be faithful to her father's teaching is excruciating for the reader to witness. The repression of the revulsion she feels toward Bounderby, along with all her natural impulses towards romance and love, tug at our heartstrings. The impact of Thomas Gradgrind's philosophy on Louisa is expressed in her oft repeated question: "what does it matter?" She seems to be at a loss to explain how; when all the tangible facts have been duly assembled and the equation is completed, that the result can be so utterly unsatisfactory. Dickens describes Louisa as "a light with nothing to rest upon, afire with nothing to burn" as she vainly tries to subdue in herself "all those subtle essences of humanity which elude the most cunning of algebra ... " Louisa herself articulates the damage inflicted by her father's philosophy when she says: "you have been so careful of me, that [never had a child's heart ... I never

dreamt a child's dream ". The triumph of natural character in the face of Grad grind's attempt to artificially impose his morally bankrupt world view is demonstrated by the fact that, as she grows older and becomes more aware of her social isolation, Louisa nevertheless holds on to her sense of decency and honour and that most unprovable, intangible abstract human capacity: the ability to love.

Despite also being a victim of his father's misguided precepts, Tom is a "whelp" who evokes little sympathy. He appears to take on board only half of the philosophy of utilitarianism, that is, that everything in life can be reduced to hard facts. He fails to grasp the other half, which is that all actions should advance the greater good of society. He is weak, undisciplined and selfish. Any instinctive impulses toward empathy, kindness, familial loyalty or social justice have been beaten out of him at an early age. Without any principles to guide his conduct and only a very imperfect comprehension of his father's teaching, he Japses into a completely random and reckless pursuit of wealth, pleasure and escape from responsibility. (Bitzer's brand of sefishness, by contrast, is a far more exemplary embodiment of the Gradgrind philosophy.) From being a sad and neglected little boy, Tom evolves into a sly, unloving, manipulative young man. Tom sees even the one person who truly loves him, Louisa, simply as a commodity to manipulated and exploited for his pleasure. He asks his sister sly questions like "you're very fond of me, aren't you, Loo?" only as a means to achieve his own selfish ends.

Mr. Gradgrind's philosophy has an almost contradictory impact on his SOD. On the one hand, young Tom is coldly calculating: everything in life is a commodity that can be traded, on the other hand his Just for more of these commodities causes him to act impulsively and risk everything he has. This recklessness and reliance on chance and luck is a slap in the face of his father's values. Where his father's advice would be to tell him not to gamble at all due to the statistical likelihood of him losing money, Tom's material greed is so powerful that he disregards the philosophy instilled in him since birth.

Gradgrind's friend. Josiah Bounderby, applies utilitarian principles to his business, reducing his workers simply to their productive assets, their hands. In this way he can treat them not as human beings, but as units to be used or exploited: simple commodities. Dickens wished to portray not only the underprivileged becoming less than human, but also their rulers becoming inhumane monsters, under the impact of the philosophy of utilitarianism. The fate of Stephen Blackpool illustrates the catastrophic effect of putting material values above human values. (This applies not just to Bounderby's behaviour toward him but also to that of Blackpool' s rejection by his Union comrades.) Bounderby like Tom can distort the philosophy to suit his own purposes. He is, in reality, more concerned with wealth and power than the philosophy of "facts, facts, facts". This is evidenced by him creating a false history and being exposed as a fraud.

Thus, Dickens wanted to show that the impact of utilitarianism can be different on different characters but it is in all cases demonstrated to have an undesirable and damaging effect The "Sleary philosophy" on the other hand, which states that there is more to life than working and learning and that people "must be amuthed" -even if it is sketched in vague and sentimental terms- points us clearly in the direction of Dickens' philosophical leanings.

Sissy Jupe is the only character who gives us a sense of hope in Hard Times. Discuss.

The classic novel Hard Times, by Charles Dickens; can be described as a bleak diatribe in which the author exposes the shortcomings of a utilitarian society. Set in the fictitious 'Coketown', which ultimately represents industrial England, the text forms a criticism of the dire consequences such a society has on its characters. Under the Gradgrindian philosophy, which is prevalent in this town, economic utility is upheld, and fancy and imagination are systematically stormed away. Dickens attacks such an ideology, showing that it creates humans with inner "wastelands"; devoid of sentiment and human decency. However, Dickens does not contend that all hope is lost; with Sissy Jupe shining as a beacon of compassion and decency throughout the novel. Moreover, through Gradgrind's reform, Louisa's kindness and the admirable lower class, the author argues to his bourgeois audience that there is still positive potential for mankind.

