Essay --

Set in the ever changing public of the Industrial Revolution, Charles Dickens novel catchy Timesbegins with a interpretation of a utilitarian paradise, a world that follows a prescribed make of logicall(a)y laid-out facts, created by the illustrious and eminently practical Mr. Gradgrind. However, one currently realizes that Gradgrinds utopia is only a simulacrum, belied by the devastation of lives devoid of elements that feed the plaza and soul, as considerably as the mind. As the years fly by, the weaknesses of Gradgrinds cautiously constructed system become painfully apparent, especially in the lives of his children Louisa and Tom, as well as in the poor workers employed by one Mr. Josiah Bounderby, a wealthy factory owner and a subscriber to Gradgrinds system. Dickens, through the burst of Gradgrinds utilitarian world, tells us that no methods, non even constant heaviness and abuse, can defeat and overcome two basic needs of humans, our rudimentary needs for emotion and imagination. Louisa, Mr. Gradgrinds favorite child, the paragon of his factual regime, leads a lost and embittered life which ends in a showdown between the ideologies of facts and fancy. She is a primal example of a child filled to the brim with knowledge by her fathers strictly scientific education. Confused by her coldhearted upbringing, Louisa feels disconnected from her emotions and disoriented from others, yet she yearns to experience more than the hard scientific facts she has absorbed all her life. While she vaguely recognizes that her fathers system of education has divest her childhood of all joy, she cannot avoid being coldly rational and emotionally blunted, unable to actively invoke her emotions. She would have been a curious, passionate person who ... ...olution he believed in internal parity and the growth of the mind and the spirit. He demonstrated that the system that grinds down, but never building up, will last result in chaos and woe for all those subjecte d to it. Through Hard Times, Dickens argues that all humans have an unconquerable need for imagination, emotion, and love. He tells us that this need cannot be altered or thwarted by any method of education or economic oppression, no event how strict and abusive it might be. Hard Times illustrates Dickens belief that it does not matter whether one is born in a nurturing or an abusive and neglectful surroundings. What matters is how an individuals true nature responds, changes, asserts itself and molds his or her environment. In the end, whether one trunk thwarted or strives to fulfill and complete their lives determines who each person becomes.