Gradgrind develop his sons into perfect utilitarians. His physical description personified this characterisation of the rigid and insistent pedagogue: In a famous passage, a visiting official asks Gradgrind's students "Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?" The character Sissy Jupe replies, ingenuously, that she would because, "If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers." Gradgrind is the most dynamic character in "Hard Times" since he comes to recognize that emotions are important when his daughter Louisa has an emotional breakdown. The text of the entry is
Charles Dickens "scrooge", for example, is a miser – or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity. His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. "Gamp" became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp, and "Pickwickian", "Pecksniffian", and "Gradgrind" all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical, and vapidly factual. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, though she didn't recognise herself in the portrait, just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's