Hard Times (novel) Gradgrind - a younger sister of Tom and Louisa Gradgrind who spends a lot of time with Sissy Jupe. She is cheerful, affectionate and despite looking similar to Louisa, in personality she is opposite. Dickens wished to educate readers about the working conditions of some of the factories in the industrial towns of Manchester, and Preston, to "strike the heaviest blow in my power", and as well to confront the assumption that prosperity runs parallel to morality. This notion he systematically deconstructed in through his portrayal of the moral monsters, Mr. Bounderby and James Harthouse. Dickens also believed in the
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens musical's Jewish provenance, Jewish playwright Julia Pascal believes that performing the show today is still inappropriate, an example of a minority acting out on a stereotype to please a host society. Pascal says "U.S. Jews are not exposed to the constant low-level anti-Semitism that filters through British society". In contrast to Pascal, Yiddish expert David Schneider found the Dickens novel, wherein Fagin is simply "the Jew," a difficult read, but saw Fagin in the musical as "a complex character" who was not "the baddie." Jewish stage producer Menachem Golan also created a less well-known Hebrew musical of "Oliver Twist". Some