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Name: Amrin Nahar

Roll no.: 40 Department: ENGA Semester: 4

Analyze the Expository Features of Chapter one of Hard Times.

In Hard Times, Dickens has constructed an almost entirely mechanized world of people,
ideals and environments. This suggests that the natural and corresponding counterpart always
needs to fight for its self-preservation among characters’ perceptions and within settings.
Dickens applies mechanical and natural time perceptions and descriptions in the novel in
order to express his opinions and disapproval for the industrial society. The novel contrasts
mechanical and natural time and, by doing so, this contrast calls attention to the dangers of
industrialization. The dominating values and beliefs present in the novel are meant to imply
an understanding of the appalling consequences, in some way or another, of industrialisation
which clearly has its beginning from the first chapter itself. A critic has expressed his
understanding of the literary achievement in question as follows: “Hard Times […] is
Dickens’ attack upon the System by which the claims of individual human beings are
trampled in a general mêlée.” (Hobsbaum, 187). This system from the very beginning is the
social and environmental setting which the characters live in; it is created by a philosophy
that adds fuel to sustain the advancement of industrialization. The philosophy mirrors the
mechanical characteristics of industrialisation and hence expresses the great importance of
mechanical perceptions such as objective utilitarianism and factual statistics especially when
Gradgrind talks about the need for facts alone in life in chapter 1 of the novel. The
mechanization of life in general is a threatening and somewhat evil crime which is always
present in Hard Times, and, as often as not, is repeatedly elucidated by the moral authority of
the intrusive narrator. The first chapter paves the way for these thoughts to build up as the
story progresses. From the very beginning of the novel it has also been observed that: […] it
is not only the narrator [Dickens] who mechanizes his characters; there are also a number of
characters in his novels who treat other characters like objects or animals, thereby depriving
them of their human dignity.
In the beginning of the novel, in an empty schoolroom, a dark-eyed, rigid man, Thomas
Gradgrind emphatically expresses to the schoolmaster and another adult, how they should
think and reason. “Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” Gradgrind’s
philosophy includes the idea that people should only act according to their own best interests,
which they can calculate through rational principles, the actions of the simple. He presents
the argument that the formation of a child's mind must be rooted in the study of fact. The
schoolroom is as hard and plain as the teacher's teaching style. He tells them that facts alone
are wanted in life and, together with the schoolmaster and a third person present, he “[…]
swept with [his] eyes the inclined plane of little vessels, then and there arranged in order
[…]”. When thinking of the children as vessels Mr Gradgrind objectifies them as small 3
gearwheels in a greater machinery. In other words, he does not see the children as human
other than in their biology and simply as empty containers ready to have “facts poured into
them until they were full to the brim”. The mechanical perception of life is, also shared with
our appreciation of time, since they are intimately connected. But for the purposes of Hard
Times, these ideas serve as a kind of shorthand for the state of mind that enable certain kinds
of action further into the novel. Cold rationalism divorced from sentiment and feeling can
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Name: Amrin Nahar
Roll no.: 40 Department: ENGA Semester: 4

lead to insensitivity about human suffering, and this is the thought that the first chapter
creates the base for.

Gradgrind’s philosophy of fact is intimately related to the Industrial Revolution, a cause of

the mechanization of human nature. The very beginning with facts, Dickens suggests that
when humans are forced to perform the same monotonous tasks repeatedly, in a drab,
incessantly noisy, and smoky environment, they become like the machines with which they
work—unfeeling and not enlivened by fancy. This first section serves mainly to introduce
the contrast between fact and fancy and to establish the allegiances of the main characters.
From the very first paragraph, Mr. Gradgrind is established as the leading disciple of fact, but
he is also shown to be a loving, if deluded, father. It opens with a detailed and repulsive
physical description of Mr. Gradgrind, indicating to the reader that what this man says about
facts being important above all else is not to be trusted, is likely to result in producing adults
who are scary and hard-looking like him.

