Hard Times

The book Hard Times written by Charles Dickens is a story about a Lancashire Mill Town in the 1840″s. The novel is divided into three books. Dickens titles the books accordingly to prepare the reader for what is about to come, and throughout the novel he shows the effects of the education system, the setup of the caste system, and the Industrial Revolution had on society through this small town of Coketown. The main characters of the novel show the English caste system of the 19th century by showing how one influences the other and the amount of power the bourgeois now have in society.

They own the factories. Therefore, they have the money and, because of the changes coming from the revolution, have some power in society. The titles of the three books, “Sowing”, “Reaping”, and “Garnering” shows significance in the way Dickens is trying to help the reader get an understanding of what is to come. Dickens shows the way the working classes are fighting for a say in the way they are treated at work by forming unions and how a bad negotiator can ruin things.

He shows from the start that the education system is based on “fact” and not “fancy. The breakdown of the “fact” based education is shown when Gradgrind himself asked a question that is not fact based. In the end, the whole system of education is reversed and the “fancy” is fancied. The novel can be summarized as a book about two struggles. One struggle is between fact and imagination and the other is the struggle between two classes. Thomas Gradgrind, the father of Louisa, Tom, and June not only stresses facts in the classroom in which he teaches, but also at home to his family.

He has brought up his children to know only the “facts. Everything is black and white, right or wrong with nothing in between. Gradgrind does not like the idea of going to the circus or having flowered carpet. Everyone knows a person cannot have flowered carpet. He would trample all over them and they would end up dying. The second struggle is between the classes is illustrated between Stephen Blackpool and Bounderby. Blackpool represents the working class and Bounderby the bourgeois or middle class. He is a warm-hearted man who feels he deserves this mediocre life.

Blackpool was once an employee under Bounderby and was fired for standing up for his beliefs. He believed that the union was taking anything that was given to them because they could not expect anything better. Stephen stands up for his fellow workers asking for reform and this makes Bounderby mad so he fires Stephen. This was typical during the Industrial Revolution. The run down society Dickens speaks of is that created by the Industrial Revolution. The air is filled with smoke that the working class have to breath. The water is turning colors with pollution caused by the factories.

The people who are most effected by this are people like Blackpool, the lower class. Dickens shows Stephen and Bounderby as a typical worker-employer relationship. Dickens shows the way in which the factories were run at this period. A person could lose their job simply by disagreeing with what he felt was wrong because the employer did not really care about the employee. This is the way the workers were treated with no respect. In contrast to the industrial revolution, it would be highly unlikely that a middle class citizen such as Bounderby to employ an aristocrat.

The titles of the three books (“Sowing”, “Reaping”, and “Garnering”) are named in a way of giving a special reference to the upbringing and the education of the children. The titles together show the basic plot of the story. “Sowing,” suggests that in the 1st book the idea of the children being sown with facts and it also lays the foundation of the plot of the novel. They are being taught fact. Where 2+2= 4 and nothing else matters, there is no gray area. Everything is either black or white and nothing else. They are not taught emotion. The 2nd book talks of the reaping or harvesting.

In this book, Dickens shows that whatever was sown in the first book, the consequences are now being seen. For example, Louisa Gradgrind Bounderby was sown with the seeds of Fact. She used facts to decide upon marrying Bounderby. It would help Tom out and get him a high position in Bounderby”s bank. We can tell that she did not want to marry Bounderby when she said, “There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, fired bursts out, father! ” This seems be symbolism to a negative view of marrying Bounderby.

In other words, she is saying that there would be repressed feelings of passionate love and if this marriage would to happen and deny her the opportunity of love. She would be susceptible to being seduced. This almost happens with Mr. James Harthouse. Here Dickens is referring to the Bible where there is a concept of “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”(Galatians 6:7). Thus, being married to Bounderby, Louisa had harvested an unhappy marriage. The 3rd book, “Garnering”, is about how characters are starting to pick of the broken pieces of their lives.

