In October 1854, less than two months after the last instalment of Hard Times was published in Household Words, Charles Dickens published an article‘To Working Men’ Household Words, 7 October 1854 in the same periodical calling on the government to address the matter of health and living conditions for the poor. There had been a deadly cholera outbreak in the city. He believed such outbreaks could not be adequately addressed without a concomitant focus upon living conditions: “reform of their [working class] habitations must precede all other reforms; and that without it, all other reforms must fail”. As remediation, he stated, “a Christian government” would need to also effect reform for the supply of “Homes, instead of polluted dens.”

Charles Dickens is remembered for his portrayal of the working class and their living conditions in mid-nineteenth century London. Outside his fiction, he was also an advocate for social reform. His very name has become an adjective – ‘Dickensian’ – denoting the poor living conditions, the squalor, the lack of opportunity and hopelessness faced by so many of London’s poor, as portrayed in his fiction.

It is not surprising to us, then, that Hard Times reads like a working-class parable: as a paean to the downtrodden. Stephen Blackpool, a power-loom worker, like Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, is cast out from his home when he is fired by Bounderby, his employer. Also, like Nell, a deep pit (for Nell it is an old well, for Stephen a mine shaft) prefigures his impending death. The working-class poor in Dickens’ fiction are often given a death scene with transcendent religious overtones.

The novel includes scenes of a working-class rally in Coketown where Bounderby has his textile mill and where Thomas Gradgrind runs his school on Utilitarian principles. Dickens includes detailed descriptions of the smoke and decrepitude of Coketown. Mr Bounderby, a textile mill owner who believes similarly in the efficacy of Utilitarianism, lives fifteen miles outside Coketown, connected to his business by railway: far enough away that he might say to James Harthouse upon his arrival that the smoke of Coketown is, “meat and drink to us. It’s the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the lungs.”

Yet, despite his sympathy for the working class, it may surprise some readers to learn that Dickens was against unionism and strikes, the means by which workers eventually helped to reform their working conditions in the latter half of the century when unionism was finally given the full imprimatur of parliament in 1871. Dickens travelled to Preston with his sub-editor of Household Words, William Wills, at the end of January 1854, only two months before the first chapters of Hard Times were published. Preston’s textile workers had gone on strike to recoup a pay cut from several years before, and factory owners responded by locking them out. The lockout lasted nine months before workers eventually capitulated in May 1854. Dickens used his two-day visit to Preston as the basis for an article, ‘On Strike’ (published 11 February 1854), in which he described the conditions under which workers were surviving and praised them for their organisation and good character. Regardless, Dickens made his feelings about unions and the strike, itself, unambiguous. “It is very much to be deplored . . . on all accounts,” he tells a fellow traveller as they ride the train to Preston. Of the factory masters, he is equally critical: “I think the associated Lock-out was a grave error.” Dickens says he has no interest in taking a side in the dispute. However, he is complementary of the character of the working-class people of Preston:

I left the place with a profound conviction that their mistake is generally an honest one, and that it is sustained by the good that is in them, and not by the evil.

It is typical of Dickens that he could conceive of an industrial dispute through moral paradigms, but that is an important insight to understand Dickens’ approach to the social issues of Hard Times. Dickens’ observations about the Preston workers have their corresponding expression about his fictional workers in Coketown:

Nor could any such spectator fail to know in his own breast, that these men, through their very delusions, showed great qualities, susceptible of being turned to the happiest and best account; and that to pretend (on the strength of sweeping axioms; however cut and dried) that they went astray wholly without cause, and of their own irrational wills, was to pretend that there could be smoke without fire; death without birth, harvest without seed, anything or everything produced from nothing.

While Dickens disagrees with the means employed by workers to address their grievances, he is still sympathetic to those grievances, which he credits not only as a rational fact, but one that exists in nature as a relationship between cause and effect. He uses an agrarian metaphor – “harvest without seed” – (farming itself being an industry requiring many ‘hands’, a term Dickens uses repeatedly in Hard Times to denote workers) to support his argument. It is imagery he associates with the disparity between the wealth produced by workers and their poor living and working conditions. Again, from ‘On Strike’, Dickens reports a workers’ placard as saying, “But we know that it is against nature to believe, that those who plant and reap the grain, should not have enough to make a mess of porridge . . .” It is not clear whether this directly quotes a workers’ placard from Preston or whether it is an embellishment (the placard is certainly long enough and sophisticated enough that it reads like Dickens). Even so, it is interesting to note that Dickens chooses to head the three parts of Hard Times with harvest terms – “Sowing”, “Reaping” and “Garnering” – recalling the Bible verseGalatians 6:7: Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. [New King James Version] which, paraphrased, suggests that we reap what we sow. It’s a phrase that can have both promising and ominous implications.

