The present extract is taken from the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens; it deals with an ordinary lesson at school held by Mr Thomas Gradgrind, an uncompromising person. He identifies a student, called Girl number twenty (Sissy Jupe), whose father is a “farrier and horsebreaker”, commanding her to give the definition of a horse. However, taken by anxiety, she could not be able to answer and another child (Bitzer) defined the animal by means of scientific biological classifications.

Right from the start the intelligent reader notices how anaphoric and alliterative sounds, even the teacher’s surname and its suffocating repetition with different names at the end of the first paragraph, conveys the idea of a monotone and oppressive atmosphere, where the “little pitchers” are subdued to Gradgrind’s authority and his restrictive rules. This situation recalls Victorian vision of the world, according to which any reference to emotions and entertainment had to be removed.

On the other hand the psychological characterization of the “man of facts and calculations” is built thanks to elaborate and bombastic sentences, which results in a ridiculous effect on Gradgrind’s figure.

Moreover each character’s name suggests his  own personality:

• Thomas Gradgrind is a composed name, made up of grade and grind : indeed he is a hard educator who grinds his students through a factory-like process, hoping to produce graduates (grads).
• Sissy Jupe (Cecilia) is unlike is the only student identified and connoted by physical characterization thus far in the novel. Furthermore she is the single female presented, as a contrast to the row of hardened mathematical men. Her last name, "Jupe," comes from the French word for "skirts" and her first name, Cecilia, represents the sainted patroness of music.
• "Bitzer", the wiseacre pupil,  has the name of a horse; this ironically and adds to the sense of pupil being like animals.

Besides its answer seems mechanical, like if Grandgrid’s question implied a process of query in his database (his brain) which made him infer the definition in an automated way. Indeed the teacher’s way of expressing (an epigrammatic one) and his inclination to give commands forced children to repeat mechanically, as if they had to be filled with facts.

For example the homeoteleuton and the alliterative sound in the expression “blushing, standing up, curtseying” brings to surface the sense of submission of the student in respect to the figure of the teacher.

Again the use of epithet “number twenty” reinforces the hypothesis of a serial and standard education in an industrialized England: the students are mere “users” of a system trough which knowledge is instilled automatically and without any kind of amusement which, in a way or another, might have promoted a curious and funny thirst of knowledge inside the children.

Also her nickname, and the frequent connotation of Gradgrind’s “squared finger”, underlines how the narrator often resorts to numbers (Maths) and figures (Geometry) to keep ironically close to science and its teaching.

Finally the main theme here is educational process at England’s Hard Times. Gradgrind’s philosophy of fact is intimately related to the Industrial Revolution, a cause of the mechanization of human nature. Dickens suggests that when humans are forced to perform the same monotonous tasks repeatedly they become like the machines with which they work, in other words depersonalized.