Sissy Jupe is the only character in the novel that does not fall victim to the harsh utilitarian philosophy modelled by Gradgrind, and in contradiction to this ideology maintains her compassionate and kind-hearted personality. Though her father wished for her to acquire a proper education, her upbringing, that cultivated her capacity for love and imagination, clashed with Gradgrind's system that actively denounced "such destructive nonsense". For this reason, Sissy is unable to meet the statistical demands that are required for educational success: she has a "dense head for figures" and takes the "smallest conceivable interest" in the facts that "hailed ... all day long". However, though she fails in the sense of the utilitarian ideal, her main principal of Political Economy, "To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me"> suggests a wisdom and innate goodness far greater than anything taught by Mr. M'Choakumchild, There is a clear message of hope from Dickens in that, though it may fall on as good ground as Sissy, Gradgrind's seed cannot flourish; rather such ground will reject it in order not to become a wasteland. Though she despairs from her unrelenting inability to meet society'S expectations, Sissy's ability to express true emotion and compassion allows her to rise above her oppressive environment, and ultimately lead a more human and natural life than any characters who are models of Gradgrind's oppressive education system.

( Although Louisa comes from the Coketown assembly line, and has from birth been "regulated and governed by fact", we are able to gain optimism from her kindness to others and her consistent search for more out ofIife. Louisa has been trained from her cradle to repress her natural instincts for emotion, with her father "educating the reason without stopping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections". As a result, she has no capacity, not only to feel emotion, but to conceptualise it. However, she always had within herself "a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow", and was able to recognise a void in her heart that should have been filled with fancy rather than facts. Dickens conveys a message of hope in that, try though he may, Gradgrind cannot fully storm away Louisa's natural wonder, exemplified through her "strong, wild, wandering interest" in Sissy's past life and everything fanciful. Furthermore, though Louisa has no understanding of the notion of charity, she shows compassion to Stephen Blackpool in offering financial aid to this impoverished man. Even though there is no place for charity in a utilitarian society - after al1 "the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist" - Louisa is still able to find sympathy, somewhere within her distorted soul, that has managed to escape the purging efforts of a philosophy that rejects social obligation.

Mr. Gradgrind is a source of hope in Hard Times, not for his servitude to utilitarian teaching theory, but for his reformation upon discovering that such a philosophy is ultimately destructive. In fact, though the Gradgrindian education system is criticised, Dickens does not condemn Gradgrind himself, suggesting that rather than being driven by corrupt motives he is acting with ill-informed good will. Gradgrind's "character was not unkind, aU things considered," and "it might have been a very kind one indeed if he had only made some round mistake in the arithmetic that balanced it." By refraining from denouncing Gradgrind, Dickens evidently does not denounce those in his society who place economic utility and pragmatism above fanciful imagination. Whilst he does attack the ideology they uphold, the author maintains that such people have good will in mind, and hence have the potential to modify their values. Gradgrind's ability to recognise the flaws in his philosophy, once Louisa had laid it in an "insensible heap at his feet", and constructively remodel his character, reflects the positive potential mankind has to adjust its ideals. From a man previously described as "a galvanising apparatus ... for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away", Gradgrind became "a wiser man, and a better man, than in the days when his life he had wanted nothing but facts". In a society Dickens likens to a miscultivated field and corrupted garden, his readership can draw hope from the character of Mr. Gradgrind, as by implication, such a society may potentially reform to become a well tended garden with economic prosperity shaped to social ends.

Whilst Dickens confronts his readers with a world devoid of sentiment and human decency, where social responsibility is rejected in the interest of social capital, hope can be gathered from the lower class characters and the admirable human qualities they display. These working class "Hands" fail to uphold the ideals of a utilitarian societythough they are an integral part of industry and economy, they care "so little for plain Fact, these people." Steven Blackpool and his close friend Rachael are symbolic of their entire working class, and are portrayed as sensitive, compassionate and the embodiment of utter human decency. Despite their failure to embrace Gradgrind's philosophy, Stephen is "a man of perfect integrity" and Rachael's face is "irradiated by a pair of very gentle eyes." Furthermore, the members of Sleary's horse riding crew make a living out of humour and imagination, and as for facts, "the combined literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor letter on any subject." Yet the untiring readiness of these people to help and pity one another, Dickens claims, is "deserving, often of as much respect ... as the everyday virtues of any class of people in the world". Such language, used by the author in describing the lower class characters, leaves the reader with little doubt as to where the hope for human decency lies. However, in Coketown there is no place for such values, and in a utilitarian society these people will remain crushed by the accumulated weight of social convention and injustice masquerading as ideology.

