Historical Context
Industrial Conditions
During the early nineteenth century, the use of the power loom [a steam-powered, mechanically operated version of a regular loom, an invention that combined threads to make cloth], which had been patented in 1785, rapidly became more widespread. This had a deleterious [injurious to health] effect on the hand loom weavers, who could not compete with the power loom and could no longer find sufficient work.
By the time Dickens wrote Hard Times, power looms were the norm and hand weaving was almost extinct. Because of this development, weavers were gradually driven from their home-based weaving to the factories in the towns, which grew rapidly in population. The new factory workers put in ten-hour days. Conditions were often dangerous, and industrial accidents were common. This subject gave rise to a heated article written by Henry Morley and published in Dickens's own magazine, Household Words, in April 1854. Morley claimed that over the previous three years, there had been a hundred deaths and nearly twelve thousand accidents in factories in England. These figures were disputed by other contemporary commentators, but there is no doubt that many serious accidents did occur, often caused by unguarded machinery. In Hard Times, there is a reference to people being "chopped up" by machinery (Book 2, chapter 1).
Factory workers sought to protect their own interests by joining trade unions, which were growing in power in the 1850s. But the unions often faced fierce opposition from employers. A notorious example of industrial conflict took place in Preston, a textile-manufacturing town in northwest England, not far from Dickens's fictional Coketown. In October 1853, between fifteen and sixteen thousand weavers went on strike for better pay. The mill owners responded by closing the mills. A bitter struggle ensued, in which the strikers were sustained only by contributions from union members in other manufacturing towns. Union leaders were arrested and charged with conspiracy. (This recalls Bounderby's threat in Hard Times to have Slackbridge and other union delegates arrested on felony [a grave crime] charges and shipped off to penal settlements.)
Dickens took an interest in the conflict and visited Preston to get an idea of the mood and the conditions of life there. He attended a union delegate meeting, which gave him material for the Slackbridge episodes in Hard Times, and in general he gained a favourable impression of the workers and their representatives, as he recorded in his article, "On Strike," which was published in Household Words in February, 1854. Dickens wrote in conclusion:
The Preston strikers found it increasingly difficult to survive on what they were receiving in contributions from other unions, and when the contributions began to fall off in April 1854, the strike collapsed. The strike leader was thrown into jail for debts he incurred during the strike.
Education
In 1854, there was no system of compulsory schooling in England. This was not to be established until the Elementary Education Act of 1870, the year of Dickens's death. However, there was, at the time a large number of schools, differing widely in quality, methods of funding and organization, and the type of pupil who attended. The school that Gradgrind is so proud of was a non-fee-paying school for students of the lower classes, of which there were many. There was a general feeling among the educated classes that universal literacy should be achieved and that the poor should be better educated. Recognizing that teachers were often incompetent and untrained, the government had set out in the 1840s to improve teaching standards. Teacher training colleges were set up, and the first graduates emerged in 1853. In Hard Times, M'Choakumchild is one such newly trained teacher, although from Dickens's satirical treatment of him it is apparent that Dickens was not impressed with the results of the training program.
A review of Hard Times, published in the Westminster Review in 1854, questioned whether any school like Mr. Gradgrind's actually existed anywhere in England. The reviewer claimed that the English educational system gave as free a rein [to give free rein figuratively means to give a person freedom to act] to the imagination and the study of the arts as any in the world. Dickens however perceived it differently. In a speech given in 1857, he claimed to have seen too many schools in which the imagination of the children was discouraged and the pupils trained as "little parrots and small calculating machines" ("Schools I Do Not Like").
In Dickens and Education, Philip Collins shows that many educators at the time expressed views similar to those of Dickens. They believed there was too much emphasis on cramming the children full of names, dates, and facts but not allowing enough time for them to digest the information. There was also plenty of complaint that the schools were failing to develop the whole child and that the teacher-training curriculum was too mechanical and tried to achieve too much in too short a period of time.