Hard Times

  Thus saying, Mrs. Sparsit, with her Roman features like a medal struck to commemorate her scorn of Mr. Bounderby, surveyed him fixedly from head to foot, swept disdainfully past him, and ascended the staircase. Mr. Bounderby closed the door and stood before the fire, projecting himself after his old explosive manner into his portrait--and into futurity.

  Into how much of futurity? He saw Mrs. Sparsit fighting out a daily fight at the points of all the weapons in the female armoury, with the grudging, smarting, peevish, tormenting Lady Scadgers, still laid up in bed with her mysterious leg, and gobbling her insufficient income down by about the middle of every quarter, in a mean little airless lodging, a mere closet for one, a mere crib for two; but did he see more? Did he catch any glimpse of himself making a show of Bitzer to strangers as the rising young man, so devoted to his master's great merits, who had won young Tom's place, and had almost captured young Tom himself, in the times when by various rascals he was spirited away? Did he see any faint reflection of his own image making a vainglorious will whereby five-and-twenty Humbugs past five-and-fifty years of age, each taking upon himself the name Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, should forever dine in Bounderby Hall, forever lodge in Bounderby buildings, forever attend a Bounderby chapel, forever go to sleep under a Bounderby chaplain, forever be supported out of a Bounderby estate, and forever nauseate all healthy stomachs with a vast amount of Bounderby balderdash and bluster? Had he any prescience of the day, five years to come, when Josiah Bounderby of Coketown was to die of a fit in the Coketown street, and this same precious will was to begin its long career of quibble, plunder, false pretences, vile example, little service and much law? Probably not. Yet the portrait was to see it all out.

  Here was Mr. Gradgrind on the same day, and in the same hour, sitting thoughtful in his own room. How much of futurity did he see? Did he see himself, a white-haired decrepit man, bending his hitherto inflexible theories to appointed circumstances; making his facts and figures subservient to Faith, Hope, and Charity; and no longer trying to grind that Heavenly trio in his dusty little mills? Did he catch sight of himself therefore much despised by his late political associates? Did he see them, in the era of its being quite settled that the national dustmen have only to do with one another, and owe no duty to an abstraction called a People, "taunting the honourable gentleman" with this and with that and with what not, five nights a week until the small hours of the morning? Probably he had that much foreknowledge, knowing his men.

  Here was Louisa on the night of the same day, watching the fire as in days of yore, though with a gentler and a humbler face. How much of the future might arise before her vision? Broadsides in the streets--signed with her father's name, exonerating the late Stephen Blackpool, weaver, from misplaced suspicion, and publishing the guilt of his own son, with such extenuation as his years and temptation (he could not bring himself to add, his education) might beseech--were of the Present. So Stephen Blackpool's tombstone, with her father's record of his death, was almost of the Present, for she knew it was to be. These things she could plainly see. But, how much of the Future?

  A working woman, christened Rachael, after a long illness once again appearing at the ringing of the Factory bell, and passing to and fro at the set hours among the Coketown Hands; a woman of pensive beauty, always dressed in black, but sweet-tempered and serene, and even cheerful, who, of all the people in the place, alone appeared to have compassion on a degraded, drunken wretch of her own sex, who was sometimes seen in the town secretly begging of her, and crying to her; a woman working, ever working, but content to do it, and preferring to do it as her natural lot, until she should be too old to labour any more? Did Louisa see this? Such a thing was to be.

  A lonely brother, many thousands of miles away, writing, on paper blotted with tears, that her words had too soon come true, and that all the treasures in the world would be cheaply bartered for a sight of her dear face? At length this brother coming nearer home, with hope of seeing her, and being delayed by illness, and then a letter, in a strange hand, saying, "He died in hospital, of fever, such a day, and died in penitence and love of you, his last word being your name"? Did Louisa see these things? Such things were to be.

  Herself again a wife--a mother--lovingly watchful of her children, ever careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a childhood of the body, as knowing it to be even a more beautiful thing, and a possession, any hoarded scrap of which is a blessing and happiness to the wisest? Did Louisa see this? Such a thing was never to be.

  But, happy Sissy's happy children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights without which the heart of infancy will wither up; the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show will be the Writing on the Wall--she holding this course as part of no fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair, but simply as a duty to be done--did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be.

  Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold.

  Afterword

  Charles Dickens loved to write novels, and for most of his life, he was bursting with ideas. Though he wrote quickly, he was sometimes pressed by commitments he had made out of financial need or sheer enthusiasm. At one point, he told his friend John Forster that he had gone into a stationer's shop to buy paper, and found himself standing behind a customer who was inquiring when she might expect the next installment of the Dickens novel then being serialized. Only Dickens knew that he hadn't even begun to write that installment yet. Dickens related this incident to Forster with a laugh--it had invigorated rather than intimidated him, because he knew he would finish it. After all, Dickens, partly in jest, referred to himself as "The Inimitable." He gloried in his own inventiveness, and almost always loved, admired, and enjoyed his work while he was writing it. If it subsequently did not do very well in the marketplace, he sometimes complained, but by then, he would be on to a new project.

