Charles Dickens Builds a Portrait Essay

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Bounderby, as a manipulative, dishonest, self-centered industrialist, and Gradgrind, as a sincere but misguided follower of the Industrialists' program, rule the world for their own benefit and the benefit of their philosophy. Bounderby is characterized as a villain who sucks the lifeblood from his workers to enrich only himself He is a man who ultimately even turns away from his wife and mother and anyone else of consequence in his life just to make a dollar. Gradgrind, who later has a change of heart and turns away from his insistence on facts, once his beloved daughter confronts him about the unhappiness of her childhood raised on such a program, seems to give himself to the ideology of capitalism because he thinks it is inevitable. Only in Blackpool, a character who suffers at the hands of both the owners and his fellow workers because he is too honest to do otherwise, does the story get a representative in the industrialist struggle who seems to be approaching heroic. His tragic death in the end for reasons that were beyond his control but also not his fault, suggests that the worker is the ultimate loser in a material sense in the Industrial Revolution, even if everyone loses in the spiritual sense.

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Other characters in the story are also representative of problems which Dickens saw in industrialist society, including Harthouse, the amoral, bored aristocract, Louisa the oppressed and overlooked feminist, and Sissy, the decent but misunderstood keeper of the flame of imagination in a time of facts. Through the use of characters and the roles they play in the plot, Dickens shows the Industrial Revolution to be both immoral and illogical. Blackpool's fellow workers abused him just as much as the owners did because he wouldn't join their union, but this was somehow shown to be acceptable. Bounderby ultimately attacked Gradgrind, even though he had always been his most faithful supporter. None of the relationships make much sense because the characters are all operating under the auspices of a guiding philosophy that has separated them from their true nature. Such is the result of living in a world where money is the answer and factual questions are the only ones….....

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