Women and Education in Hard Times Book Review

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In Hard Times, Charles Dickens makes the commentary that young people need more than just “facts” in order to be considered educated.  The narrow-minded headmaster who opens the book by insisting on facts and “nothing but facts” (Dickens 1) serves as the symbol of a narrow-minded modern world devoid of soul.  For Dickens, women often represent the beauty and grace of a soul filled with life and creativity.  Yet it is this life and creativity that is driven out of the soul by the arrival of Industrialization and its brutal textile mills where women and child were forced to work by the “hard times” of the age’s social and economic conditions.  Dickens himself characterized these mills as “dark” and “satanic” (Tuttle).  In Victorian England, Charles Dickens was showing his readers that young people needed more than facts and mills:  they needed to have their hearts and minds educated and their characters formed.

Women play a significant role in the formation of the heart and mind in many of Dickens’ works.  In Hard Times, the soul is represented by Louisa, who is stifled by the insufferable education under her father Gradgrind, and Sissy, who resists this same education and sets out for the circus to find her father.  Louisa listlessly consents to a marriage to an old mill proprietor.  Her emotions and affection, nearly killed by her soul-crushing education, leave her in a faint at her father’s feet, a symbol of how his own actions have been working to kill the soul of London and how the actions of his friend, Louisa’s old husband, have been doing essentially the same thing.

Gradgrind is converted and abandons his utilitarian philosophy of education and Louisa and Sissy go on to have meaningful lives, with Sissy becoming a mother (a creative act), whose children love Louisa for her kindness (love of soul), and Louisa encouraging and promoting creativity and imagination as her life’s work.  Thus, Dickens shows that the only happy ending that Victorian London can have for itself is if it returns to the soul, appreciates creativity, beauty and imagination, and gives up its foolish pursuit of “facts” as though human beings were mere machines that could be programmed.

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  The characters in Hard Times prove that human beings are not machines, but have hearts and minds that feel, sacrifice, help, hurt, and give. 

As Sam Stack writes, with Hard Times, Dickens “presents a critique of industrialization, utilitarianism, reason, pedagogy and the educational system of his day” (7).  What Dickens has to say about the act of education itself is that “teaching may be an artistic endeavor and that there is much more to learning than the simple acquisition of information” (Stack 8).  Information is useless if the heart and mind are not formed appropriately.  Information without heart is represented by old mill proprietor Bounderby, whose lack of soul is represented by his absent mother, who is kept away from him.  Without the presence of a real, genuine, loving woman in his life, Bounderby grows up to be a humbug.  He cares only about his mills and making money off the back-breaking labor of the poor.  As Elizabeth Pleck shows, it was the Bounderby type of Industrialist who turned child labor into the terrible thing it was in Victorian England:  prior to Industrialization, labor was less intensive, less inhumane, less destructive to the mind and soul (Pleck).

Louisa and Sissy have heart, however.  The wayward Tom is even forgiven and saved by them (and the converted Gradgrind), and sent off to America, where he becomes sorry for his sins.  Facts and information and a….....

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