Excerpts from Charles Dicken´s Hard Times
Autor: Claudio Martins | Publicado: 2012-08-26T12:43:00-04:00



Excerpts from
Charles Dichen´s Hard Times

Dicken´s view
on Education in the Victorian Period (19th century)

Chapter I —
The One Thing Needful

“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. Stick to Facts, sir!”

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the
speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every
sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by
the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base,
while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by
the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin,
and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was
inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s
hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to
keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust
of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts
stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs,
square shoulders, — nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat
with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, — all helped
the emphasis.

“In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third
grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the
inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to
have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the
brim. 







 

  
  
Excerpt Describing Coketown



Dicken´s view of industrialism



 







 

  
  
Chapter 5: THE KEY-NOTE



... Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune. 

It was a town of red brick, or of 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 the 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 piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up
  and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It
  contained several large streets all very 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 same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same
  as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and
  the next. 

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the
  work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of
  life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which
  made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to
  hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they
  were these. 

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the
  members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there - as the members of
  eighteen religious persuasions had done - they made it a pious warehouse of
  red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a
  bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New
  Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating
  in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions
  in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The
  jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail,
  the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything
  that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact,
  fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact,
  everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the
  school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were
  all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the
  cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable
  in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should
  be, world without end, Amen 

 







Another Brick &nbsp;In The Wall



Pink Floyd

parte1
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Daddy's
flown across the ocean
Leaving just a memory
Snapshot in the family album
Daddy what else did you leave for me?
Daddy, what'd'ja leave behind for me?!?
All in all it was just a brick in the wall.
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.

"You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still
lady!"

When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children in any way they could
(oof!)
By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids
But in the town it was well known
When they got home at night, their fat and
Psychopathic wives would thrash them
Within inches of their lives.

parte 2

We don't need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave us kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave us kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

"Wrong, Guess again! 2x
If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?
You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddie!"

parte 3

I don't need no arms around me
And I don't need no drugs to calm me
I have seen the writing on the wall
Don't think I need anything at all

No! Don't think I'll need anything at all
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.
All in all you were all just bricks in the wall


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