Charles Dickens' Hard Times Quiz

The Setting of the Schoolroom

• The scene is set in a plain, bare, and monotonous vault of a schoolroom.

The Speaker's Character

• The speaker emphasizes their observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve.
• The speaker has a square forehead with eyebrows at its base, and eyes that are overshadowed by the forehead.
• The speaker's mouth is wide, thin, and hard set.
• The speaker's voice is inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.

The Speaker's Philosophy

• The speaker believes that only facts are wanted in life.
• The speaker thinks that nothing else will be of any service to children except facts.
• The speaker's principle is to "stick to facts" and to "root out everything else".
• The speaker applies this principle to their own children and to the children in the school.