Mr. Gradgrind starts to help his children put together pieces of their lives by promising to teach them the “fancy” or emotional side of life along with the “facts. ” The main characters in the story are representative of the 19th century caste system. The aristocracy is represented through Mrs. Sparsit and Mr. Harthouse. Mrs. Sparsit is motivated by an underlining jealousy towards Bounderby; she works for him, throughout the book. During this time in history, there was a conflict of power going on. The middle class was gaining it and the aristocracy was losing it. Mrs.

Sparsit despises Bounderby and his philosophy that he is a “self-made man. ” Mr. Harthouse lives the life of a typical aristocrat. He lives the idle life, only moving to Coketown to find something to occupy him. He tried to steal Louisa away from Bounderby. This shows that Harthouse still felt that the rules didn’t apply to him being aristocratic. Bounderby, Thomas Gradgrind, Tom Gradgind, and Louisa Gradgrind represent the middle class. Bounderby is the typical successful middle class citizen of this time. He has a lot of wealth and influence and he does not care about his employees.

The father, Gradgrind, is driven by a firm belief in his educational system. Therefore, pounds facts into his children. Tom Gradgrind is later revealed as very weak and becomes a person only interested in what he can get no matter how it affects other. He is heartless. Louisa is a poor girl trapped in the middle. Both her father and brother push her to marry Bounderby. She only does this to make them happy, but we see throughout the book that she has an interest in the fancy side of life. Sissy Jupe and Stephen Blackpool represent the lower class. Sissy Jupe is orphaned at the beginning.

Blackpool is a worker for Bounderby. Both are very uneducated, but very compassionate people. Blackpool and Jupe show throughout the book the typical lower class citizen. They were very compassionate towards their fellow man and help whenever they could. In looking at the aspects of the 19th century. Dickens gives a description about how the “hands”, or the workers, were being mistreated and that there was little hope that they would be helped. Dickens” views towards unions at this time are that they were just as corrupt as the employers. Slackbridge is one of the union agitators.

He claims to be for the union, but Dickens describes him as a false prophet. He was not a very good negotiator for the union. Even his name suggests that he is a very poor “bridge” between the workers and the owners. Slackbridge takes whatever is offered and that is not much at all. The Gradgrind education system backfires on Gradgrind himself. This is seen through an ironic situation between him and Bitzer, Bitzer was an excellent product of the “system. ” Bitzer had stopped Gradgrind”s son Tom from leaving town. Tom had been caught stealing money from Bounderby”s bank.

By this time Gradgrind has become a more emotional man, torn down by the constant failure in life by his own children. In an effort to save Tom from any jail time, he was planning to send Tom away from town. The emotions felt by Gradgrind become too much for him and in a “broken down and submissive” manner asks Bitzer, “have you no heart. ” Bitzer replies. “No man, sir, acquainted with the facts established by Harvey relating to the circulation of the blood can doubt that I have a heart. ” The irony is that Gradgrind taught Bitzer to think in this manner.

Bitzer uses facts to undermine a question clearly related to compassion, which Bitzer does not have. Gradgrind would have answered the question the same way at the beginning of the novel. Toward the end of the book, fact and fancy became reversed. Why was that? It was because of the realization that the Gradgrind education system failed. Teaching only facts was not the best way of eduacating the children. Gradgrind himself figures this out when he sees his own children failing at life. Dickens illustrates that the education system of this time was educating people to not think on their own.

Their imaginations were suppressed and that it also was not interested in making well-rounded students, but denying children their childhood. The significance of the ending being in the circus is that is the complete opposite of everything that was being taught at the beginning. The institution of the school of fact is totally gone. A new way of looking at life has arisen. Facts can no longer the only thing in life. The necessity of compassion, love, and understanding are now shown to be of more importance that learning facts alone.

The entire Gradgrind system of facts proved to be a failure, and Gradgrind learns that emotions and imagination are the controlling forces in everyone’s life. Gradgrind is filled with repentance for ruining the lives of his children, as he decided to make “his facts and figures subservient to Faith, Hope, and charity. ” In Dickens three books in the novel, we are shown the effects of the education system, the caste system, and the Industrial Revolution had on society through this small town of Coketown To me the book was a good portrayal of what life in the 19th century would have been like.