  Dickens was not alone in his productivity. Many nineteenth-century authors, taking advantage of the rise of mass market magazines, and then books, were happy to produce all the stories and novels that the reading public demanded. Like Dickens, such authors as Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, Jules Verne, and Emile Zola worked steadily. They wrote books in numbers, and of a quality, that today seems virtually impossible. Unlike some of the others, though, Dickens recognized early in his career that authors could work hard and still not profit from their efforts--the money was in publishing. In addition to writing, therefore, Dickens worked as an editor (for Bentley's Miscellany until 1839) and founded two weekly magazines, Household Words in 1850, and All the Year Round in 1859.

  It was inevitable that the editorial Dickens and the authorial Dickens would make good use of each other, and they did, in 1854, when Dickens decided to boost the sales of his magazine by writing a short and provocative novel about industrial conditions in northern England. He had just finished Bleak House, his most ambitious novel to date.

  When he began to think about Hard Times, Dickens, born in 1812, was forty-one, almost forty-two. He had been a prolific author since the age of twenty-four and the most famous author in England and America since the age of thirty. He was married, and he had fathered ten children, the oldest of whom was seventeen and the youngest of whom was soon to be two. He also supported his parents, and sometimes his brothers and their families. Expenses were high, invention was cheap, and so he concocted the story of Louisa Gradgrind, Sissy Jupe, Josiah Bounderby, and Stephen Blackpoo
l. As part of the research for his novel, Dickens visited the industrial mill town of Preston (in Lancashire), where a volatile work stoppage was taking place. Dickens wrote an article about it called "On Strike," which he published in Household Words at the end of January 1854. Although he subsequently denied that the strike was an inspiration for his novel, it is clear from the article that he found the visit informative, and the sentiments the article expressed were soon to take shape in a more nuanced fashion in Hard Times.

  But the novel doesn't begin with the strike; it begins, as Dickens so often did, with children--Louisa Gradgrind, Sissy Jupe, and a pale fellow student of theirs named Bitzer. I read Hard Times for the first time in high school, and this is the scene I remember: the head of the school (Mr. Gradgrind) and the teacher (Mr. McChoakumchild) asking the students to define a horse. Sissy, the girl who lives with horses, can't do it. Bitzer, the teacher's pet, can, but only in terms of number of legs, type of feed, characteristics of teeth. Almost immediately thereafter, while Grandgrind is walking home, congratulating himself on his educational methods ("Stick to facts, Sir!"), he finds his own children peeking under the bottom of a tent at some real horses in the circus that Sissy Jupe calls home. For me, as a student, this vivid contrast between the definition of a horse and the image of circus horses was a potent narrative hook. I recognized the unfairness of the classroom, the rivalry among the students, the inexplicability of the educational theory at work, and the pleasures of playing hooky. I decided that Charles Dickens was on my side.

  Hard Times, like A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities, is divided into three acts. In Hard Times, the titles of these sections are "Sowing," "Reaping," and "Garnering." The first section begins with Louisa Gradgrind's disobedience in going to the circus and ends with her marriage some years later to her father's colleague, self-made industrialist Josiah Bounderby, at the secret behest of her beloved older brother, Tom, who works in Bounderby's bank and lives at Bounderby's house. Simultaneously, Dickens introduces the millhand, Stephen Blackpool, who, though he has come to love one of the women who works with him in the factory, is married to an alcoholic harridan. At the beginning of "Reaping," Gradgrind, now a member of Parliament, sends a political ally named James Harthouse to Coketown. Harthouse does not share Gradgrind's principles--he has no principles. An upper-class idler, he sets about corrupting both young Tom Gradgrind, who needs more and more money to support his gambling habit, and Louisa, whose beauty and indifference intrigue and challenge him. At the end of book two, Louisa saves her virtue by fleeing to her father.

  A typical Victorian melodrama would have ended with the foiling of Harthouse's plot, but Dickens was not as interested in the consequences of his characters' actions as he was in having the characters understand the origins of those consequences. In book three, "Garnering" (a synonym for "storing away"), Louisa, young Tom, and their father must pay the price of the elder Gradgrind's educational theories--his daughter's life has been blighted by a purely commercial marriage, made without love or even the expectation of love. Gradgrind's belated understanding of the fruits of his methods is contrasted to his friend Bounderby's entire failure to come to terms with the meaning of his own downfall. In the meantime, Stephen Blackpool, who has been shut out of employment by both the owners and the strikers, is duped by Tom Gradgrind in a plot that illustrates the way that his upbringing and education have robbed him of all conscience and all sense of attachment to others.

  In spite of Dickens' hopes for the serial and the novel, Hard Times did not improve the circulation of Household Words, and was not popular once it was published in volume form. Few critics liked it, and it more or less disappeared from Dickens' canon until it was revived in 1948 by F. R. Leavis. After Hard Times, Dickens embarked upon Little Dorrit, which sold well beyond Dickens' hopes, and after that novel came A Tale of Two Cities, which has remained one of his best-loved works. A Tale of Two Cities was followed by Great Expectations , also an enormous success. But Hard Times has several things in common with Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, and should, I think, be read as a first attempt to try for effects that finally succeeded in the later works.

