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Hard Times Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.
Short stories:
1) According to your reading what is more important fact or fiction ?
* Fact / fiction
Dickens depicts a terrifying system of education where facts, facts, and nothing but facts are pounded into the schoolchildren all day, and where memorization of information is valued over art, imagination, or anything creative. This results in some very warped human beings. Mr. Thomas Gradgrind believes completely in this system, and as a superintendent of schools and a father, he makes sure that all the children at the schools he is responsible for and especially his own children are brought up knowing nothing but data and "-ologies".
As a result, things go very badly for his children, Tom Gradgrind and Louisa Gradgrind. Since they, as children, were always treated as if they had minds and not hearts, their adulthoods are warped, as they have no way to access their feelings or connect with others. Tom is a sulky good-for-nothing and gets involved in a crime in an effort to pay off gambling debts. Louisa is unhappy when she follows her mind, not her heart, and marries Mr. Bounderby, her father's friend. As a result of her unhappy marriage, she is later swept off her feet by a young gentleman, Mr. James "Jem" Harthouse, who comes to stay with them and who seems to understand and love her. Louisa nearly comes to ruin by running off with Harthouse.
Cecilia (Sissy) Jupe was encouraged when she was little to dream and imagine and loved her father dearly, and therefore she is in touch with her heart and feelings, and has empathy and emotional strength the other children lack. Sissy, adopted by the Gradgrinds when her father abandons her, ultimately is the savior of the family in the end.
According to my point of view both are needed for life.
2) At the end of the story who wins?
*End of the story:
In the industrial city of Coketown, Josiah Bounderby is a rich and fairly obnoxious factory owner and banker. He loves to tell everyone he meets about how he grew up in the gutter, abused by a drunken grandmother. He is friends with Thomas Gradgrind, a rich politician and an education reformer in whose school students only learn about facts. Gradgrind's own children, Tom and Louisa, also grow up in this system. The kids are forbidden to be creative or imaginative or to have too many feelings. Gradgrind is basically trying to make kids into robots, with predictably bad results.
When a traveling circus show comes to Coketown, one of the clowns abandons his daughter, Sissy Jupe, there. Gradgrind takes her in as a servant. She is a natural, happy, not particularly robotic girl, and his system does not seem to make too much of a dent in her good nature.
Louisa and Tom grow up (well, not really – she is nineteen and he is seventeen, but everything happened faster back in the day, especially for robot-children). Gradgrind basically gives both of them to Bounderby. Tom works for him as a bank clerk, and poor Louisa ends up marrying the guy. Oh, did we mention that he's a nasty and annoying? And that Louisa is grossed out by the sight of him? And that he has been really creepily waiting to marry her? Let's all say it together now – ewwwww. But, obviously Gradgrind thinks everything is fine – because since when do robots care about that kind of thing?
Sissy Jupe and Rachael are worried about Stephen and try to find him. Taking a walk across the countryside they stumble on him (literally) lying almost dead in a huge well dug by some factory owner and not marked in any way. He is fished out, pleads his innocence about the robbery, and dies. Yes, sorry, no happy ending for the only decent guy in the whole book. Tom flees, and Louisa and Gradgrind realize that he is the bank robber, and that the only hope is to smuggle him out of the country. Tom hides as a clown in the same circus where Sissy's father used to work. When Gradgrind confronts him, Tom tells his father that political economy made him into a thief, and if he hadn't stolen the money, someone else would have.
Just as Gradgrind is about to put him aboard ship, the family is discovered by one of Gradgrind's old students, Bitzer. Bitzer is quite the economist and refuses to be swayed by Gradgrind's begging to let them go. After all, Bitzer has learned only to advance his own self-interest, which at this point indicates that he should capture Tom to get the probable reward. This is the final nail in the coffin of Gradgrind's educational theory. Still, the circus guys help Tom get away.
