CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY
HOMEWORKS
CHARLES DICKENS, HARD TIMES, The definition of a horse, 1854
The extract is taken from Hard Times a novel written by Charles Dickens.
The novel takes place in Coketown an imaginary industrial city. It mirrors the social and economical condition of the contemporary time of the writer.The industrial city of Coketown is a place dominated by grim factories and oppressed by coils of black smoke, the dark-eyed where a rigid man named Thomas Gradgrindhas established a school. He has hired a teacher, Mr. McChoakumchild, whom he hopes will instill in the students nothing but cold, hard facts. Visiting the school, Gradgrind tests a pair of students by asking them to define a horse. Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a horse-riding circus entertainer, is unable to answer, but a pale young man called Bitzer gives a cut-and-dried definition that pleases Gradgrind.
The intelligent reader can divide the text in four sequences. The first sequence has the function to describe and introduce the teacher who will probably be one of the main character of the extract. He is presented as a methodical and precise person who sets his life only on facts and everything is based on a precise scale of importance. This kind of though is evidenced by the will of the teacher on being called sir. This makes the reader understand that there is a total division between his and his students that goes over the respect.There is also an initial reference to the education process as regards Dickens’s time: students were seen as little pitchers who were to be filled so full of facts.Students are totally depersonalized and the same thing appends to the teacher, who is compared to a cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts.It imposes a depersonalized relationship and a teaching directed to the remembering of facts.
The second is a dialogical sequence that presents the conversation between the teacher and a female student. The problem of depersonalization of the students and of the teacher continues in the dialogue presenting the identification by number: the girl is called the girl twenty, so she has no possibility to be recognized as a person. In a second time, she is deprived of its own nickname Silly, which is replaced with the proper name, Cecilia. this action makes collapse every possibility to found a relationship between the girl and her teacher or parents.In nineteenth-century society, the personal relationship is seen only in economic terms. The definition of a horse appears here for the first time because of the work done by the female student’s father. The teacher pretends it and it is considered a test of basic knowledge. The female student does not answer, she possessed no facts, so the definition is asked to another student, a boy that is no called while an identification number but with his proper name.
The third sequence is another descriptive sequence that has the function to introduce the reader two new character: two student, one boy and one girl. Here the writer underlines the differences between male and female gender. The first and most important difference is that the by has a proper identification and name while the girl is non-identified. The demarcation with the previous student allows the reader to notice the different view of men and women at the time. Moreover the class is described as divided into two groups: males and females are separated in two compact bodies. The different attention given to the first is given also by the much space used for the description of the boy, revealing the sexist character of the nineteenth-century English society. The third sequence highlight another time the themes of depersonalization: students are only containers to be filled with information and are treated according to the principles of a capitalist and a sexist society.
Last but not least we find another dialogue in the fourth sequence between the teacher and the male student where the reader can find the humiliation of the girl that was unable to answer the question about the definition of a horse. on the contrary the definition of the boy was very detailed and scientific; the horse is only an object of study and not a living being.
There there is the conclusion go the extract that defines the main features of the English society where Dickens lives. the intelligent reader can notice that it is based on impersonal relationship, personal relationships were permitted only in economy. Another important feature is education: it was seeing as mere learning and memorizing of facts and data. it seems that it would create robot and not human. For this reason the english society of Dickens’s time is based on the gain and it is considered the start for the capitalist point of view of the today Western society. it also has a sexist component that now is going slowly to drop.