Summary of Hard Times and Character Sketch of Mr. Gradgrind
Name:
divya parmar
Paper:
104 Literature of The Victorians
Roll no: 05
Enrollment no:
4069206420210024
Email id:
Batch:
2021-2023(M. A sem 1)
Submitted to:
S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja krishnakumarsinhji bhavnagar University.
Summary of hard times
'Hard Time for These Time' is the Novel by Charles Dickens. During Victorian age there were lots of influence of industialism and machanism. Dehumanise become the part of the society and Charles Dickens do stairs by his work.
Hard Times is an 1854 novel by English author Charles Dickens. Taking place in three parts named after a Biblical verse, “Sowing,” “Reaping,” and “Garnering,” it satirizes English society by picking apart the social and economic ironies of its contemporary life. The novel takes place in a fictional industrial town in Northern England called Coketown, modeled partially on Manchester. The novel is best known for its pessimism regarding the state of trade unions and the exploitation of the working class by capitalist elites.
Book 1, “Sowing,” begins from the point of view of school superintendent Mr. Gradgrind. An exacting educator, he interrogates a student named Sissy, revealing his inclination to punish students who are unable to speak strictly in facts. His two sons are named after famous thinkers, Malthus and Adam Smith, and his daughter is named Jane. Gradgrind’s friend Josiah Bounderby is a rich mill owner who constantly reflects on the fruits of his difficult childhood and unshakable entrepreneurial spirit. The two convene and decide to expel Sissy because they think she is disrupting the school. However, they learn that her father has orphaned her in the belief that she might lead a better life without his influence. Mr. Gradgrind offers Sissy, who wants to join the circus, a chance to return to school to work for his wife. She decides on school in the hope that she will find her father again.
Other characters important to the novel include Stephen Blackpool, a mill worker who struggles with a marriage to an alcoholic wife whom he cannot leave; and Mrs. Sparsit, the assistant to Bounderby who rebuffs Blackpool’s appeal to Gradgrind for advice. Louisa is proposed to by Bounderby and ambivalently accepts. Her rother Tom arrives to say farewell as she leaves for Lyon.
"Reaping” begins at Bounderby’s bank in the middle of Coketown. One of Sissy’s classmates, Bitzer, has teamed up with Mrs. Sparsit to watch over it after dark. A man appears and asks for the way to Bounderby’s, claiming he has come from London at the request of Gradgrind. He introduces himself as James Harthouse. Harthouse meets Bounderby who tries to impress him with absurd stories about his youth, boring him. However, he is infatuated with Louisa, whose brother Tom now works under Bounderby.
Later, a union meeting assembles where the activist Slackridge announces that Blackpool is a traitor for refusing to be part of the union. Bounderby scapegoats Blackpool for the uproar, firing him. Louisa and Tom meet Blackpool, giving him pity money, while Tom asks him to meet him at the bank after his shift. As he does, a robbery occurs in the bank; Blackpool is accused of being the criminal. Meanwhile, Mrs. Sparsit is suspicious of the relationship between Louisa and Harthouse, believing it is adulterous. She follows Louisa on her way to her father’s home but loses her. Louisa faints at her father’s doorstep after an incoherent statement about her repressed emotions.
"Garnering” begins at Bounderby’s London hotel. Mrs. Sparsit informs him of her mistaken finding that Louisa and Harthouse are lovers. Bounderby goes with her to Louisa’s residence at Stone Lodge, where Gradgrind insists that Louisa is not in love with Harthouse, and had merely fainted after a personal crisis. Bounderby grows angry with Mrs. Sparsit, delivering an ultimatum that Louisa return immediately lest he calls off the marriage. Louisa ignores his demand. Sissy tells Harthouse to leave Coketown forever, while Bounderby suspects that Louise and Tom are plotting against him.
One Sunday, Sissy and Rachael come upon Stephen trapped in a pit, having fallen into it on the way to Coketown. A group of locals pulls him out, but he dies after stating his innocence. The two women now suspect Tom of robbing the bank and framing Stephen. Sissy regrets having helped Tom escape to the circus. They go there and find him wearing blackface. Gradgrind appears, working with the circus owner, Sleary, to help Tom escape to Liverpool, from where he will leave the country. Blitzer valiantly arrives, throwing off the plot in an attempt to arrest Tom, inadvertently allowing Tom to escape.