The breakdown of society from a single towns standpoint through the eyes of Dickens is amazing. In my opinion, I felt that the voice of Gradgrind had the most impact throughout the novel. As the novel progresses, so does the attitude of Gradgrind. He slowly faded away from his idea of education of nothing but fact, to completely abandoning that philosophy and promises to intertwine the two. Also, he showed that he was a stronger man, by standing up to Bounderby when Louisa came home. He allowed her to stay and Bounderby divorced her. Gradgrind did this out of love and with no concern about what Bounderby thought or would “say” about it.

Intoduction

Utilitarianism is the assumption that human beings act in a way that highlights their own self interest. It is based on factuality and leaves little room for imagination. Utilitarianism dominated as the form of government in England’s Victorian age of eighteenth century. Utilitarianism, as rightly claimed by Dickens, robbed the people of their individuality and joy; deprived the children of their special period of their lives, ‘Childhood’ and deprived women of their inherent right of equality.

The theme of utilitarianism, along with industrialization and education is explored by Charles Dickens, in his novel Hard Times.. Hard Times written in those times intended to explore its negativisms. Utilitarianism as a government was propounded as a value of system which evaluated its productivity by its overall utility. It substantiated the idea of “highest level of happiness for the highest numbers of people”. Since the overall happiness of the nation depended open the overall productivity, industrialism became the walk of everyday life.

Moreover, since Utilitarianism assumes that what is good for majority is good for everyone, individual preferences are ignored. The majority answers are always right. Minorities are subjugated and oppressed, instead of being asked for their opinions. Their feelings are ignored and society becomes increasingly practical, and driven by economics. The theory fails to acknowledge any individual rights that could not be violated for the sake of the greater good. Hard Times was in fact an attack on the Manchester School of economics, which supported laissez-faire and promoted a distorted view of Bentham’s ethics.

The novel has been criticised for not offering specific remedies for the Condition-of-England problems it addresses. It is debatable whether solutions to social problems are to be sought in fiction, but nevertheless, Dickens’s novel anticipated the future debates concerning anti-pollution legislation, intelligent town-planning, health and safety measures in factories and a humane education system. The school teachers are compared to a gun loaded to its muzzle by facts ready to be exploded to the children. The children in schools don’t have names and are called by numbers.

There is no room for imaginative answers. When the teacher asks to answer what ‘horse’ is, a student named Bitzer gives a factual answer, “quadruped” having this-many teeth etc, but by no means the ‘qualities’ of the horse is exemplified and considered. The influence of utilitarianism is shown particularly by two characters in the novel, Gradgrind and Bounderby. Both are money-oriented, have materialistic outlook and give importance to ‘facts’. eople in insane productivity. Dickens provides three vivid examples of this utilitarian logic in Hard Times The first; Mr.

Thomas Gradgrind, one of the main characters in the book, was the principal of a school in Coketown. He was a firm believer in utilitarianism and instilled this philosophy into the students at the school from a very young age, as well as his own children. Mr. Josiah Bounderby was also a practitioner of utilitarianism, but was more interested in the profit that stemmed from it. At the other end of the perspective, a group of circus members, who are the total opposite of utilitarians, are added by Dickens to provide a sharp contrast from the ideas of Mr. Bounderby and Mr. Gradgrind.

Thomas Gradgrind Sr. , a father of five children, has lived his life by the book and never strayed from his philosophy that life is nothing more than facts and statistics. . Thomas Gradgrind in particular always gives importance to facts and raises his children to be hard, machine-like and epitomes of facts and they lack any emotions. Even while justifying Louisa’s marriage to ‘old’ Bounderby, he does so by some mathematical calculations and logic.. He has successfully incorporated this belief into the school system of Coketown, and has tried his best to do so with his own children.

They did not consider, however, the children’s need for fiction, poetry, and other fine arts that are used to expand children’s minds, all of which are essential today in order to produce well-rounded human beings through the educational process. One has to wonder how different the story would be if Gradgrind did not run the school. How can you give a utilitarian man such as Gradgrind such power over a town? I do like how Dickens structures the book to make one ask obvious questions such as these.

