Asceticism and Sentiment: Gandhi and Dickens - Essay Example

In “My experiment with Truth” Mohandas Gandhi explores the complexity of social standards in England and British India, from his personal experience. (Gandhi, M.K. 1996). Gandhi regarded the western view of modernity with caution based on powerful expressions derived from creative English literature of major writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dickens, who had found in the concept of the autonomous child a potent metaphor of struggle against society and its conventions. The European etiquette “Do not touch other people’s things” very much influenced Gandhi, but he disliked “our youth had succumbed to the temptation and chosen a life of untruth for the sake of companionship which, however innocent in the case of English youths, were for them undesirable.

”(Chapter XIX: The canker of untruth) The literary career of Dickens, like all middle-class Victorian men, made early claims to social distinction and dissent through a dandyism that would eventually be overshadowed by the authority accorded to his writings as social criticism. Dickens captured the conjunction of economic discipline and imaginative self-creation through his portrait of Bounderby and caricature of Mr. Thomas Gradgrind in “Hard Times”(Charles Dickens, 1854). But the persistence of the excellent as a shadow of both prophet and capitalist, included in Gandhian philosophy and Dickens’s industrialist England, reflects a paradox within the regime of inner-worldly asceticism.

Dickens’s tenth novel, set in the industrial Midlands of England, unravels the effect of industrialism, education, and utilitarianism in correlation with fundamental crux of human existence. During the 19th century, industrial cities sprung up throughout England, which furiously churned out merchandise and wealth. The living and working conditions for factory laborers in these towns were extremely poor, whereas wealthy bourgeoisie prospered by exploiting