Gradgrind ""Gradgrind, a character in "Hard Times," who weighs and measures everything by a hard and fast rule and makes no allowances. "" (from the Gurenberg Project's version). Gradgrind Mr Thomas Gradgrind is the notorious school board Superintendent in Dickens's novel "Hard Times" who is dedicated to the pursuit of profitable enterprise. His name is now used generically to refer to someone who is hard and only concerned with cold facts and numbers. In the story, the man himself he was the father of five children, naming them after prominent utilitarians such as Robert Malthus. He also ran a model school
Letters of Charles Dickens Letters of Charles Dickens The letters of Charles Dickens, of which more than 14,000 are known, range in date from about 1821, when Dickens was 9 years old, to 8 June 1870, the day before he died. They have been described as "invariably idiosyncratic, exuberant, vivid, and amusing…widely recognized as a significant body of work in themselves, part of the Dickens canon". They were written to family, friends, and the contributors to his literary periodicals, who included many of the leading writers of the day. Their letters to him were almost all burned by Dickens because of his horror at