Most will remember that Hard Times begins with Thomas Gradgrind’s assertion that Facts are the only things worth teaching children: “Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” From the first lines we see where this harvest metaphor is going. Education is the seed planted in young minds and children thereby grow into adults and members of society. Facts are indisputable; a means to discipline and focus the mind. “Root out everything else” Gradgrind asserts, and he means everything: “. . . he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge . . . a grim mechanical substitute for the tender imaginations that were to be stormed away.” “Fancy”, a synonym for the imagination, is a “robber”. Cecelia Jupe (otherwise known as Sissy), a student of Gradgrind’s, is upbraided for having read fairy stories. Gradgrind’s students are told, “You are never to fancy”. Gradgrind’s own children are raised upon the same principles. His oldest child, Louisa, has been raised “to never wonder”.

Furthermore, Gradgrind is horrified to think of the intellectual lives of workers who access the public library (the Public Libraries Act of 1850 had introduced the modern tax-supported public library system):

There was the library in Coketown, to which general access was easy . . . It was a disheartening circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths, of common men and women!

It is, of course, part of Dickens’ satire that the library system is a “disheartening circumstance” for Thomas Gradgrind. But there is a real point behind Gradgrind’s comically exaggerated ideology. Dickens is addressing the tenets of Utilitarianism, a philosophical doctrine introduced by Jeremy Bentham, which advocated the greatest good achievable for the greatest number of people. The doctrine was founded upon the notion that humans wish to avoid pain and achieve pleasurable outcomes. This seems sound, except that Dickens is addressing Bentham’s utilitarian ideals on two points. First, is the doctrine’s reliance on facts and measurement to achieve its outcomes: that an adherence to rationality, science and fact had unintended consequences within a modern industrialising world. Second, that social realities demonstrated that the outcomes of industrialisation did not produce favourable outcomes for the “greatest number”. Another way of understanding the impact scientific and philosophical knowledge could have is to consider the scientific discoveries Darwin was to report only a few years after Hard Times was published. Though evolutionary theory is factual, its application to social theory by Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest”, provided capitalism with an exculpatory narrative. Workers must work harder; hard work would be rewarded. ‘Social Darwinism’ is the merging of Evolutionary theory and the Protestant Work Ethic.

Even so, the tenets of Social Darwinism had already permeated the industrialising world of the mid-nineteenth century, even if the term was yet to be coined The term “Social Darwinism” first appeared in Joseph Fisher’s article ‘The History of Landholding in Ireland’ in 1877 and was later popularised in France by Émile Gautier in his 1880 work, Le Darwinisme social, as a criticism of the harsh conditions created by economic competition. when Dickens was writing, just as the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic was a driving social factor during this period even if the term wouldn’t be used for another fifty years. Mr Bounderby represents the extremes of these ideals. Important to his self-identity is the story of his success despite overwhelming odds. He frequently tells versions of the story of his childhood in which he claims to have been abandoned by an alcoholic mother and raised by an unsympathetic grandmother. Bounderby is a terrible boaster and self-mythologiser. He claims to have grown up in poverty. In all things, Bounderby had it hard, he tells anyone who will listen. He claims to be virtually self-educated. Dickens’ narrator describes his mythologising as “braggart humility”. It is clear we should despise him, entertaining and ridiculous as he may be. He implicitly humiliates Mrs Sparsit, his housekeeper, who has come from a family of consequence, the Powlers, and who bears a patrician nose worthy of Coriolanus. But she fell on bad times in her youth when her young husband died and left her with nothing. Bounderby enjoys contrasting his own unpromising early years with the advantages once enjoyed by Mrs Sparsit, and he does the same with everyone. At any hint of adversity of any kind, Bounderby has a tale to outdo his interlocutor: how his low beginnings highlight his stellar achievements and in turn diminish others. When young Sissy explains that she has an ointment to relieve her father’s injuries, Bounderby responds with a diatribe about the terrible injuries he received as a child. When he hears that Sissy’s father has abandoned her, he responds by claiming that his mother not only abandoned him, but that he was born in a ditch, too! The point is simple. If Bounderby made good, despite the terrible circumstances of his youth, then there is no excuse for anyone else’s failure. It’s a lesson young Bitzer, a former student of Gradgrind, intent on promotion through Bounderby, learns. When he manages to put away some savings he questions, “Why can’t they do as I have done . . . What one person can do, another can do.” Dickens, as narrator, is impelled to step in:

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don’t you go and do it?