It is clear that, though Dickens displays a world devoid of sentiment and human decency, he does not contend that all hope is lost. Rather, in the face of injustice shrouded as utilitarian ideology, several of his characters are shining beacons of optimism for readers in the pragmatic dystopia of Coketown. Whilst Sissy Jupe reflects the ability to embody true emotion in an economy driven society, other characters such as Louisa, with her sympathetic nature shining through her upbringing, and Gradgrind, who symbolises mankind's potential for change, also send positive messages to Dickens' readership. Furthermore, the lower class characters represent hope for basic human decency, although in a society more interested in pragmatism than social obligation, such hope is futile.

Hard Times demonstrates the damaging effects of an upbringing tllat allows no place for tmaginetion: Discuss.

Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times, clearly demonstrates that an upbringing which refuses to establish foundations for imaginative and creative elements, will ultimately lead to an individual's demise. In the Dovel, the destructive force of the utilitarian based society of Coketown is examined through the journey of Thomas Gadgrind, his children Tom and Louisa, as well as his own utilitarian philosophy. Furthermore, this systematic upbringing is juxtaposed by the freedom embraced by Sissy Jupe, a character who examines that a childhood, in which fanciful notions are embraced, will produce an emotionally stable and socially healthy being.

Within Hard Times, it is the utilitarian philosophy of Thomas Gradgrind that is the foundation of this damaging style of upbringing. A man who is "ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature", Gradgrind believes that human nature can be administered" by rationality, calculation and fact alone, a belief which he subsequently implants in the minds of'his children and the pupils at his school. "Facts alone are wanted in life .... nothing else will ever be of any use to them." Gradgrind's school in fact, acts appropriately as a factory in the suffocating environment of Coketown, spilling machinelike youths into its "monotonous" temperament It can therefore be argued that Coketown's portrayal as a "dark citadel" is stemmed from this injection of poorly raised young people. Additionally, the name of the schoolmaster, Mr M' Choakumchild, evokes images of the suffocation of a child's innocence. This notion further examines how the utilitarian system of education will acts to negatively influence the development of what would be, healthy and balanced individuals. However, Gradgrind's systematic and fanciless method of upbringing extends further to his home, Stone Lodge. This name, as well as Gradgind's frequent direction to '<never wonder" or to "go and be somethingological" also suggests the incarceration of freedom and creative expression which evidently results in many of the character's breakdowns. It is through this rigid and monotonous style of upbringing, implemented particularly by Thomas Gradgrind, which enables Hard Times to demonstrate the damaging nature of a fanciless upbringing.

Louisa is perhapsthe greatest tool to illustrate the danger of an upbringing solely based on fact. Originally portrayed as the perfect product of Gradgrind' s unique education system, Louisa quickly becomes the greatest prisoner of the novel as she is held captive by her narrow and highly censored upbringing. "You have trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child's dream." The Jack ofvitaJity and creativity in her childhood at Stone Lodge, magnifies her lack of humanity as she is incapable-of expressing her emotion, or escape her misery, "what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed ... ., Her relationship with James Harthouse also is testament to this as she is unable to express her true desires to him. What.these examples suggest is that the lack of imaginative elements in her education, produced a human, incapable of regular, healthy social interaction and development. Furthermore it is interesting to note that as she is exposed more to the realm of 'Fancy' through her strengthening relationship with Sissy, Louisa slowly develops into a healthier, more vibrant and active character. It therefore can be concluded that the lack of imagination in Louisa's upbringing. manufactured her into an empty and monotonous inmate in the prison of objectivity. It is

this idea which allows Louisa to act as a vehicle to convey the damaging effects of an upbringing that allows no place for imagination.

