MURDERING THE INNOCENTS

This text I’m going to analyze is an extra taken from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854). So I immediately think it would be a Victorian text, and I’ll verify this hypothesis.

As regards the plot, it deals with a man, Thomas Gradgrind, who’s a professor. He’s discussing with a girl, Sissy Jupe. She’s embarrassed by his willingness and requestes,  but he doesn’t care about it. Indeed, he’s so impatient to not wait for her answers and to ask to another one. What’s more, after the other boy’s answer, he underlines Sissy’s unpreparedness.  So it comes out the use of the realism. Indeed, this implied the pathos and the grotesque. The first out emerges from the little girl, she who the reader feels pietas for. This because she’s a number before being a student and a girl, and neither her name is right for her. On the other hand, the grotesque is expressed by the professor’s figure: he’s behaviors and thoughts.Apart from this point, there are many other points that makes this extra a Victorian one.

First of all exaggerations: the professor’s figure is created as the meanest, the most demanding and the most precise one. Indeed, it’s all done with a Math’s language: the repetition of the noun square, the objectivity, and he’s preciseness in choosing the boy that is even connected to sides, corners and inclinations.  Thomas Grandgrind is as the same as the chapter II’s introduction explains. A man made by facts, nothing else. So real that he couldn’t even be compared by idealistic literature’s characters. He’s circled by scientific objects and his mind thinks in a scientific way.

Moreover there’s the modesty, that is, saying things as not as they really are, but being what they should be. For instance, the girl’s father is a man who works in a ring. But this isn’t a suitable work in the Utilitarianistic and Puritanistic’s view. So, it’s better to say that he’s a veterinary surgeon.

Then, the Industrial thought: in describing a horse it’s important to consider it’s needing of iron for his hoofs.

Last but not least, Thomas Grandgrind is the perfect character that a Victorian reader wants to compare himself to. Indeed he’s as mean as possible, without heart for a girl. Therefore, a Victorian reader should have thought: I’m not so mean, I’m not like him. In this way he would have justified himself. But the truth of course was the opposite.  And the “sir” at the beginning is like the novelist wanted to involve the reader and to make him reflect about.

So, the hypothesis has been verified.