Hard Times By Charles Dickens

In the industrial city of Coketown, Josiah Bounderby is a rich and fairly obnoxious factory owner and banker. He loves to tell everyone he meets about how he grew up in the gutter, abused by a drunken grandmother. He is friends with Thomas Gradgrind, a rich politician and an education reformer in whose school students only learn about facts. Gradgrind's own children, Tom and Louisa, also grow up in this system. The kids are forbidden to be creative or imaginative or to have too many feelings. Gradgrind is basically trying to make kids into robots, with predictably bad results.