Born on February 7, 1812, Charles John Huffam Dickens, the creative pen of the Victorian era holds a transcendent position in the literary society of the time. He is considered to be one of the greatest novelists of his times and is responsible for some of the most iconic novels in the history of literature. His genius was fully recognized by scholars and critics. Many of his works were originally published serially in monthly installments, a format of publication that Dickens himself helped popularize.
Victorian England was, in Tennyson's phrase, “an awful moment of transition” (Source: Web.) A society based largely on agriculture, traditional values, and social hierarchies was transformed into one both stimulated and unsettled by unprecedented growth in science, technology, industry, urbanization and population, and profound questioning of politics, morality, and religion. Its writers energetically revealed their responses to the times and the effect that such a rapidly changing world had upon them. The age known as the age of…show more content… A man of wealth and strict principles, Gradgrind embodies the then high society crotchety population. His description early in the novel of having a square coat, square legs and square shoulders (Dickens, 37) is a representation of the rigid and the unjustifiable values he carries. Gradgrind as the name suggests, pulverized his emotions, feelings and masked them with the rational principles and calculative philosophies of the time. A man of self-interest, he brings up his eldest with the same notion or rather with the scientific principles of life. Though in the conclusion we encounter a changed Gradgrind – someone who fully realizes his mistakes after his daughter Louisa confesses that all she ever missed in her life was a dad, a dad who loved her and cared about her