ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The central utilitarian character in Hard Times is Thomas Gradgrind, a school board superintendent and father who forces the children under his mandate to memorize facts and statistics. The children are encouraged to maximize utility through their actions by basing their decisions on selfish, cold calculation.

Detailed explanation-2: -Furthermore, Dickens viewed utilitarianism, as espoused by Bentham and Mill, sympathetically. problems with utilitarianism’s answers and determine that Dickens positively viewed utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, as an ideology, begins with An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, published in 1789.

Detailed explanation-3: -Dickens objected to this philosophy of expediency because he believed that it trampled upon the rights and feelings of the individual and seemed fundamentally opposed in spirit to “fancy” and works of the imagination.

Detailed explanation-4: -Dickens’ novel Hard Times (1854) is a great moral fable that not only provides a damning critique of industrial England of the nineteenth century but also an indictment of global laissez faire capitalism of twenty-first century.