Dickens’s language
shone when Louisa approached her father to confront him about her lifeless
upbringing. Rather than simply saying her father was unable to read Louisa’s
distressed expression due to a lack of intuition, Dickens folded image upon
image together into a complex metaphor. Speaking to Mr. Gradgrind’s emotional
inexpertise, Dickens wrote, “But, to see it [Louisa’s desire to pour out her
soul out to him], he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he
had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences
of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last
trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck” (99). This quote
is incredible for twisting both physical and abstract images together and
blurring the lines between them in such a way that all are given new meaning,
and all are able to work together despite their complete surface-level
dissimilarity.
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