The speaker is instructing the schoolteacher on how to instruct and this adds to the irony and
deliberate confusion of the short scene. The Speaker's anonymity, the power of his voice, and
his pointed "square forefinger" all combine as a symbol of a man with God-like authority. No
one teaches the children, but the Speaker plays schoolteacher to the schoolteacher; and he is
the only one who speaks. There is no dialogue in the chapter, only the Speaker's reiterations
and the bystanders' silent assent. The role of power in education is a theme that is treated
throughout the novel, and the balance between leisure and diligence is definitely dependent
upon the methods of force and power demonstrated. Later chapters will expand upon another
theme that is only foreshadowed here: the wrestle between Romanticism and Utilitarianism.
Dickens does not wholly endorse the Romantic point-of-view, but with his (artistic)
livelihood potentially at stake, he does use a number of rhetorical devices to defeat the
principles of Utilitarianism. As for rhetoric, Dickens' use of absolutes and hyperbole must be
remembered; the arguments he puts into the mouths of the Utilitarian philosophers are
characteristic but they are exaggerated.

While Dickens de-personifies the Speaker (he is more of an object and a symbol than an
actual person), various objects in the schoolroom, in particular the Speaker's clothing, take on
personality and activity of their own. The Speaker's tie is "trained to take him by the throat
with an unaccommodating grasp." The Speaker has trained the tie to be as unaccommodating
as this school system. The sum of Dickens' images, from sowing to strangulation, should
clearly foreshadow the "hard times" that are ahead

The first chapter has little narrative content (only three paragraphs), but its imagery is intense.
Dickens establishes himself within a contemporary debate on the nature of learning,
knowledge and education. The description of the classroom is definitely satire, a critique of
utilitarianism, and similar philosophies that suggested the absolute reliance upon calculations
and facts in opposition to emotion, artistic inspiration and leisure.
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Name: Amrin Nahar
Roll no.: 40 Department: ENGA Semester: 4

The novel is divided into three "books" entitled Sowing, Reaping and Garnering. This
agricultural motif is introduced by the "sowing" of facts as "seeds" into the fertile minds of
the young boys and girls. "The one thing needful" is the seed of "fact" and even though the
insistence upon "hard facts" seems infertile and unyielding, the motif of sowing makes the
classroom a literal kindergarten. To be more precise, the imagery of "sowing" and
horticulture varies from the children as the planted field and the children as plants
themselves. At one point, "the Speaker" charges the instructor to "plant and root out" in order
to form the children's minds. Later, the children are described as "little vessels then and there
arranged in order," not unlike the wisps of hair on the side of the Speaker's head, humorously
described as "a plantation of firs."

The sum of Dickens' imagery contrasts the words of gardening and horticulture with the
actual scene depicted: "plain, bare, monotonous inflexible, dry and dictatorial." Dickens
means to say that there is no true sowing taking place in the "vault of a schoolroom." Against
the archetype of youth (spring, sowing, fertility), the older men are "square;" eyes are
described as having "found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the
wall." Dickens' hyperbole makes architecture out of the physical description of The Speaker
(who seems rather villain-like). Dickens wants to demonstrate that the idea of the child's
mind as a "vessel" that is "ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured" this creates adults
whose brains are described as mere "cellarage" space for facts.

The two important allusions to note are both Biblical ones: the use of the word "sowing" does
not only correspond to the old proverb "you reap what you sow" but it has a particular
resonance with Dickens' largely Protestant English audience. The second Biblical allusion is
along the same lines: one of the New Testament parables makes mention of good Christians
as "vessels" who are to be "filled" by God, much as the "dictatorial" Speaker has an "inclined
plane of little vessels" that he will fill with his "imperial gallons." Here, the Speaker's
imagery and intentions seem so superhuman and yet, misanthropic that he becomes not a
parallel but a foil of the Christian messiah (another educator) to whom Dickens alludes. The
speaker demands power without the benevolence, patience or sacrifice that is expected of the
role.

This first chapter is prefatory, and in the second, Dickens introduces the names of the
characters and their town as a further element of caricature. As we see in Chapter One,
Dickens uses tactics of suspense: withheld information (what is the geographical setting?);
foreshadowed doom ("unaccommodating grasp"); unnamed anonymous figures ("the speaker,
and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person") and a cliff-hanger at the conclusion
(literally: "the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, readyŠ").
Dickens must use suspense so that his reader will buy the next serial as the story came in
instalments to the readers. An exposition is a comprehensive description and explanation of an
idea or theory, hence after analysing the first chapter it can be said that it was a great success
in terms of its service as an exposition to the novel.
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