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He was born in 1812

He had an unhappy childhood.

His father was imprisoned for debt.

Charles was removed from school and sent to work in a blacking factory.

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He was on the side of the poor, the outcast, the working-class.

He is one of the first writers to talk about the lowest classes.

He is the writer who best described the social problems of the new industrialisation.

He visited the north and experienced the impact of industrialisation.

He was shocked by the working and living conditions he saw. As a consequence he wrote HARD TIMES.

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The narrator is omniscient and obtrusive: he provides comments.

He uses meaningful names.

STYLE

Repetitions of words , phrases, structures and massive use of adjectives , similes , metaphor , exaggerations or hyperboles and ironic remarks .

He makes use of irony and satire (no sarcasm).

The text describes the town of Coketown (an imaginary industrial town) in the mid 19th century.

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HARD TIMES is Dickens's most polemical novel.

It denounces industrialisation, which had caused the gap between the rich and the poor, and between factory owners and their workers, who were forced to work long hours for low pay in dirty, noisy and dangerous factories.

The novel also criticises materialism and Bentham's Utilitarianism, which claimed that human nature was motivated by self-interest, and that it was the duty of the state, through education, to support and encourage each individual to pursue their own interests.

HARD TIMES suggests that 19th-century England was turning human beings into machines by repressing the development of their emotions and creativity.

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disegna la città di hard time di dickens

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He is an educator, a teacher who founded his own school. He believes in facts , in common sense and reason.

He is materialistic and narrow-minded.

Education, according to him, must be abstract and rigid/strict. No space for creativity.

Human nature can be only measured and quantified through facts.

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Mr Gradgrind educates his own two children, Louisa and Tom, and the children of his school through facts.

He believes that human nature can be governed and measured by reason, no space for feeling and imagination.

That’s why he marries his daughter to Mr Bounderby, a friend of his, and a very rich banker 30 years older than her.

Louisa accepted because she wishes to help her brother, who is given a job by Bounderby. Her marriage will be unhappy (no feeling) and her brother will be obliged to leave the country after robbing the bank where he works.

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SETTING : It’s a wild (a jungle) and irrational place.

USE OF SENSES:

Machinery and tall chimneys producing interminable serpents of smoke ( metafor)

black canal and purple river

the water is smelling because of the presence of a substance used for colouring

windows and machinery , they all look the same ( alienation)

People equally like one another  who do the same actions, the same work.

The products of the industry, however, contributed to the luxury and elegance and comfort  of the lives of the rich all over the world