How is the theme “Mistreated children” shown in the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens????
There are two sets of children in Hard Times, those brought up under the influence of Gradgrind, ie his own children and those in the school he controls and those of the Horse Riding Circus, notably Sissy. Gradgrind believes in the stifling of imagination and the primacy of hard facts, his own children grow up without a moral compass, his son is an embezzler and his daugher marries the appalling Bounderby, and then very nearly runs off with the seducer Hartshouse. The Gradgrind educated boy Bitzer is seen as heartless and ungrateful, because he has been taught to see everything as a matter of cause and effect, and statistics rather than of the relationships between individual human beings. Sissy, who began her life amongst the circus people who are seen as an injection of imagination and “fancy” into the lives of the characters, is tender and compassionate, despite the fact that she is generally despised by the people around Gradgrind, whose household she joins and, at his school. She
