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A review by bkoser
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
4.0
The opening scenes in the school are the best. The Stephen-Rachael storyline seemed extraneous.
Mrs. Sparsit as a harpy: the harpies swoop down and steal food - Mrs. Sparsit "fell" socially, moves quickly down stairs, compared often to a bird, in almost all her scenes she's eating. Her mother's family is the Powlers, a form of "poller": a plunderer. Her father's family is the Scadgers, which is slang for a "mean, contemptible person, one who always wants a loan".
Dickens ranking!
1. A Tale of Two Cities
2. A Christmas Carol
3. Oliver Twist
4. Hard Times
Quotes:
- "Bitzer," said Thomas Gradgrind. "Your definition of a horse."
"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
"Now girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind. "You know what a horse is."
- Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality, looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind it.
- She stopped, at twilight, at the door of a mean little public-house, with dim red lights in it. As haggard and as shabby, as if, for want of custom, it had itself taken to drinking, and had gone the way of all drunkards go, and was very near the end of it.
- As if an astronomical observatory should be made without any windows, and the astronomers within should arrange the starry universe solely by pen, ink, and paper, so Mr. Gradgrind in *his* Observatory (and there are many like it), had no need to cast an eye upon the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty little piece of sponge.
- It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn't get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.
Mrs. Sparsit as a harpy: the harpies swoop down and steal food - Mrs. Sparsit "fell" socially, moves quickly down stairs, compared often to a bird, in almost all her scenes she's eating. Her mother's family is the Powlers, a form of "poller": a plunderer. Her father's family is the Scadgers, which is slang for a "mean, contemptible person, one who always wants a loan".
Dickens ranking!
1. A Tale of Two Cities
2. A Christmas Carol
3. Oliver Twist
4. Hard Times
Quotes:
- "Bitzer," said Thomas Gradgrind. "Your definition of a horse."
"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
"Now girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind. "You know what a horse is."
- Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality, looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind it.
- She stopped, at twilight, at the door of a mean little public-house, with dim red lights in it. As haggard and as shabby, as if, for want of custom, it had itself taken to drinking, and had gone the way of all drunkards go, and was very near the end of it.
- As if an astronomical observatory should be made without any windows, and the astronomers within should arrange the starry universe solely by pen, ink, and paper, so Mr. Gradgrind in *his* Observatory (and there are many like it), had no need to cast an eye upon the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty little piece of sponge.
- It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn't get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.