Dickens does not tell us much about the success of the other students of the school besides Bitzer, who is fairly successful on paper, but does not have the capacity as a person to deal with life’s everyday struggles. Gradgrinds two oldest children, Tom and Louisa, are examples of how this utilitarian method failed miserably. These children were never given the opportunity to think for themselves, experience fun things in life, or even use their imaginations. True, they are smart people in the factual sense but do not have the street smarts to survive.

Tom is a young man who, so fed up with his father’s strictness and repetition, revolts against him and leaves home to work in Mr. Bounderby’s bank. Tom, now out from under his fathers wing, he begins to drink and gamble heavily. Eventually, to get out of a deep gambling debt, he robs a bank and is forced to flee the area. When Bitzer realizes that Tom has robbed the bank and catches him, Mr. Gradgrind begs him to let Tom go, reminding him of all of the hard work that was put on him while at the school.

Ironically Bitzer, using the tools of factuality that he had learned in Gradgrinds school, replies that the school was paid for, but it is now over and he owes nothing more. I think this is extremely funny how, at a time of need, Gradgrind’s educational theory has backfired in his face. I think Dickens put this irony in as a comical device but also to show how ineffective the utilitarian method of teaching is. Louisa, unlike Tom, does get along with her father. She even agrees to marry Mr. Bounderby, even though she does not love him, in order to please her father.

She stays in the marriage with Bounderby, and goes about life normally and factually, until she is faced with a dilemma and panics. Mr. James Harthouse, a young, good looking guy, is attracted to Louisa and deceivingly draws her attraction to him. She does not know what to do since she has never had feelings of her own before. Her father never gave her the opportunity to think for herself, or even love someone. This is why Louisa goes frantic and ends up crying in her fathers lap. She has always been told what to do and what is ‘right’, and now even her father is stumped.

For the first time in the whole novel, Mr. Gradgrind strays from the utilitarian philosophy and shows compassion for his daughter and her feelings. One must think that he is beginning to doubt his philosophy after seeing it backfire in his face more than once. Josiah Bounderby is another prime example of utilitarianism. He is one of the wealthiest people in Coketown; owning a bank and a factory, but is not really a likable person. His utilitarian philosophy is similar to Gradgrinds in the sense that factuality is the single most important virtue that one could posses.

Mr. Bounderby maintained throughout the story his utilitarian views, which basically stated that nothing else is important besides profit. Being the owner of both a factory and a bank, Bounderby employs many workers, yet seems to offer them no respect at all. He refers to the factory workers as “Hands,” because that is all they are to him. Bounderby often states that workers are all looking for “venison, turtle soup, and a golden spoon,” while all they really want is decent working conditions and fair wage for their work.

He is not concerned about his employees as human beings, but how much their hands can produce during the workday, resulting with money in his pocket. When one of his workers, Stephen Blackpool came to Bounderby’s house asking for advice about his bad marriage, he was treated as inferior just because of his social status. Dickens portrayed the scene as one in which Blackpool was on a level five steps below Bounderby and his associates because he was a lowly worker who was obviously much less educated than them.

It almost seemed like they would not even take him seriously because he was such. Blackpool was told that he could not divorce his wife because it would be against the laws of England. Later in the book, Bounderby divorces his wife. This shows that wealth played a large role in determining the social classes that people were in and the privileges they had. This was definitely unfair but the social classes were structured in a way which allowed those who had money to look down upon those who were less fortunate.

Generally, those who were not well-educated did not have any money, while the well-educated ones such as Bounderby and Gradgrind were wealthy. The people who knew the factual information, (utilitarians) were successful, while those who did not were reduced to working in the factories of the utilitarians. Dickens paints a vivid picture of this inequality between social classes and shows he does not care much for it. It is fairly easy to see that Dickens holds a contempt for Bounderby and the utilitarian philosophy he carries.

The book details the philosophy, then shows how miserably it failed. How much different would their lives be if the town was not run by utilitarians. Dickens cleverly added in circus people as a contrast to the utilitarian approach to life. The circus people could be called the total opposite of utilitarianism. If one element of the book stands out in my mind, it would be this one. The circus people are simple, open-minded human beings whose goal in life is to make people laugh.