As social satire, Dickens’ narrative is at pains to make the point that education and employment, for a vast majority, do not produce a ‘greater good’, but instead pervert the potential of humanity, and that the systems which should serve the ‘greatest number’ benefit the few: that this self-serving narrative of success demeans those who have no opportunity of emulating it. After all, Gradgrind’s educational “system” is not designed to produce thinking, feeling people who might make a success of themselves. His own abhorrence of libraries and fiction demonstrate this. Instead, children are the raw materials from which education produces human products, the consumables of manufacturing. Gradgrind reflects of Sissy and his son:

In some stages of his manufacture of the human fabric, the processes of Time are very rapid. Young Thomas and Sissy being both at such a stage of their working up, these changes were effected in a year or two . . .

In manufacturing terms “working up” is the process of working raw materials through successive stages of production to create a product. Hence, the children are merely “fabric”, like the products of Bounderby’s mill. And so, when Sissy fails her lessons, Gradgrind is convinced, “that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge”: now Sissy is being transformed into a kind of grain by the metaphor, too.

If children are merely raw materials, if factory workers only have identity through the utility of their “Hands”, it is little wonder that Bounderby’s approach to Louisa should be so transactional, too. In a creepy scene when she is only fifteen, he enters her bedroom to kiss her goodbye. When he leaves, Louisa rubs her face with a handkerchief “until it was burning red”. Even so, she accepts an offer of marriage made to her by Bounderby through her father when she is older. She has been raised on the principles of rationality, of the suppression of feeling and imagination, and to value only Facts. When asked for her assent, Louisa replies, “What does it matter”, a nihilistic statement that will become her refrain – an acquiescent mark of despair – throughout the novel. Her further response to her father’s news of the proposal reveals the personal impact her education has had upon her:

“What do I know, father . . . of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and affections; of all that part of my nature in which such light things might have been nourished? . . . You have been so careful of me, that I never had a child’s heart. You have trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child’s dream. You have dealt so wisely with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child’s belief or a child’s fear.”

Even so, Louisa’s response is so steady and unemotional that though the despair is obvious to us as readers, Gradgrind, ironically, upon hearing these exhortations, is instead, “quite moved by his success, and by this testimony to it.”

Even Bounderby’s perfunctory wooing of Louisa is a theatre devoid of emotion, and only conducted on mercantile principals:

Love was made on these occasions in the form of bracelets; and, on all occasions during the period of betrothal, took a manufacturing aspect. Dresses were made, jewellery was made, cakes and gloves were made, settlements were made, and an extensive assortment of Facts did appropriate honour to the contract. The business was all a Fact, from first to last.

Dickens subtly puns on the commonplace ‘Love was made’, since instead of establishing true feeling through Bounderby’s wooing, the word ‘made’ establishes the wedding as a manufacturing process: the industry of the wedding is purely contractual and factual. Like the workers who populate Bounderby’s mill, Louisa has been manufactured since childhood through her education, and now that raw material is being shaped into a wife.

Certainly, Coketown and its industry is a dehumanising place. It is described as a “triumph of fact”, and Dickens (indulging his own racist feelings Dickens’ attitudes to race may be indicative of his time. To get a clearer idea about how he expressed this, I could direct you to his article published in Household Words in June 1853, ‘The Noble Savage’. In part, he called a group of Zulus being exhibited in London “extremely ugly”, and stated that “a savage [is] something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth.” which were possibly more indicative of his time) says that, “it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.” Its tall chimneys belch, “interminable serpents of smoke” and it contains a “black canal”. Coketown is an unsavoury place, yet Dickens seems to uncharacteristically describe the factories lit at night as “Fairy palaces”. Kate Flint, who writes the introduction for my edition of Hard Times, is critical of Dickens for this imaginative transformation, which she sees as indulgent rather than purposeful: that “Dickens cannot quite escape from the habits of his own transformative imagination . . .” Even so, the point of the metaphor seems to lie in the disparity between potential and reality. At the beginning of chapter 11 Dickens returns to the image: “The Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale morning showed the monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown.” Here we see the point made clear. There is a difference between how the town might appear, depending not only on time, but from perspective. At night it seems magical, like a world that might be described in a story to a child, while in reality it is something readers recognise as closer to Blake’s “dark Satanic mills”. But from Bounderby’s perspective the reality, itself, is a source of pride; his “meat and drink”, as he tells James Harthouse.

