Dickens did not like the changes industrialisation brought to Victorian society. Industrialisation brought many factories, poor working conditions and overcrowded cities. Dickens also hated Victorian schools altogether. He saw the Victorian education system as ineffective and often wrote essays attacking the forces of industrialisation, the government and those responsible for what he saw as the poor schooling techniques. He shows this hatred clearly in `Hard times' and nowhere more so than in his description of Gradgrind.

Dickens often gave characters in his novels names that summed up their personality, for example; Mr. M'Choakumchild chokes children to death, Ebenezer Scrooge, unwilling to give or spend and Thomas Gradgrind grinds down the kids.

"we hope to have, before long a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact and nothing but fact." This firstly shows that it...