Hard Times

Charles Dickens - Hard Times (1854)

Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, retired merchant in the industrial city of Coketown, England, devotes his life to a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and fact. He raises his oldest children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy and never allows them to engage in fanciful or imaginative pursuits. He founds a school and charitably takes in one of the students, the kindly and imaginative Sissy Jupe, after the disappearance of her father, a circus entertainer.

Themes;
- Mechanization of human beings,
- The opposition between fact and fancy,
- The importance of feminity       

Motifs;  
- Bounderby's Childhood,
- Clocks and time.

Symbols;
- Staircases,
- Pegasus,
- Smoke serpents,
- Fire.

Symbolism, Imagery and Allegory;

- Fairy palaces and elephants (a.k.a the factories and the machinery inside of them) 
- Fire, Sparks and Ashes.
- Turtle Soup, Venison and Gold Spoon. 
- Mrs Sparsit's Staircase,
- Old Hell Shaft.

Setting;
- Coketown, England in the mid-19th century, Victorian England.

The Narrator;

The narration is omnicsent (in third person.)

Question posed; Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

The novel is full of characters who are only completely unable to communicate with one another. What's more, most of them don't really even have a way of internally processing the events happening around them. Some, like Bounderby, are in total denial, while others, like Louisa, are too deeply detached from their emotions to react appropriately to anything.

Genre;

Family Drama, Literary Fiction, Philosophical Literature

Tone;

- Sarcastic, Rueful, Mocking, Authoritative, Detached.

Dickens often uses the trick of distancing readers from the characters and the plot. For instance, let's look at this description of Bounderby talking to Mrs. Gradgrind, in Book 1, Chapter 4:

"[Bounderby] stood before the fire, partly because it was a cool spring afternoon…partly because he thus took up a commanding position, from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind[…]

Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her[…]

'For years, ma'am, I was one of the most miserable little wretches ever seen. I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and groaning. I was so ragged and dirty, that you wouldn't have touched me with a pair of tongs.'

Mrs. Gradgrind faintly looked at the tongs, as the most appropriate thing her imbecility could think of doing. (1.4.5-11)"

Here, it's the narrator's voice that tells us with unquestioned authority what to make of these two people.