Young Thomas Gradgrind and Mrs Gradgrind also are useful in examining the damaging influences of an upbringing that lacks imagination. Tom, like Louisa, is a model of Gradgrind's factual education system. Although he focuses more on the notion ofmateriaIism represented within his father's philosophical beliefs, he nonetheless becomes a slave to it. This is evident when he robbed the bank, as well as through his frequent attempts to manipulate his sister; "It would do me a great deal of good jf you were to make up your mind to I know whaL." It is this attraction to the utilitarian ideal of materialism, which was imbedded in his consciousness as a child, that placed him on a self-destructive path of gambling and theft, resulting in his death "many thousands of miles away" in exile. Similarly, Mrs Gradgrind, a prisoner of an unimaginative environment, dies empty and "so helpless", Acting as an illustration of Louisa's likely future self Mrs Gradgrind clearly highlights how a fanciless lifestyle effectively 'grinds' the livelihood and humanity from a person. « ... whenever she showed a symptom of coming to life, [she] was invariably stunned by some weighty piece offact tumbling on her," Descnbed as "thin" and having a "transparency" about her, Mrs Gradgrind, who is never assigned a first name, acts as a shadow of her husband and his philosophy. She is the epitome of the damaging effects of an upbringing that rejects imaginative elements. Both Young Tom and Mrs Gradgrind are effective in examining the detrimental effects of the Gradgrmd system of education and upbringing.

Sissy Jupe conversely examines the prosperity gained from an upbringing which embraces fanciful notions. From her origins at Mr Sleary's Circus, the embodiment of the novel's creative and imaginative elements, Sissy is raised in an environment which is the complete inverse to that of the Gradgrinds. This tension between the two worlds is evident during Sissy's first day of school, "Sissy is not a name ... Call yourself Cecilia." However, unlike that of Louisa, her journey in the novel secretes a wave of optimism and peace. This is shown when she visits James Harthouse. Descnbed as "very pretty", «innocent" and "youthful", she is able to calmly convince Harthouse to leave Louisa. Her influence over Jane Gradgind, as well as the support that she offers Rachael when they discover Stephen in the mining shaft, highlights her ability to communicate, understand and care for those around her - a trait Jacking in the Gradgrind geniality. It is however the final chapter, when we learn of Sissy's future, which testifies that an imaginative upbringing offers prosperity and happiness. "But, happy Sissy's happy children [loved] her; aU children [loved] her ... " It can therefore be argued that through Sissy ~ Hard Times explains that an upbringing which recognises the imagination will sprout a blooming character.

Hard Times effectively examines the damaging effects of an upbringing that allows no place for imagination. Through the characters of Louis, Young Tom and Mrs Gradgrind, it can be concluded that the systematic method of upbringing, employed by Thomas Gradgrind and his utilitarian instincts, results in a furore of despair and struggle. Conversely, through the narrative device Sissy Jupe, the novel expresses the positive outcomes of an education that embraces creativity.

TEXT RESPONSE STRUCTURE:

I NTHODUCTION:

e C: CONTEXT (physical, emotional, historical)

e 0: OVERVIEW OF IDEAS (definitions)

e S: STANCE (contention)

.. T: TEXT DETAILS

BODY PARAGRAPHS:

e Topic sentence: taken from overview. Provides one distinct argument/idea to support contention. Reader should know everything your paragraph is about. No new info can be included in a paragraph

e Explanation: expand on topic sentence. Consider who, what, where, why and how

e Evidence: how is this concept developed in the text? Quotes, chapter titles, structures, symbols etc

" Analysis: what implications does this have? Why is this important? Etc.

e Link: Back to topic sentence

CON(LUS~ON:

e G: GENERALISATION THAT RESPONDS TO QUESTION

e 0: OVERVIEW OF YOUR DISCUSSION

e D: DEFINITIVE STATEMENT

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Context: Imaginative Landscape

Island

By Alistair MacLeod

VCAA 2009 Prompt

'We live in a specific time and place yet, simultaneously, we experience an internal life that is not limited in this way.'

Assessment was based on the interrelationship among: the quality of writing

the handling of the prompt the quality of ideas

Some critical advice from 2009 VCAA assessment report. (context Section) formulaic approaches were limiting

memorized responses failed to address the prompt(s) use texts as vehicles, not as the centre of the task avoid retelling the plot

work on the transference of ideas offered by the texts teach/learn a variety of forms of writing

incorporate texts in ways appropriate to the form

practice writing in a range of approaches, styles and forms

explore the context outside the set texts so that students have more to draw on when

creating ideas

ensure there is adequate practice and strategies for exploring the prompt develop more sophisticated imaginative pieces

develop pieces which are well crafted

explore the ideas of the Context first, then explore the text - this may avoid the text becoming too much of the

Focus.

