Thomas Gradgrind was a man built on the idea that facts and statistics were the only truth in life and all that was needed to have a healthy and productive life. The only truth to him was his very own vision of the truth. Simply put, Thomas Gradgrind strived for perfection. He strived to be perfect, which is what his philosophy was based on, and he strived to make his children perfect and not to wonder. He raised his children never to wonder, never to doubt facts and to never entertain any vice or fancy. As soon as Gradgrind’s children were old enough to absorb information, he was feeding them more lessons than they could handle. His children were brought up only knowing one way to live and that was the idea that if it is not fact, then it is false. He was emotionless, as were his children because they were brought up only knowing what they were taught by him. Eventually, as Gra

Sissy Jupe, a child who had been scolded for her inability to accept fact over fancy, was not approved by Mr. Gradgrind. He tried everything in his power to make Sissy Jupe more like him, but he could not because she had been raised by loving people who taught her that there is more to life than just statistics. After Sissy Jupe began living with the Grandgrind family, she began to rub off on them. After observing her and her values, the entire Gradgrind family saw that she was a genuinely caring and sympathetic girl and that’s when they started to notice that something about then was flawed; something in their life was missing. Sissy Jupe showed the Gradgrind family what it feels like to love and how it feels to care. A child who was scorned for being herself was teaching a supposed “perfect,?family values they did not possess and they were grateful.

Along with the affects of time on personality and the importance or lack there of for “facts vs. fancy,?there is many references of time to natural time and “man-made?time. Time in the Grindgrind family as well as Coketown is habitual, an example of this is when it is said that “Time went on in Coketown like its own machine.? For the story itself, “Hard Times?moves in natural time, and the seasonal change constitute “the only stand that ever was made against its direful uniformity.? The most obvious example of time passin

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