But by the first chapter of part two the image is entirely undercut by Dickens’ description of the town:

The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many storeys oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoon; and their inhabitants wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert.

Coketown is a place of stifling oleaginous heat. “Fairy palaces” is surely an ironic appellation, not indulgent imagination. Coketown’s unnatural cruelty is heightened by the steam engines that, like “melancholy-mad elephants” move their pistons up and down; like giant creatures maddened and defeated by their circumstances. It is a brilliant evocation of the town’s industrial muscle, referencing an animal that was still used in Asia for heavy work, but an animal that might also appear in the circus, a place of amusement, where Cecilia Jupe has spent her formative years. What we should understand about Dickens’ “Fairy palaces”, is that their promise and reality is like the promise of Utilitarianism: that there is an ideal in the possibilities of what is offered, but the reality has little to mitigate its impact in practice: Facts promise certainty and reward, but there is something hollow in this creed, practised exclusively.

Facts are not enough to live by, and this is revealed in the poignant scene in which Louisa returns to her father, understanding that her marriage is a sham and that her father’s indoctrination has set her up to fail; that her upbringing has robbed her of human sentiment, of a childhood, even; and that she is tormented by her discovery of true feelings of love outside her marriage.

Facts can neither manufacture a complete person, nor have they efficacy without a broader human perspective. When Bounderby’s bank is robbed Bounderby comes to the conclusion, based upon a series of incontrovertible Facts, that Stephen Blackpool, his former worker, must be responsible for the theft. Of course, Bounderby is wrong, and Dickens’ narrative demonstrates the means by which facts have been manipulated against Stephen. Mrs Sparsit too, blinded by her hatred of Louisa and her contempt for Bounderby (who has overlooked her as a romantic possibility) is driven to extremes to prove Louisa’s unfaithfulness. She imagines a staircase, “with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom”, down which she imagines Louisa daily descending. Mrs Sparsit is driven to her own ruin as she seeks to make a case against Louisa.

The inadequacy of Facts is also applied at national level by Dickens’ narrator, at a scale on which the benefits of Utilitarianism might presume to be measured:

So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions.

The narrative underscores the ineffable nature of our humanity that is, at the very last, outside the reach and influence of capital and its educational system. There is no true way to measure the reach of the ‘greater good’ beyond mercantile indicators: certainly, no way to tally or understand the moral character of a person or the nation.

To return to Dickens’ trip to Preston and his subsequent article, ‘On Strike’, we see that Dickens has provided an interesting observation that finds applicability to Hard Times. As stated, Dickens rejects the idea that industrial action is the solution to industrial dispute. Instead, he reasons the following:

Now, if it be the case that some of the highest virtues of the working people still shine through them brighter than ever in their conduct of this mistake of theirs, perhaps the fact may reasonably suggest to me – and to others besides me – that there is some little thing wanting in the relations between them and their employers, which neither political economy nor Drum-head proclamation writing will altogether supply, and which we cannot too soon or too temporarily unite in trying to find out.

Key words here are “some little thing” and “relations”. In Dickens’ mind the potential resolution of this industrial dispute resides in human relationships and the ability of the workers and their employers to find some common ground of human understanding. On the story’s personal level, the Gradgrinds achieve rapprochement when Louisa tells her father of the impact of her upbringing and education, and her unhappy marriage. Gradgrind responds:

“Some persons hold . . . that there is a wisdom of the Head, and that there is a wisdom of the Heart. I have not supposed so; but, as I have said, I mistrust myself now. I have supposed the Head to be all-sufficient. It may not be all-sufficient; how can I venture this morning to say it is! If that other kind of wisdom should be what I have neglected, and should be the instinct that is wanted, Louisa.”