· there seems to be a growing dependence on formulaic responses, which suggests that some students believe that rote learning is sufficient. The English study is concerned with developing students' understanding and confidence in responding to the specific topics and prompts offered in the examination. Active engagement with texts enables students to develop language awareness, articulate ideas and develop communication skills.

· some students did not fully engage with the actual elements of the topics and prompts. Greater care needs to be taken in analysing and recognising the specific expectations of each topic or prompt

· this is an English examination and strong language skills (including correct spelling and grammar) are expected and necessary for success.

· it is recommended that students organise their time so that enough time is left to proofread their work. While handwriting is not assessed directly, it must be legible. It is accepted that there is obvious pressure in an examination, but there were occasions when words or phrases could not be deciphered.

Below is a sample of a very creative introduction to a contextual response given in the 2009 exam using the text "Fly Away Peter" this is not in the usual expository form however could still prove useful for ideas.

Jim crawled like an animal across the muddy and desolate field, once it had been crowded with peasants and their crops, now it was strewn with bodies. Every now and then dark and foreboding night sky was split by a blinding light that tore it open and was followed by deafening cracks like thunder following lightning. Each time this happened a shiver of pure fear coursed through Jim and he wondered ifhe had, in fact, died until he noticed he was still frozen cold and he was still in grained with dirt and how could this be death? As he inched further forward, a shot rang out, startling Jim as the bullet buried itself in a corpse not far from his position. The blackened body jumped then fell still again, the only result being the scattering of the filthy rats that had only a moment ago been tumbling about in the dead soldier's belly, surviving offhis death.

VCAA 2008 Prompt

'Events and experiences influence the way we connect to place.'

What did the examiners have to say this time round?

Students presented a range of approaches to writing in their responses; however, overwhelmingly students selected an 'expository' approach. For too many, the approach to writing could be likened very much to a text response. Section B is not text response; it focuses equally on ideas and writing. Overreliance on a text may undermine the capacity to develop ideas that emerge from the prompt. Likewise, when considering the approach to writing chosen by the student, quotations should generally be used judiciously.

The text was often used as illustration to support a conceptual discussion and this worked well in responses which offered excellent insights. Weaker responses relied too much on the text and responded with great slabs of plot. The difference between successful and unsuccessful pieces in this regard was a conceptual discussion versus simplistic storytelling. Many responses leaned too heavily on the text and were not able to use the text as a conduit for exploring the Context. Often the quality of ideas appeared inhibited because students seemed afraid to move too far away from the text.

Weaker responses, on the other hand, also seemed to have pre-prepared introductions, which were obvious as they were often generic discussions of the Contexts. The introductions were followed by a passing recognition of the prompt with a number of examples included from one or two texts. Often the penultimate paragraph discussed a wider 'outside world' example. In these cases there was little engagement with the direction of the prompt nor any attempt to create an authentic piece of writing,

Final advice

formulaic approaches were limiting

avoid memorised responses - working with the prompt is the key use texts as vehicles, not as the centre of the task

avoid narrative retelling of the plot

teach/learn a variety of approaches to writing

incorporate texts in ways appropriate to styles of writing

practise writing in a range of approaches

· explore the context outside the set texts so that students have more to draw on when creating ideas

· work on incorporating material into a piece of writing so that it is not convoluted or loses direction

ensure there is adequate practice and strategies for exploring the prompt assist students to develop greater sophistication with imaginative pieces encourage students to develop pieces that are well crafted

explore the ideas of the Context first, then explore the text - this may avoid the text becoming too much of the

focus

· teach the use of text as explaining complexity, not merely as simple illustration

Outside/extraneous material

Similar to the use of multiple texts, students who 'forced' outside material into their writing without considering how it might fit conceptually would sometimes end with absurd scenarios. This use of material needs to be congruent with the ideas surrounding it.

Responding to the prompt

Most students were able to consider the prompts and respond to them. Students who seemed to ignore the prompts or come in with prepared responses did not have the same success as those who dealt with the prompt appropriately. Although a prompt is a springboard for a piece of writing rather than a topic, students must deal with and explore the central ideas. The prompt 'angle' compels students to address the key direction of the prompt; a 'big idea' relevant to this Context. For example, in this year's prompt for identity and belonging, the focus was on relationships. For students to achieve success they needed to have explored the notion ofrelationships as the principal idea of their piece of

writing.

