Hard Times

             The story Hard Times is set in an imaginary town by the name of Coketown. Coketown "was a town of red brick, or of some brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like a painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the pistons of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of and elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very much like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the pavements, to do the same work, and to whom everyday was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counter part of the last and the next." "Fact, fact, fact everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial." I feel that these quotes were necessary for you to see the environment in which the townspeople have been brought up.
             Louisa and Thomas are two of the Gradgrinds children. Mr. Gradgrind is a man of facts and who wants nothing more than facts to be taught to all children. "Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.