Hard Times demonstrates the importance of emotional as well as intellectual growth.

For a person to be well developed and achieve happiness in life, a well-rounded education and upbringing is pertinent. Without imagination and grace, it is easy for a person to become lost or worse, cold and empty a result. Development of the intellect is important for a successful career later in life, but ignorance of the need for imagination andcreativity only creates incomplete and emotionally damaged human beings. In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, he demonstrates the importance of beauty and imagination in the lives of children as a factor in determining their happiness and ability to do well in life. Those who care only for factual education, however, and ignore emotional development will turn out to be cold and heartless human beings.

When facts alone are cared for in life, and emotionally development suppressed, the outcome can mean human beings who are unable to achieve happiness and whose well-beings are scarred.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Charles Dickens, a former resident of Lant Street.

Copy of Sketch of Charles Dickens

Dickens demonstrates through the characters of Louisa and Tom Gradgrind that when ‘facts alone are wanted in life’, the result can be disastrous indeed. Louisa has a disposition to wonder and be imaginative, but she is instructed to ‘never wonder’ from childhood and thus is suppressed early on. With ‘a light with nothing to rest upon, and a fire with nothing to burn’, she is emotionally starved and later becomes a ‘cold impassive and proud’ person. Without having developed her emotional side, Louisa enters into a Loveless marriage, where it is all ‘transaction from first to last’. Without the cushion of better judgement for her feelings, she breaks down after being seduced by James Harthouse, and runs away to her father, condemning him for his methods of upbringing. She is unable to know her own heart, whether she loves Harthouse or not, and is consequently miserable as...