It is not an inconsiderable insight for a man so assured by facts: to understand that his daughter might have an inner life unbounded by facts and rationality, alone. His progress is highlighted by Bounderby’s contrasting intransigent response to the news that his wife may need something more. Bounderby can only understand Louisa’s needs as a material demand:

When a man tells me anything about imaginative qualities, I always tell that man, whoever he is, that I know what he means. He means turtle-soup and venison, with a gold spoon, and that he wants to be set up with a coach and six. That’s what your daughter wants.

It’s the same observation Bounderby makes about his militant workers. According to Bounderby, work in his mills is, “the pleasantest work there is, and it’s the lightest work there is” but “as to our Hands. There’s not a Hand in this town, sir, man, woman, or child, but has one ultimate goal in life. That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with gold spoons.” His later repetition of this remark with reference to Louisa attests to Bounderby’s fixation with material wealth, as well as the status he accords his wife. He is a man without a heart or any other ennobling principle, and Louisa is merely something he has acquired and has no use for if she acts outside the bounds of his control.

Which brings us back to the question of that “some little thing” that could ameliorate the situation between workers – Hands – and the employers – the Head. Dickens is often criticised for his sentimentality, a feature of his writing that was appealing to Victorian audiences, but is less so for modern audiences. It is certainly true of the deaths of morally pure characters like little Nell or Stephen Blackpool: that Dickens deliberately pulls at his audience’s heartstrings. If you feel emotionally vulnerable you may wish to indulge in a little blubbering when you read these kinds of scenes in Dickens. And Dickens’ conception of a ‘heart’ – the discovery made by Gradgrind through his daughter – is possibly an equally sentimental solution to industrial disputes Dickens documents in Preston, and which he fictionalises in Coketown (but by no means unique). The idea of a unified system, a body politic, or the unity of body and soul is an idea that remains with us, even now. Fritz Lang’s silent film, Metropolis, for instance, uses an intertitle near the end of the film to help dramatically achieve the reconciliation between Joh Fredersen, the capitalist overlord of Metropolis and Grot, the worker foreman of Frederson’s voracious machine:

Head and hands want to join together, but they don’t have the heart to do it . . . Oh mediator, show them the way to each other . . .

The ‘mediator’ is Frederson’s son, Freder, who has descended into the mechanised underbelly of Metropolis and fallen in love with a working girl, Maria. He is that “some little thing”, in the words of Dickens, that must effect the change needed.

This is a theme in more recent films, too (The Devil Wears Prada, Working Girl and even Groundhog Day) and the number of modern adaptations of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, is astronomical. Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly man without a heart who must be taught compassion so that his worker, Bob Cratchit, may live with dignity. The number and variety of A Christmas Carol adaptations is a testament to the popularity of these themes in the modern world, despite Dickens’ sentimental bent.

Stephen Blackpool is no Bob Cratchit. He is rescued from the hole he has fallen into but he is not saved for this world. His circumstances remain “in a muddle”, a repeated expression that connotes the misunderstandings and misery of the world. Stephen’s dying moments are a lament for what might have been: “If Mr Bounderby had ever know’d me right – if he’d ever know’d me at aw – he would’n ha’ took’n offence wi’ me.” And his dying prayer is, . . . that aw th’ world may on’y coom together moore, an get a better unnerstan’in o’ one another, than when I were in’t my own weak seln” [Translation]That all the world may only come together more, and get a better understanding of one another, than when I was in it my own weak self

Stephen Blackpool represents the tragic failure of the two worlds, of workers and employers, to reconcile. But, like other characters, his personal life also exemplifies the tensions between personal dreams and reality. His marriage is one of several bad marriages in the novel. Mrs Gradgrind hardly seems to understand her husband’s philosophies, support them as she may, and is reduced to speaking about the “ologies” her children learn. Louisa’s marriage to Bounderby is a public fiction manufactured into fact, but never supported by personal feeling. And Stephen’s marriage is early marred by his wife’s alcoholism, and his inability to divorce her – Bounderby tells him as a matter of fact that he can’t – destroys the happy future he imagines with Rachael, just as convention prevents Louisa from ever considering James Harthouse. It is hard not to read some of Dickens’ own personal life into this narrative. Dickens separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858. Even for someone as wealthy and influential as Dickens, divorce was almost impossible at the time.