In the end, Bounderby dies of some kind of fit in the street. Gradgrind lives to old age and tries to undo the damage he did to his children. Louisa remains unmarried and childless (which is a pretty severe punishment back in those days). Tom eventually feels bad about being so awful, but has to remain abroad. Rachael lives out her life taking care of Stephen's drunken widow. Sissy gets married, has children, and seems to be the only light in everyone's lives.
So we can say that fiction wins at the end of the novel.
3) Do you find any similarity between Louisa and Stephen ?
Louisa is the protagonist of the novel while Stephen is poor person who works in the factory is Bounderby. Dickens shows some similarities between these two characters and tells about both in parallel structure.Thomas (Tom) Gradgrind, Junior is the oldest son and second child of the Gradgrinds. Initially sullen and resentful of his father's Utilitarian education, Tom has a strong relationship with his sister Louisa. He works in Bounderby's bank (which he later robs), and turns to gambling and drinking. Louisa never ceases to adore Tom, and she aids Sissy and Mr. Gradgrind in saving her brother from arrest.
Stephen Blackpool is a worker at one of Bounderby's mills. He has a drunken wife who no longer lives with him but who appears from time to time. He forms a close bond with Rachael, a co-worker, whom he wishes to marry. After a dispute with Bounderby, he is dismissed from his work at the Coketown mills and, shunned by his former fellow workers, is forced to look for work elsewhere. While absent from Coketown, he is wrongly accused of robbing Bounderby's bank. On his way back to vindicate himself, he falls down a mine-shaft. He is rescued but dies of his injuries.
In the structure of the novel Louisa's story alternates and contrasts with Stephen's. Louisa's questions to Sissy about Sissy's parents and their marriage were answered not only by the young girl's description of their compatible and happy marriage but also both by contrast and repetition in the two following chapters in which Stephen tells Bounderby about his own miserable marriage and wish for a divorce and then fantasizes about an ideal marriage with Rachael. More metaphorically, Stephen's subsequent murderous thoughts about his wife are followed by Louisa's capitulation to Bounderby's "criminal" proposal.
Louisa and Stephen are further linked to Tom's betrayal of them both, while Tom's robbery of the bank acts out retribution on Bounderby for him, his sister, and Stephen (and also substitutes for Harthouse's intent to "rob" Bounderby of his wife). However, in a crucial scene in which the three are brought together by Louisa, Tom displaces his guilt and perhaps his sister's, too, onto Stephen.
Another connection between Stephen and Louisa is in their equally dreadful if quite different marriages. Stephen and Louisa's responses to their bad marriages are similar: both turn to sympathetic others though they both resist acting on the needs and desires released in them by these others. The four illustrations for the novel reflect this linking of Louisa and Stephen in their responses to their marriages: two are of Harthouse, Louisa's would be lover; a third is of Stephen and Rachael with Stephen's wife, who is reaching out from the bed curtains for the poison.
So ,in this novel we can see many similarities between two characters.
4) At the end of the story who survives ? Or who wins ? Louisa's father or Sissy jupe
Sissy is the daughter of a circus performer, who comes to live with the Gradgrinds as a servant when her father abandons her. She is naturally good and emotionally healthy, so the Gradgrind philosophy doesn't affect her, and she is able to take care of Louisa and to arrange Tom's escape. At the end of the novel, she is the only character who gets a happy ending of marriage and children.
Sissy is the main force for good in the novel. She is kind, caring, and loving. In the face of being abandoned by her father and then being forced to learn the Gradgrind philosophy, she never stops being the only grounding, emotionally positive force in Coketown. In a way, she is similar to another one of Dickens's favorite character types, the perfect young woman who selflessly takes care of other people.
But in this novel, Sissy is also a messenger from the land of imagination, creativity, and selfless actions.
