A wonderful commentary on two classic books that reflect our current age. I recently saw a dramatization of “North and South” on Netflix. I highly recommend it for those who don’t like to read but want to know what the story is all about. I am sure “Hard Times” is in movie form somewhere.
Throughout the 20th century, critics regarded Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) as one of his lesser novels. It didn’t have the huge menagerie of colorful, memorable characters that most of his novels did, nor did it provide much comic relief from its hard tale..
Hard Times is back in vogue because the philosophy of its central character, Thomas Gradgrind, is back in vogue. Gradgrind is a schoolmaster and later Member of Parliament for Coketown, a stand-in for the gritty industrial city of Manchester.
Gradgrind’s philosophy is based on the famous fact-value distinction—the idea that facts are objective because they can be proved or disproved, but that values are subjective because they arise from personal feeling.
He operates a school devoted to rote memorization of facts—no games, no art or literature, no appeals to the imagination—and to a philosophy based on the ethic of rational self-interest.
It was a fundamental principle…
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