Use of text

There can be no definitive advice on the success of relying on a single text or employing both (or more). Some students used the two texts expertly to demonstrate exceptions and qualifications while others did little more than use the second text to add more of the same examples.

Some students who relied on a single text were able to develop a more coherent response than those who felt they were required to use both texts, and were unable to make the transition from one text to the other in a coherent, fluent manner.

The below example is quite similar to the creative one I put in from the 2009 exam however this one is drawing from 'Island'.

What did the examiners say about this piece?

This sample shows good control of writing in persuasive style. It has a very strong sense of the task and addresses the prompt consistently throughout the piece.

THE CAPE BRETON TIMES

We're Do bIg Just Fine With No Open Cut Mine

Having lived on Cape Breton all eighteen years of my life, I was honoured and delighted to be able to write a column in our newspaper. From the age of thirteen, like many boys my age, I worked on my father's boat, catching lobsters or fish. I can still remember my first expedition

in the boat - the rolling ocean, the omnipresent smell of sea-salt. For me today, the sea is symbolic not only of a means to earn a living, but of a way of liJe. As Cape Breton's other key industry, many of the boys I attended school with were from the mining community. Where salt and lobsters shaped my fraternity with the island, the smell of earth shaped theirs. The mining community has lost husbands and fathers to the mines, and I have heard tales of many a brave evacuation or rescue. But for all its dangers, shaft mining is a part of Cape Breton's rich tapestry. For this reason I feel the need to speak out

against the open cut mine the council is seriously considering as you read.

Schlectem Enterprises is a German based multi-billion dollar mining company. Its tentacles reach around the globe. Its executives and managers reel in millions of dollars each year, most of them having never touched a shovel or known the adrenalin oflighting dynamite in their lives. For these people, Cape Breton is just a dot on a map, an opportunity to squander even more money. They do not share stories with Cape Breton, the earth holds no memories for them. They say they come to provide employment and to 'boost the struggling Cape Breton economy'. But we've worked the landfor generationsjustfine. We've struggled through the times harder than these withoutforeign 'help'. Schlectern Enterprises comes to rape and pillage the land, destroying a living culture in the process. Shaft mines will be closed to make room for the ugly machinery and infrastructure - and those that remain will be unable to compete.

Cape Breton may not be as prosperous as it once was, but an open cut mine will only exacerbate the issues we have now. Some say the stream of coal is running low. According to Mr Milicevic, spokesperson for Schlectern En terprises, 'an open cut mine is the only viable option remaining for Cape Breton ... We can offer full employmentfor the entire mining population.' But I ask ofMr Milicevic.for how long? Eventually, the coal will run out and Mr Milicevic will leave with his colleagues, leaving behind a gash in our beautiful island, now barren and empty of coal. And with them they will take the profits, leaving Cape Breton unable to be mined. So I urge you, seek temporary labour in Blind Creek if you must but never low down to the open cut mine. The battle can still be won.

I remember an old miner once told me, 'Once you taste underground water, it's inyour blood forever.' Although nota miner myself, his words rang true. For me, the smell of salt will be with me forever, reminding me of my father'S salty beard and sunbleached hair. Mr Milicevic and company share nothing in this. Their history is elsewhere and as such they have no connection with the land. They will use it while it profits them, and discard it without a thought when they are done. The current situation reminds me of the predicament we fisher-people found ourselves in when Iwasyounger. The advent a/big trawlers cost us dearly. They were coming into our waters, polluting our shores and stealing our fish. Local father / son fish ing enterprises struggled to compete. Each month, one more boat lay unused in the sand. For at time, our boat was one of those while my [ather was forced to work on a Portuguese ship in distant lands, with sailors he had met in younger days. But we continued to fightfor our waters. Women collected and sold clams or yabbies to make ends meet and when the trawlers moored at our docks they left with nets cut and moorings broken. Desperate measures, but they were desperate times. Finally, the governmentgot the message, and regulations were past keeping the trawlers out of our waters, and today, with the help ofimprovedfishing technology we are

able to farm these waters once more, making us complete again.