At the end of the novel, Bounderby fires Mrs. Sparsit for her many mistakes. The narrator projects into the characters’ future lives, stating that Bounderby will die on the street of an unknown affliction. Mr. Gradgrind will become a political outcast, Tom will perish in America after apologizing to Louisa. Louisa never marries again; she will live a life of charity and kindness, and will have a happy and imaginative life with Sissy’s children. Hard Times, though almost all of its many characters face despair, suggests that the actions of individuals deeply affect even the distant futures of their lives.
Character of Mr. Gradgriend:
Thomas Gradgrind is the first character we meet in Hard Times, and one of the central figures through whom Dickens weaves a web of intricately connected plotlines and characters. Dickens introduces us to this character with a description of his most central feature: his mechanized, monotone attitude and appearance. The opening scene in the novel describes Mr. Gradgrind’s speech to a group of young students, and it is appropriate that Gradgrind physically embodies the dry, hard facts that he crams into his students’ heads. The narrator calls attention to Gradgrind’s “square coat, square legs, square shoulders,” all of which suggest Gradgrind’s unrelenting rigidity.
In the first few chapters of the novel, Mr. Gradgrind expounds his philosophy of calculating, rational self-interest. He believes that human nature can be governed by completely rational rules, and he is “ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you what it comes to.” This philosophy has brought Mr. Gradgrind much financial and social success. He has made his fortune as a hardware merchant, a trade that, appropriately, deals in hard, material reality. Later, he becomes a Member of Parliament, a position that allows him to indulge his interest in tabulating data about the people of England. Although he is not a factory owner, Mr. Gradgrind evinces the spirit of the Industrial Revolution insofar as he treats people like machines that can be reduced to a number of scientific principles.
While the narrator’s tone toward him is initially mocking and ironic, Gradgrind undergoes a significant change in the course of the novel, thereby earning the narrator’s sympathy. When Louisa confesses that she feels something important is missing in her life and that she is desperately unhappy with her marriage, Gradgrind begins to realize that his system of education may not be perfect. This intuition is confirmed when he learns that Tom has robbed Bounderby’s bank. Faced with these failures of his system, Gradgrind admits, “The ground on which I stand has ceased to be solid under my feet.” His children’s problems teach him to feel love and sorrow, and Gradgrind becomes a wiser and humbler man, ultimately “making his facts and figures subservient to Faith, Hope and Charity.”
Character of sissy jupe:
Sissy is the daughter of a circus performer, who comes to live with the Gradgrinds as a servant when her father abandons her. She is naturally good and emotionally healthy, so the Gradgrind philosophy doesn't affect her, and she is able to take care of Louisa and to arrange Tom's escape. At the end of the novel, she is the only character who gets a happy ending of marriage and children.
Sissy is the main force for good in the novel. She is kind, caring, and loving. In the face of being abandoned by her father and then being forced to learn the Gradgrind philosophy, she never stops being the only grounding, emotionally positive force in Coketown. In a way, she is similar to another one of Dickens's favorite character types, the perfect young woman who selflessly takes care of other people. Check out Esther in Bleak House, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit, Lizzie in Our Mutual Friend… OK, there are a lot of them. Take our word for it.
But in this novel, Sissy is also a messenger from the land of imagination, creativity, and selfless actions. For instance, all three are combined when she cheers up her father after a hard day in the circus ring by reading him fairy tales about ogres and giants. What's more, everyone else in the novel is so weirdly screwed up, that the reader is always hugely relieved whenever Sissy appears, because finally someone normal is going to say some normal things in a normal way about all the craziness going on.
And yet Sissy, like Bounderby, is an interesting contradiction. She is obviously tied to the circus, to entertainment, to the life of the imagination. But she is also clearly one of the more realistic and matter-of-fact characters in the novel. The reason she can't deal with most of things Gradgrind's school is trying to teach her is that they are so abstract. Gradgrind's policies don't make any actual sense despite being logical (well, to a Utilitarianist, anyway). Think about when Sissy tells Louisa about her mistakes in school. They are all intersections of economic theory. They're clearly meant to be Sissy's more reasonable, human interpretations of what the world is actually like. For instance, when questioned about how very unimportant a few deaths in a thousand people are, she pretty sensibly answers that to the families of those dead people, those deaths are actually quite significant indeed.
Word count: 1695
Resources :
https://www.booksummary.net/hard-times-charles-dickens/
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