Sissy, like Bounderby, is an interesting contradiction. She is obviously tied to the circus, to entertainment, to the life of the imagination. But she is also clearly one of the more realistic and matter-of-fact characters in the novel. The reason she can't deal with most of things Gradgrind's school is trying to teach her is that they are so abstract. Gradgrind's policies don't make any actual sense despite being logical . Think about when Sissy tells Louisa about her mistakes in school. They are all intersections of economic theory. They're clearly meant to be Sissy's more reasonable, human interpretations of what the world is actually like. For instance, when questioned about how very unimportant a few deaths in a thousand people are, she pretty sensibly answers that to the families of those dead people, those deaths are actually quite significant indeed.
At the end of the story With Sissy's help, Tom hides in Sleary's circus as a clown. Tom's father, sister, and Sissy come to get him on board a ship sailing abroad to escape. He is captured by Bitzer, but Sleary's people pull an awesome heist to free him and send him off.
So ,sissy win at the end of the story.
5) This novel talk's about marriage low, divorce low , why there are different rules for different class? Why there is no equality in rules and regulation?
* Marriage and divorce in the story :
A statement on the religious morals of 19 th century British society. The Victorian era in England gave birth to the first real industrial society the world had ever seen.
Oppressive laws and working conditions set clear boundaries between classes in England .The most oppressive social and state laws were those regarding to marriages and divorce.
* Rules and regulations:
When a woman got married ,she gave up all her rights to her husband. The husband controlled all assets in the marriage , including any assets his wife may have had before the marriage.
There are no happy marriages in Hard Times. In Stephen's case, it focuses instead on a missed opportunity for true companionship. In the case of the Gradgrinds, you've got an entirely intellectually unequal match where spouses are indifferent to each other. Then there's a loveless disaster where husband and wife grow to hate each other in the case of Louisa and Bounderby. The only happy unions are mythic, have occurred in the past, or are just barely implied, as in the case of the Jupes or Sissy .
6) Did this title justify this work ? Can you illustrate the title with help of character's life ?
The title is apt and significant in so far as it hints at the industrial crisis too. Dickens ' thesis is that the hard times are man - made. In an industrialized town like Coketown , it is the inhumanity of industrialists like Bounderby who is culpable for the sorry scheme of things . In this trying time of civilization every worker is just a ' hand ', a soulless subhuman creature to whom even smoke is healthy. Bounderby has not the slightest regard for ' humbugging sentiments ' of his workers whom he equates with machines:
“So many Hundred Hands in this mill, so
Many horse - o steam power:"
Dickens' points is that' the 19th century business ethos laissez faire proposed and practiced by the utilitarian economies spawned a nightmarish time of the civilization. So hard was the time that in the ' impassable world ' of Bounderby everything was fact between the lying in hospital and the cemetery '. No wonder that Bounder by makes love to Louisa in the form of bracelets and the hours of his cold, superannuated romance are perfectly punctual " The deadly statistical recorder in the Gradgrind observatory knocked every second on the head as it was boon and buried it with his accustomed regularity. " Gradgrind by the imperfect utility calculus man ceases to be a man.
The title has a bearing of many. The details indicate that humanity is jawing through a very edificial face. Sissy's father has some how fallen on hard times for his performance is no longer flawless. He has lately seen missing tips, falling short in his tips and found bad in his tumbling. Stephen Blackpool has also his hard times. He is a persecuted husband who cannot divorce his wife given to drink and vile life style. The word and time look inimical to all his innocent wages. The muddled situation he is bogged down in is one of unrelieved gloom. There is the cruel and blind criminal law to punish him if he hurts his wife or flees from her - or marriages his ' good angel ' Rachael or simply lives with her with out marriage in case the divorce is not granted. Stephen can only burst out in anger:
“This a muddle. It is just a muddle a ' together and the sooner I am dead the better '.
Thus the present title of the novel is highly appropriate, for the novel not merely diagnosis the causes of educational and socio-economic crisis, but somberly draws the dismally bleak hard times which are but an out come of them.
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