Dickens portrays them as a step up from the “Hands” but still close to the bottom in the social structure. These people are hated by Gradgrind, Bounderby and other utilitarians because they represent everything that is shunned in utilitarianism such as love, imagination, and humor. Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus man, was taken in by the Gradgrinds to live in their home. She is representative of the circus people with her innocence and free-will, qualities which are lacking in the lives of the people around her.

Just by her presence, her goodness rubs off on the people around her, although it is too late for most of them. Even after numerous attempts to force utilitarianism into her by Mr. Gradgrind and his school, she is still the fun-loving girl that she always was because she grew up living with “normal” people who thought for themselves and loved each other. She influenced these qualities on the youngest Gradgrind daughter Jane, who led a much more enjoyable and fulfilling life than her older sister Louisa because of those influences.

Jane is not spoken of much until the end of the book but I like the way Dickens showed the effects of the utilitarian lifestyle as opposed to the non-utilitarian lifestyle. The utilitarians ultimately ended with a great downfall because their narrow-minds could not endure the pressures that life can impose on oneself. The people that did not fall victim to the utilitarian trap were able to live their lives happily and freely, able to love, laugh, and use their imagination; which is the way life ought to be lived.

Dickens obviously had a definitive opinion of the way life should be lived and did an excellent job of depicting it. His method was somewhat indirect in the sense that he worked backwards to get his point across, but turned out to be very effective as the story progressed. Most of the story revolved around utilitarianism and the study of cold hard facts, but when the character flaws began to surface as a result of this philosophy, Dickens is quick to emphasize them. One actually sees the main character of the book and firm supporter of utilitarianism, Mr.

Thomas Gradgrind, experience the faults of his practice and begin to stray from it. Now, after watching his life fall apart, maybe he wishes he were in the circus. . . The working and living conditions were often atrocious. Working days were long, and wages low, as employers often exploited their workers and increased their profits by lowering the cost of production by paying meagre wages and neglecting pollution control. Safety measures were often ignored and workers were put out of jobs by the introduction of machines that created a surplus of labour.

The rate of accidents was very high. A handicapped worker was doomed to extreme poverty, as there were no social security or insurance payments. The New Poor Law of 1834 was based on the “principle of less eligibility,” which stipulated that the condition of the “able-bodied pauper” on relief (it did not apply to the sick, aged, or children) be less “eligible”that is, less desirable, less favorable than the condition of the independent laborer. This reasoning was absolutely correct from the scientific and the Utilitarian point of view, but it rejected any emotional considerations.

There was no consciousness of class beyond a recognition that the ‘masters’ constituted a different order of society into which they would never penetrate. Their aspirations were modest: to be respected by their fellows ;to see their families growing up and making their way in the world, and to die without debt and without sin. Trade unions did appear to introduce and protect workers rights, but in the initial stages of industrialisation, the workers were not protected. Purely theoretically, it can be proven that Utilitarianism poses a threat to humanity.

For example, if one person must suffer to make other people happy, then in the Utilitarian terms it is acceptable to make that person suffer. One of the Hands in Bounderby’s factory, Stephen lives a life of drudgery and poverty. In spite of the hardships of his daily toil, Stephen strives to maintain his honesty, integrity, faith, and compassion. Stephen is an important character not only because his poverty and virtue contrast with Bounderby’s wealth and self-interest, but also because he finds himself in the midst of a labor dispute that illustrates the strained relations between rich and poor.

Stephen is the only Hand who refuses to join a workers’ union: he believes that striking is not the best way to improve relations between factory owners and employees, and he also wants to earn an honest living. As a result, he is cast out of the workers’ group. However, he also refuses to spy on his fellow workers for Bounderby, who consequently sends him away. Both groups, rich and poor, respond in the same self-interested, backstabbing way.

As Rachael explains, Stephen ends up with the “masters against him on one hand, the men against him on the other, he only wantin’ to work hard in peace, and do what he felt right. ” Through Stephen, Dickens suggests that industrialization threatens to compromise both the employee’s and employer’s moral integrity, thereby creating a social muddle to which there is no easy solution. Through his efforts to resist the moral corruption on all sides, Stephen becomes a martyr, or Christ figure, ultimately dying for Tom’s crime.

