Chapter1，2

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At the beginning of Hard Times, Dickens paints a suffocating world dominated by "facts" with a stifling touch. In the first chapter, "The One Thing Needful," the educator Mr. Gradgrind, with his "square wall of a forehead" and "square wall of a mouth," instills in his students the cold creed of utilitarianism: "In this life, we want nothing but Facts!" The second chapter, "Murdering the Innocents," illustrates how this philosophy strangles the warmth and imagination of humanity through his educational practices with his daughter Louisa and son Tom.

Mr. Gradgrind is undoubtedly the embodiment of utilitarianism in the Victorian era. He measures everything, including human emotions, yet overlooks the dimension of the soul. His children grow up in the cage of "facts"—Louisa's gaze is vacant, while Tom learns hypocrisy prematurely. These children are not only victims of Gradgrind's educational experiments but also epitomes of the alienation of humanity during the Industrial Revolution. Through them, Dickens questions what kind of next generation a society that prioritizes utility over spirituality will cultivate.

Reading these two chapters, I am struck by Dickens' foresight. In an era where data is paramount and efficiency is prioritized, are we not building our own "Coketown"? As education increasingly leans toward standardized testing and success is simplified into quantifiable metrics, are we unconsciously becoming accomplices of Gradgrind? Dickens reminds us that the true hardship lies not in material scarcity but in spiritual impoverishment; the most terrible of times is not an economic crisis but the loss of humanity's ability to perceive beauty, imagine, and love.

These two chapters serve as a mirror, reflecting the pitfalls every era may fall into—reducing people to tools and life to numbers. Amid the roar of machinery in the Industrial Age, Dickens raised one of the earliest cries for the value of the human soul. This cry transcends time and space, still resonating and challenging our modern society dominated by technological rationality today.