The same can be done for shaft mining. The mining community must be strong, and the council must oppose the open cut mine. For the sake of our future, and the sake of our history which makes up so much of what we are today.

Examiners notes on creative responses like the one we have just seen:

Some of the best responses were imaginative. Capable students demonstrated the capacity to create an engaging piece of writing, weaving insights and explorations of both the Context and the prompt into their story or narrative. This task is equally about ideas and writing, so those students who could produce an artful piece were highly rewarded.

Students who attempted a more imaginative approach generally directly employed the text as a basis for their work. Less often students used the text in implicit ways, often beyond, however, their capacity to do so. Some did little more than reuse the basic plot, perhaps in a modem setting. Others created hypothetical scenarios which placed the characters in a different setting and time. While this could be successful, too often in these cases the stories were trite and superficial. Like all responses these were of varying success. Some pieces, however, bore virtually no connection to the prompt or one of the texts.

A potential problem, however, is when a student creates an imaginative response using a particular text but then does little more than retell the plot of the story and offer a cursory nod at the prompt. Whatever approach to writing a student decides on, they must explore the ideas of the prompt, the Context and the text.

OK. I chucked this next one in for two reasons, the first being he/she sounds like they are writing a debate and two it was interesting to see what the examiners wrote about it

Examiners: The following is an example of a response that was considered too general and did not explore the prompt using the text. Stronger responses had a greater conceptual understanding of the implications of the ideas of the prompt, the text(s) and the Context.

(We call evade (reality' but we cannot avoid the consequences of doing so. '

Reality isn't a pleasant thing, we all love to picture the world as perfect and growing up and having that story book life we had always wished for. Although that will never happen, because that's reality. This is the reason most people become miserable and unhappy, because they need to get in the real world andface the fact, reality isn't a nice thing, its dangerous. While everyone is living in a superior world, building their lives upon lies and ignoring the facts about what is really going on around us, when they finally get into reality they cannot understand, they just cant handle the truth. The world is a beautiful place, but then again its also a very scary place. While people are wony about what new car they are buying next, our unrenewable petrol supply is running out. Or how much money they are going to spend on their fairy-tail wedding, when half the world is suffering extreme poverty. This is the reason we are being bombarded with all this bad news, because we have been ignoring the truth and now were having to deal with the consequences. We have come to the point were we have to change our ways, not because we choseto, there is no other choice. Which is pathetic, this world has grown to become dependent on money and greed. But does that really matter, when in a few years time our earth is destroyed. If everyone used their brains and realized what was really important. Reality wouldn't be that harsh, because we would be prepared for it. That's the way it is, as much as you try and ignore it, reality is always waiting for you around the corner.

Nice sounding sentences I have stolen from all over the place:

• Landscapes inevitably shape our sense of who we are as a person, physically, psychologically and spiritually.

• The world we live in does not just compose of physical landscapes, but extends to each individuals interpretation of their surroundings which forms their own, unique imaginative landscape.

• They way we perceive the world shapes who we are as a person and our mind draws upon our past experiences and memories as well as our innermost dreams and desires in firming our sense of self.

• Laurence Durrell once said "we are the children of our landscape. No matter how far away in the world we may be from our home, we should still feel a bond with our homeland that defines our personality.

• Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz remarks "There is no place like home. II

• The geography of the land can also lead to a spiritual connection with the landscape that is intimately linked with who we are as a person.

• For Indigenous Australians the land is their "mother" where they will return to once they die. The landscape inherently shapes their lives as they belong to the landscape rather than the landscape belonging to them.

• Aboriginal Pat Dobson writes "the land provided for her physical needs as well as spiritual needs".

• Our experience of the past shape who we are in the present.

• The imaginative landscape is a metaphor for the ways in which we make sense of our lives.

• The imaginative landscape and the literal landscape intertwine and become increasingly complex as we grow up and become aware, to a greater or lesser extend of the wider world.

Descriptions of Macleod's writing style which could be useful in introducing the text in a paragraph.

"MacLeod writes of bonds of love and family that transcend time and distance and all the circumstantial dividers that life imposes, and does it with as much heart as any writer ever has."

"Like the poignant lament of a Scottish piper .... A masterful evocation of a displaced people caught between past and present."

"Each story is charged with a place and way of life both alien and somehow familiar .... The honest emotion is as sensually rendered as the blood, salt, and waterlogged wood of Cape Breton ... and every word feels true."