ABSTRACT
The author of Hard Times, Charles Dickens, was always interested in the serious human problems resulting from an increasing industrialized society and its government to which people of his time so meekly surrendered. The capitulation was to the gods of science and the technical rationality that accompanied it, and to the axioms of mediocrity and mechanical-like behaviours that crept into all aspects of life. The inhumanity that accompanied this capitulation invaded not only factories but the very institutions where humanity itself was educated-the schools or as he described them, the ‘teacher factories’. It is significant, as Charles Shapiro observes, that Hard Times opens and closes in the world of children in classrooms and the world of those who are assumed to be uniformed. In the book, the schoolroom is seen to dehumanize its scholars, but the circus, all fancy and love, gives humanity back. We are exposed to two worlds in which the possibility of dehumanization with its underlying hard, pragmatic values, a parody of utilitarianism, is transmitted undistilled to children.
