How Does Dickens Use the First Four Chapters of ‘hard Times'to Introduce the Characters and Themes of the Novel?

How does Dickens use the first four chapters of ‘Hard Times’ to introduce the characters and themes of the novel?

Charles Dickens wrote ‘Hard Times’ in 1854. He had a number of reasons for writing it. Firstly, he wished to educate readers about the working conditions of some of the factories in the industrial towns. He wanted to demonstrate how appallingly the affluent factory workers treated the poverty-stricken working people. This is an issue Dickens felt strongly about, as he himself was forced to work in a blacking warehouse at the age of twelve, when his father was imprisoned for non-payment of debt. Relating to this also, Dickens wished to expose the assumption that wealth runs parallel to morality, something that is cruelly shattered in this novel, due to his portrayal of the moral monster, Mr. Bounderby. Dickens was also campaigning for the importance of imagination in life, and not for people's life to be reduced to a collection of material facts and statistical analysis. Dickens' favourable portrayal of the Circus, who he describes as caring so 'little for Plain Fact', is an example of this.

In Chapter 1, we are introduced to Mr Thomas Gradgrind, the headmaster at the school. Gradgrind is a utilitarian who is the founder of the educational system in Coketown. The characters' names are almost always an immediate indication of where the character fits on Dickens' moral spectrum. Thomas Gradgrind, "a man of realities" is a hard educator who grinds his students through a factory-like process, hoping to produce graduates (grads). 'Eminently practical' is Gradgrind's recurring description throughout the novel, and practicality is something he zealously aspires to. Gradgrind repeats the word “facts” several times in the first chapter, emphasising the great importance he has given to analytical, logical, mathematical learning. From the very beginning, Dickens establishes himself within a contemporary debate on the nature of learning, knowledge and education. The description of the classroom is definitely satire, a critique of utilitarianism, and similar philosophies that suggested a reliance upon calculations and facts in opposition to emotion, art and leisure.

In Chapter 2, Gradgrind’s confrontation with the character Cecilia Jupe is also interesting. The major theme of the chapter can be easily inferred from Dickens' description of Cecilia in the classroom. The "horses" and carpeted "flowers" are symbolic of her femininity and youth, but most importantly, Cecilia represents art in opposition to mechanization. It is also hinted that Grandgrind’s mathematical, calculated mental approach has pervaded his physical when Dickens describes him as “square”. Dickens is not arguing against education, science or progress, he is arguing against a mode of factory-style, mind-numbing production. However, even more importantly than the loss of "fun" or "leisure," Dickens is arguing that art requires an inquisitive and sharp mind. In this chapter, we are also introduced to the ludicrously-named Mr. McChoakumchild, a character that chokes the creative life out of children. While the students are not literally in danger, their childish imagination has been targeted for extermination. Dickens also uses colour to emphasise a character’s mental and physical well-being here as he describes Cecilia Jupe as receiving a “deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her”. However, for a character such as Bitzer, who has been drained of all imagination and creativity, the sun is said to “draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed”. Through his writing, Dickens also predicts that whoever is being targeted and singled out (Cecilia Jupe and her imagination) will ultimately escape this tyrant, but other innocents will be less fortunate (Bitzer).

When Louisa is first introduced, in Chapter 3, the narrator explains that inside her is a “fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow.” This description suggests that although Louisa seems coldly rational, she has not succumbed entirely to her father’s prohibition against wondering and imagining. The fact that Grandgrind finds his children