The resilience of nature and the variance of nurture conflict within the three families of Hard Times but the nature of the traditional family remains unchanged in response to the nurturing of social expectations and individual determinations. With their respective social backgrounds, each take on their own sense of nature and nurture in gradual and finite stages. There are three families this paper will put into contention: the Jupes, the Gradgrinds, and the Bounderbys. Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times explores the function of the family in both terms of nature and nurture. This social striation is otherwise known as classism which soon became the societal norm. A family is not of family members, but of a solitary union, each different from the next family. Work now entered the home, turning the family from a real occurrence to an ideal expectation. The Industrial Revolution changed both the social landscape of public and private life into inverses of each other. The Victorian family is defined less by its nature, its biological associations, and more by its nurture, its artificial means of cultivating similarities. In the Victorian sense however, the definition of the family and its dynamics take on a drastic change.

A raw, jarring novel I highly recommend.Family by nature is a social group of individuals who share similar attributions and characteristics. What particularly haunts the narrator though is an event magnified in his mind in a later brief encounter with the friend, after which the friend disappeared from his life. The book is a timeless depiction of the human condition marred by matters of the heart, steeped in imagery of the moors of marital moral dilemmas as neighbors fall in love, she an abused and unhappy mom and he who married young and longs for love, as the author meticulously imagines how the marital betrayals metastasize into a cuckolded husband's mania, the isolation of their son (his friend), the estrangement of her married lover's children, and even the broken heart of the boy's/family's dog.

Written as the recollection of the narrator's friendship with another 14-year-old and his reconstruction of events from newspaper accounts fifty years on after he cannot shake a lingering memory of the last time he saw his friend, whose father killed his mother's lover and then himself. 'jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame' Solomon 8:6, King James Bible This short novel about a 1921 murder-suicide in a small Illinois farming town mesmerized me.

So long see you tomorrow review