  Charles Dickens was an ambitious and precocious novelist. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he was published and celebrated, but it became clear to him as he wrote through his twenties that he needed, first, an organizing principle for each of his sprawling and lively works, and, second, a theory of society to match his intuitive grasp of psychology. In all of the early novels, Dickens explored some facet of English injustice: Oliver Twist grows up in the workhouse; Nicholas Nickleby finds employment in a cruel Yorkshire boarding school; Jonas Chuzzlewit becomes involved in an insurance swindle. The most perfect of his earlier works (though not everyone's favorite) is Dombey and Son, in which Dickens successfully portrays all the ramifications of his protagonist's human failings as they connect to his business ambitions--his selfishness, his insensitivity, his materialism, and his pride. Dombey fails at every relationship: his son dies without loving him, his daughter goes unappreciated, the manager of his company runs off with his wife, his business collapses. After Dombey and Son, in David Copperfield, Dickens addressed and contextualized his own life (though David Copperfield is far from strictly autobiographical), and also commented upon child labor. In Bleak House, Dickens introduced the motif of the Chancery lawsuit as a method of exploring the connections between all classes of society, but even in this, his ninth full-length novel, he still did not have a theory of how society worked--London was too vast and populous to be organized in such a way, and Dickens' favored setting was always London (with occasional vacations to the countryside or America).

  Coketown, however, a company mill town in the north of England, was a simpler world that could be understood, and in Hard Times, Dickens works out his theory--humans are used like machines: regulated, owned, and steadily worked for profit. Money, countable and tangible, is the only good, and is also the model for all things rational. Whatever cannot be bought or sold is considered to have no value. Gradgrind and Bounderby run things in Coketown. Bounderby owns factories and the bank. Gradgrind trains the children and is the Coketown representative in Parliament, where he promotes his inhumane programs.

  From the first chapter, Hard Times is intended to send a message. It has much the same substance as "On Strike"--those in power are selfishly resentful of the powerless; the powerless do the best they can, but they are trapped by circumstances (as Stephen Blackpool is trapped in his horrendous marriage) and have no way of gaining a livable life or even a tolerable life. In order to enforce their power, the powerful rely upon a purely objective philosophy that denies the existence of feeling, shared humanity, or any sort of pleasure. The tone taken by the narrator, like the tone in "On Strike," is highly polemical. A polemic is by nature both angry and eloquent. It relies on hyperbole and passion to move listeners and readers, and its goal is change. Thus, the narrator does not set out to prove that Gradgrind's educational theories and philosophical outlook are simultaneously foolish and cruel; he assumes that, and lays out a story to demonstrate it. Hard Times is really a morality play not unlike A Christmas Carol (1843), but the morality explored is political rather than personal. Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, fails in his relationships to his family and to his employee, Bob Cratchit, but witnessing the effects of his miserliness is sufficient to change his habits, and so, too, does it change his business relations. By 1854, however, Dickens knew that a little Christmas spirit would not be enough to alter the class-based factory system of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution.

  The reader can turn to almost any page in Hard Times and read a passage such as the following:

  The Gradgrind party wanted assistance in cutting the throats of the Graces. They went about recruiting, and where could they enlist recruits more hopefully than among the fine gentlemen who, having found out everything to be worth nothing, were equally ready for anything? (page 130)

  The p
urpose of this passage is not to introduce us to James Harthouse so that we can later ponder his moral dilemma--we know from it that Harthouse is without a conscience, and the question will only be whether Louisa can escape him. Dickens is forthright about dismissing the moral capacities of several of his characters (Harthouse, Bounderby, Mrs. Sparsit, Tom Gradgrind) as soon as they are introduced, so the suspense, and the interest, lies partly in watching the pattern of their relations with characters such as Louisa and Mr. Gradgrind, who still might learn, and partly in our pleasure in the language Dickens employs to analyze and depict these characters. In the same way, there is no chance that Coketown will throw off its "killing airs and gases" (page 69) or that "the national dustmen, after entertaining one another with a great many noisy little fights among themselves" (page 217) will reform and make the public good their first consideration. Dickens knows what (and whom) he is condemning, and he wants the reader to know, too--two of Mr. Gradgrind's sons are named "Adam Smith" and "Malthus." We are meant to laugh, and we are also meant to condemn. That's polemic.

  While polemic is not to every reader's taste, as Dickens discovered when he published Hard Times, it is straightforward, and can be both entertaining and invigorating. It can also be insightful.

  Charles Dickens died in June 1870, aged fifty-eight. His critical reputation was not high--he was remembered by critics for his sentimentality and his popularity, but his work was not considered literary. In fact his literary reputation had declined to such a degree that already in 1872 George Henry Lewes could write, "There probably never was a writer of so vast a popularity whose genius was so little appreciated by the critics." When F. R. Leavis wrote The Great Tradition, in 1948, he left Dickens out entirely--except for Hard Times, because Hard Times is not sentimental, was not popular, is highly structured, and was the first to make thematic points that later authors such as D. H. Lawrence also made, about the effects upon England of industrial production, industrial thinking, and industrial damage to the environment and human society.