Charles Dickens Research Paper

Queen Victoria’s reign of sixty-three years and seven months was the longest reign of any monarch in Great Britain’s history. It was a time of great change in the fields of industry, culture, politics, and science. Along with the innovations of the time, came problems. Charles Dickens conveys the issues with class distinction, arranged marriages, and the education systems that existed during the Victorian era in England in his story Hard Times and the movie Great Expectations. To start off, class distinction was a major social concept during the Victorian Era and a recurring theme in many of Dickens’s works. Once born into a particular social class, a person would typically stay in that class until they died. It was extremely difficult to

Dickens features characters who were raised with different types of educational backgrounds to prove that an imagination is important for a happy, healthy life. One of the final statements Mrs. Gradgrind makes to Louisa and perhaps, one of the most intelligent, was that “there is something—not an Ology at all—that your father has missed, or forgotten,” (Dickens 150). The Gradgrind education system is based on facts, and it took Mrs. Gradgrind her entire life to realize that imagination and creativity is a vital part of what makes us human. Her children and all of the other victims subject to the system may have felt its damaging effects and had problems understanding their feelings when they grew older. Dickens even uses the characters Bitzer and Sissy to contrast one another; one of them excelled under the system and the other failed. Although Sissy was the one who failed, she was able to experience real feelings and lived a genuinely happy life. Whereas, Bitzer’s personality was repressed behind all the facts he learned in school, leaving him a cold, careless individual. In another instance, in Great Expectations, Miss Havisham raises Estella to be a beautiful, yet cold-hearted and cynical young woman who will break the hearts of men for her. This expectation Miss Havisham sets upon Estella is not only immoral as a mother, but is downright awful as an educator. Miss Havisham isolates Estella and does not allow her to express emotions like a normal person. In other words, Estella is never taught how to interact normally with others. Overall, Dickens makes a point that Victorian education is overwhelmed by facts and provides no creative outlet for its students to express their feelings in a healthy