Essay --

Set in the ever changing piece of the Industrial Revolution, Charles Dickens novel heavy(a) Timesbegins with a exposition of a utilitarian paradise, a world that follows a prescribed descend of logic every last(predicate)y laid-out facts, created by the illustrious and eminently practical Mr. Gradgrind. However, one shortly realizes that Gradgrinds utopia is only a simulacrum, belied by the devastation of lives devoid of elements that feed the ticker and soul, as wholesome as the mind. As the years fly by, the weaknesses of Gradgrinds guardedly 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 shatter of Gradgrinds utilitarian world, tells us that no methods, non even constant subjugation and abuse, can defeat and overcome two basic needs of humans, our ingrained needs for emotion and imagination. Louisa, Mr. Gradgrinds favorite child, the paragon of his factual regime, leads a disjointed and embittered life which ends in a showdown between the ideologies of facts and fancy. She is a blossoming 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 confused 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 disadvantaged 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 psyche 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 at long last result in c haos and woe for all those subjected 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 field of study how strict and scurrilous 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 body thwarted or strives to fulfill and complete their lives determines who each person becomes.