Monday, March 25, 2024

My students and the animal imagery in a passage about Mr. Bounderby in Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times” (1854)

When the lies of Mr. Bounderby in Charles Dickens's "Hard Times" (1854) have been exposed to an uninvited crowd in his home, he ushers them out with "blustering sheepishness": "[...] he could not have looked a Bully more shorn and forlorn, if he had had his ears cropped." When I gave this paragraph to my students today, I only asked for comments and interpretations, but they immediately picked up on the animal imagery, which one student even linked to another phrase about "a pedigree." As always, an open discussion led to the primary points that I would have mentioned, while also generating many other angles that I had not yet noticed. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 March 2024) 

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