THE DEFINITION OF A HORSE

This is an extract from Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times taken from the second: Murdering Innocents.

The extract immediately clarify the position of adults in respect to children: adults create a world full of avarice and injustices, on the contrary children represent a pure figure who don’t know what corruption and violence are.

In the first paragraph Dickens presents us a rigid man who is Thomas Gradgrind , teacher of a school in the industrial city of Coketown. All the sentences are short and marked (lots of full stops and comas) and this creates a military atmosphere. In addiction the repetition of the words “men”, “sir” and of the name “Thomas” remind us to the firmness of the army. Thomas Gradgrind, as all of adults in Coketown, does not seem a teacher or a person: he seems as a rigid and rational robot.

In the second paragraph there is a juxtaposition between the rigidness of the teacher and the vitality, spontaneity and embarrass of children, in particular of Sissy (the girl who Mr. Gradgrind is questioned). The teacher does not know his students, indeed he calls Sissy “Girl number twenty”, so the rader can understand that Mr. Gradgrind hasn’t and doesn’t want to have a human relation with their student. Thanks to this behaviour Thomas Gradgrind creates a caricature of him-self that coincides of the stereotype of typical bourgeois of the Victorian Age.