Study Guide for Hard Times

1. Identify the most important characteristics of the educational system described in the opening pages of the book. Why is this a ‘useful’ form of education?

2. What was Coketown like? What is it meant to symbolize?

3. What is the relation between education and industrialization suggested by these first few chapters?

4. Like other nineteenth-century novelists, the different characters in the novel often are intended to represented different types of people. Characterize the different types of people represented by Sissy Jupe, Gradgrind and Bounderby, Stephen Blackpool, Tom and Louisa Gradgrind, Mrs. Sparsit, etc. throughout the book.

5. What do you make of the names used in the book, especially M’Choakumchild, Gradgrind, Bounderby, and Sparsit? If Stephen and Cecilia (Sissy) are saints’s names and Rachael appears in the Old Testament, what do you think Dickens was trying to say about these characters?

6. In general, how does Dickens characterize working-class people as opposed to middle-class people?

7. What is Dickens’s view of trade unions? How do you explain this?

8. Why do James Harthouse’s advances cause problems for Louisa? Again, what symbolic clash is Dickens trying to represent?

9. How would you generally characterize the difference between the male and female characters in the book? What sort of nineteenth-century gender stereotypes can you discern here?

10. What symbolic issue is Dickens portraying in the discussions between Gradgrind and Tom and Gradgrind and Bitzer near the end of the novel? What philosophical issues are at stake?

11. Who is the ‘hero’ of the novel and why?

12. Dickens is sometimes described as a ‘romantic’ novelist and sometimes as a ‘realistic’ novelist. In what ways is this novel a romantic and/or realistic recreation of life in an early nineteenth-century industrial town?

13. If you were forced to choose to write an essay on either Hard Times as a romantic novel or Hard Times as a realistic novel, which would you choose and why?