When he falls into a mine shaft on his way back to Coketown to clear his name of the charge of robbing Bounderby’s bank, Stephen comforts himself by gazing at a particularly bright star that seems to shine on him in his “pain and trouble. ” This star not only represents the ideals of virtue for which Stephen strives, but also the happiness and tranquility that is lacking in his troubled life. Moreover, his ability to find comfort in the star illustrates the importance of imagination, which enables him to escape the cold, hard facts of his miserable existence.

In Hard Times human relationships are contaminated by economics. The principles of the ‘dismal science’ led to the formation of a selfish and atomistic society. The social commentary of Hard Times is quite clear. Dickens is concerned with the conditions of the urban labourers and the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. He exposes the exploitation of the working class by unfeeling industrialists and the damaging consequences of propagating factual knowledge (statistics) at the expense of feeling and imagination.

However, although Dickens is critical about Utilitarianism, he cannot find a better way of safeguarding social justice than through ethical means. “In place of Utilitarianism, Dickens can offer only good-heartedness, individual charity, and Sleary’s horse-riding; like other writers on the Condition of England Question, he was better equipped to examine the symptoms of the disease than to suggest a possible cure” (Wheeler, 81). Hard Times proves that fancy is essential for human happiness, and in this aspect it is one of the best morally uplifting novels.

Dickens avoided propagating employer paternalism in the manner of Disraeli, Charlotte Bronte and Gaskell, and strongly opposed commodification of labour in Victorian England. As John R. Harrison has pointed out: The target of Dickens’s criticism, however, was not Bentham’s Utilitarianism, nor Malthusian theories of population, nor Smith’s free-market economics, but the crude utilitarianism derived from such ideas by Benthamite Philosophical Radicals, which tended to dominate social, political, and economic thinking and policy at the time the novel was written.

The Gradgrind/Bounderby philosophy is that the Coketown “ Hands” are commodities, “ something” to be worked so much and paid so much, to be “infallibly settled” by “laws of supply and demand,” something that increased in number by a certain “ rate of percentage” with accompanying percentages of crime and pauperism; in fact, “something wholesale, of which vast fortunes were made. ”

References

• All references to Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation will be to the section of it republished in Burr and Goldinger’s Philosophy and Contemporary Issues.
• New York: Macmillan,1992. p. 225-232.
• Dimwiddy, John. Bentham. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
• Mitchell,Sally,ed. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. New York and London: GarlandPublishing,1988.
• Cazamian, Louis. The Social Novel in England 1830-1850. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
• Woodward, Sir Llewellyn. The Age of Reform 1815- 1870. The Oxford history of England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962.

Thomas Gradgrind is a man bereft of any imagination or fancy, and perhaps that is why he is a staunch believer in the practicality of the education system. He discards wonderment and regards facts and figures as the ultimate path to learning. In the novel Hard Times, the author Charles Dickens has shown Gradgrind as an educationist, and hence has portrayed him implementing his views on both his pupils in the school, as well as on his family. He expects his students to engage in nothing but factual education; and brings up his children on the same principle.

Fashioning his children on the principle of logic, he wants to make model beings out of them, which he may portray to society as examples of a practical nature. But he fails to understand the power of human emotions, or rather their weakness. Ignoring all possibilities of what hope and imagination could bring, into the lives of both himself and others around him, he creates a wall of facts beyond which it becomes very hard for his daughter Louisa and his son Tom to see, which they very much come to want. They get sick of their father’s ‘eminently practical’ ways and long to break free from the environment they are made to live in.

Their desires and wishes are so subdued that they are forced to turn to whatever respite, no matter how little they can get from any source whatsoever. Despite his efforts to implement his theory upon everyone around him, the seed of fancy does not die out in his son and daughter, and is evidently on display in the incident where the siblings are caught peeping in at the fanciful circus which fuels their starved imaginations, but their moment is short lived as they are caught by their eminently practical father who chastises them for their behavior.

In his views, their behavior is astonishing, for such practical children are not expected to be seen paying attention to things such as circuses and other such buffoonery. His views, which he holds in such high regards, fail here as it shows that no matter how much practicality a person is fed with, even if it is up to the brim leaving no room for any thing belonging to another nature, that basic human nature, which is known as, among others, fancy, will find its way through the thickest of books and the toughest of facts, into the minds of human beings, especially those so deprived of it.

