Inspiring Older Readers
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
This might well be the shortest novel Dickens wrote but it’s still densely packed with his trademark characters and a plot convoluted enough to prevent the average reader from relaxing too much. I have to confess that I’ve always struggled with Dickens for some reason. God knows, I want to love his stuff, I feel I should, but something always gets in the way. Partly it’s a length thing – I start strongly and then flag when, after 300 pages, I’m only half way through. Partly it because I expect too much – parts of Dickens are so sublime, so brilliant, I get a bit grumpy when I hit patches that are, frankly, turgid. So my record with him isn’t great – I must have half-finished half a dozen of the big ones and just about managed to push on through the likes of Oliver Twist.
Uncharacteristically, I’m also determined not to give up because I’m convinced the problem is with me and not him. I thought that this time I’d try starting at the other end of the critical appreciation spectrum with Hard Times – a book most critics are split over in terms of the quality, that is explicitly political in its content and is his only offering that’s not set in London. Oh, and yes, as I said, it’s short(ish).
It seems that Dickens wrote this novel in order to publish it as a serial in his periodical, Household Words, which was struggling at the time to retain its readership. Serial publication wasn’t new to Dickens who had presented his new books in this way before but it is something which has a big impact on the way the novel is structured because, of course, the author has to keep the reader on tenterhooks waiting for the next instalment to appear.
I’m not going to try and provide any sort of plot summation here because you’ll find those all over the internet but instead I thought it might be worth looking at what stood out for me from the experience of reading the book.
The novel is split into three sections that were published in twenty episodes between April and August 1854 and it seems to have given Household Words the shot in the arm it needed. The story is set in the industrial North of England in the fictional Coketown where we meet the educator, Gradgrind who is a fanatical adherent of the, then modish, social philosophy of Utilitarianism. As well as the children in his care, his own two offspring, Louisa and Tom, are subjected to a ruthless regime of ‘facts’ – anything that hints at imagination or creativity is ruthlessly suppressed.
Gradgrind’s closest friend is the self-made businessman, Bounderby, who, like Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen, revels in telling everyone, all the time, about how he pulled himself up from the gutter and that no-one has had life as tough as he has. Bounderby, it transpires, has his eye on Gradgrind’s teenage daughter and is biding his time until she comes of age and he can ask for her hand in marriage.
It is, however, Louisa and Tom (who goes to work in Bounderby’s Bank), who turn out to be the most interesting characters in the book as the plot progresses. Dickens has famously been criticised for not being able to create real, three-dimensional women but it has also been argued that Louisa is the most interesting – she is emotionally repressed, subservient but passively resistant and ultimately transformed by liberation from her oppressive marriage to Bounderby. Tom, on the other hand, has been made, by Gradgrind’s unremitting imposition of facts, into a selfish, dependent, thoughtless, manipulator whose actions destroys lives and results in his own exile.
As well as focussing on some of the characters that have made Coketown into the place it is – Dickens presents the town almost as a living entity squatting like a blight on the landscape – we also get to see something of the lives of the working classes. Gradgrind takes into his family, Sissy, the child of a travelling showman who he believes he can ‘save’ by the application of his Utilitarian philosophies – but who he gives up on when the child cannot be weaned away from speculation and imagination. And Dickens also gives us the story of Stephen Blackpool, a worker who is married to a woman he can’t divorce who has been overtaken with a drink addiction and who comes and goes bringing him misery and havoc. Stephen loves and is loved by Rachael – one of the more dreadfully saintly, sugary females Dickens is so fond of.
Stephen also clashes with the embryonic trade union which he refuses to join and who send him to Coventry as a result. And I have to say that his fatalistic acceptance of being made a victim by just about everyone – including Tom who sets him up as a patsy for a bank robbery – is just about as infuriating as it gets.
At the end of the novel Bounderby has been exposed as a humbug, Louisa becomes a philanthropist of sorts, Tom is exposed as guilty of robbery and smuggled out of the country, Stephen falls down a mine shaft and dies and Gradgrind abandons Utliitarianism. It’s all a bit hectic.
In truth I found the book a bit of a ragbag – although, again, delicious in parts. It had the feeling of a story pushed forward by the need for a sensational injection every little while to keep the punters coming back but which stretched some of the character development beyond the feasible. As for the politics, the messages seemed to be crammed with contradictions – there’s genuine anger I think for the way workers in industrial towns were being exploited but hostility too, I think, towards the notion of trade unions.
In the end it felt that Dickens’ real beef is with inflexible ‘isms’ of all kinds that he blames for dehumanising people. Salvation, it seems to argue, can’t come from political theory but from nurturing the best of the human spirit.
You can, for course, buy copies of this book in just about every format. The one I read was was published by the Folio Society and enlivened by illustrations from Charles Keeping.
Terry Potter
September 2018