In Hard Times, Charles Dickens makes the commentary that young people need more than just “facts” in order to be considered educated. The narrow-minded headmaster who opens the book by insisting on facts and “nothing but facts” (Dickens 1) serves as the symbol of a narrow-minded modern world devoid of soul. For Dickens, women often represent the beauty and grace of a soul filled with life and creativity. Yet it is this life and creativity that is driven out of the soul by the arrival of Industrialization and its brutal textile mills where women and child were forced to work by the “hard times” of the age’s social and economic conditions. Dickens himself characterized these mills as “dark” and “satanic” (Tuttle). In Victorian England, Charles Dickens was showing his readers that young people needed more than facts and mills: they needed to have their hearts and minds educated and their characters formed.
Women play a significant role in the formation of the heart and mind in many of Dickens’ works. In Hard Times, the soul is represented by Louisa, who is stifled by the insufferable education under her father Gradgrind, and Sissy, who resists this same education and sets out for the circus to find her father. Louisa listlessly consents to a marriage to an old mill proprietor. Her emotions and affection, nearly killed by her soul-crushing education, leave her in a faint at her father’s feet, a symbol of how his own actions have been working to kill the soul of London and how the actions of his friend, Louisa’s old husband, have been doing essentially the same thing.
Gradgrind is converted and abandons his utilitarian philosophy of education and Louisa and Sissy go on to have meaningful lives, with Sissy becoming a mother (a creative act), whose children love Louisa for her...
Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. England: Bradbury and Evans, 1854.
Pleck, Elizabeth. “Two Worlds in One: Work and Family.” Journal of Social History,
10, 2 (Winter, 1976), 178-195.
Stack, Sam. “Charles Dickens and John Dewey: Nurturing the Imagination.” Journal of
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