And it may as well grow their, positively if it is fed, and negatively, in a manner of frustration and despair, if it is not. Such was the case with Gradgrind’s children that their fancy was gravely trampled upon and not allowed to grow, that their basic human nature of fancy and imagination took on a negative tone of development and brought out in them natures far from what might be considered good. Gradgrind’s forcing upon them his extreme practicality and factual nature brings out the worst in them, as is often the case with youth exposed to the extremities of human psychology.

His daughter Louisa enters into a loveless marriage with the unsympathetic man Bounderby, and becomes an unfeeling and cold person. There is no hope developed within her to help her think about what other prospects might have been open for her; whereas Tom goes astray and disembarks on a path unfit for a gentleman of his stature. There is no imagination in his mind whatsoever to suggest to him another course of being other than the one he has been brought up on, which is also the one he detests, and hence, in desperation, he takes to the only other path he sees before him.

Gradgrind, having firm belief in the sensibleness of his ideas, extends his educational theory to the orphan child Sissy, who is the estranged child of the circus man Jupe, whom Gradgrind, overcome by pity at realizing her prospects as an un-apprenticed orphan, invites to live in his own house, which he relishes in presenting as an example to Louisa as to what becomes of someone who engages in things which do no appeal to the rational side of man.

He provides Sissy with the same logical education he had been fashioning his children and his pupils on, but Sissy is not able to be as practical in nature as her education ought to have made her. She is not able to leave behind her basic nature, one which has bred from a past of reading fairy tales and enjoying the circus, which Thomas Gradgrind so detests. And it is this past, this quality of nature, which ultimately helps his son to escape a dreadful turn of events.

Tom Gradgrind, on the other hand, having received an education factual in nature to the core, and without any experience whatsoever in matters otherwise, goes off course and unlike his father, becomes a man of lesser standards. He enters into gambling and commits thievery. The education tom receives, which teaches him that self interest must rise above every other, is over-done. As a result Tom becomes so selfish that he coaxes his sister Louisa into marrying the rich businessman Bounderby just so that he could mint money for his gambling purposes, and becomes cross with her, when Louisa lands up on the wrong side of her marriage and is not able to fulfill his demands anymore.

His sister is distraught at being treated coldly by her beloved brother, as he is the sole love of her life. He is very efficiently able to hide the crime he commits by playing upon the general suspicion on the poor workman Stephen Blackpool, the suspicion he has facilitated by taking advantage of Stephen’s gratitude towards his sister and asking to keep watch over the bank on the days leading to the robbery, so that the general doubt would naturally fall on Stephen.

Gradgrind is forced to realize the failure of his theory implemented on his children by the embarrassment he suffers at the hands of his son when Tom junior, after his heist at the bank is at the brink of exposure, is in the process of escaping but is stopped short by Gradgrind’s old student Bitzer, who has now become a man of utmost practical bend of mind, who places his teacher’s very theory in his own face.

Bitzer is an unyielding man who gives importance to nothing above self interest, which, as he truly states, was taught to him under the school of thought propagated by Thomas Gradgrind himself. He gives no regard to his former educator, stating instead that self interest and practicality is what he has been taught all his life, and that is what he shall practice. Gradgrind’s daughter Louisa marries Bounderby solely for the sake of her brother.

Neither does she feel anything special towards Bounderby, neither holds anything against him, but agrees to it solely on her brother’s suggestion. To her, nothing in her life is worth getting excited for, as the extreme practical nature of her upbringing restricts her from thinking about things she could’ve possibly engaged in. Her saying, from time to time, “What does it matter? ” suggests that she is so jaded of the system she is a part of, that it does not matter to her what goes on around her, and is devoid of all concern.

Her upbringing and education has been so weak in equipping her with knowledge about human relations of any kind that she is flustered when she is approached by James Harthouse with matters of the heart, and rushes back to her father as she is clueless about what to do about or make of the situation, thus displaying the failure of Thomas Gradgrind’s principles and beliefs on which he has brought his daughter up. This which goes on to show that man’s basic temperament cannot be bottled and filed, thus failing his theory of education being profoundly practical.