Dickens can be a sentimental writer, it is true. But like most novelists who deal with social issues, he views them through the prism of his characters and their problems. In Dickens’ world ‘good’ characters like Stephen Blackpool are often sacrificed because of a heartless world. Dicken’s reconciliation in Hard Times is limited, after all. Gradgrind can learn a lesson, but Bounderby remains unchanged, untethered from imagination and his feelings to the very last. It is left to a peripheral character like Sissy to support Louisa’s change, and her old circus boss, Sleary, to make the point about Dickens’ “little thing” to Gradgrind. Early on he tells Gradgrind in his lisping manner, “People must be amuthed, Thquire, thomehow . . . they can’t be alwayth a working, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a learning”.[Translation]People must be amused, Squire, somehow . . . they can’t be always working, nor yet can they always be learning. He repeats the sentiment later in the novel, adding that people “an’t made for it”. He also tells Gradgrind the sentimental story of Merrylegs, the dog owned by Sissy’s father, taken by him when he abandoned Sissy. Years have passed since he left, and then fourteen months before, the dog returned. When the dog could not find Sissy, it came to Sleary and then died. Like Odysseus’ dog, Argos, it is a story of the loyalty and love of dogs. But the dog’s return is portentous, too. Sleary is convinced it means Sissy’s father is dead. He sees no reason to tell Sissy, since without definitive proof Sissy can maintain her hope and belief in her father’s goodwill and his desire to return to her; that he can remain in her heart a paragon. After all, as Sleary points out, there is no certainty about her father’s motives: “whether her father bathely detherted her; or whether he broke hith own heart alone, rather than pull her down along with him; never will be known, now, Thquire.” [Translation] whether her father basely deserted her; or whether he broke his own heart alone, rather than pull her down along with him; it will never be known, now, Squire”.

Merrylegs’ story is also a parable about human nature, providing two insights: “one, that there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-intereth after all”, and “that it hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating, whith thomehow or another ith at leath ath hard to give a name to, ath the wayth of the dogth ith!” [Translation] one, that there is a love in the world that is not all selfish after all”, and “that it has a way of its own of calculating or not calculating, which somehow or another is at least as hard to give a name to, as the ways of the dog! Selflessness is a human quality we see in characters like Sissy and Rachael, who nurses Stephen’s wife when she lies sick in Stephen’s bed. Selflessness is numinous, unbounded by rules or facts and difficult to quantify or explain. It may be this quality that Dickens means when he speaks of that “one little thing” needed. It is certainly an idealistic hope to assert in the matter of industrial relations and social reform, and if this is what Dickens is driving at, it is certainly a simplistic and naïve hope rather than a practical panacea. Dickens is writing at the end of an era when Christianity held sway over the nation and could be called upon as a standard for social conscience in reform. Industrialisation and the modern world ushered in new challenges and conflicts, and appeals to morality had no real efficacy when the issues were of class, wealth, privilege and influence. Industrialisation and scientific progress had gone hand in hand with Enlightenment ideals since the century before to reshape the national economy and ways of thinking. Rather than lean into that reality, Dickens’ appeal is to an older creed that would still hold sway over the hearts of many, but could no longer address the complex social, economic and political realities that were gaining a stronger hold in the second part of the century.

Dickens was a moralist who made emotional rather than rational appeals, appealing to a sense of Christian values that he evidently hoped could ameliorate the rationalist principles of industry and the modernising world. After all, it is to “a Christian government” he makes his appeal, to remedy the homes of the poor and address disease in London. Maybe Sleary’s simple credo is what Dickens is getting at: “Do the withe thing and the kind thing too, and make the betht of uth; not the wurth!” [Translation] Do the right thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of it; not the worst!”

Hard Times may be about British education, industrial towns and living conditions of the nineteenth century, but I think it is already a backward-looking book by the time it is published. Even so, it still has a human appeal, today, as long as we don’t feel too clever about nineteenth-century tastes for the sentimental. As a shorter work, it may even be a good place to start for those looking for their first Dickens to read.

Frederick Walker Library Edition of Dickens’ works, 1862

Hover your mouse over an image to stop the automatic scrolling

Ringmaster Sleary and His
Daughter, Josephine, Costumed as
a Horse-Rider

Title Page Vignette

“Louisa, My Dear,
You Are the Subject Of
A Proposal of Marriage
That Has Been Made To Me.”

Louisa and her father in
the study at Stone Lodge

Thomas Gradgrind Apprehends His
Children Louisa and Tom
at the Circus

Dumb with amazement,
Mr Gradgrind crossed to the spot
where his family was thus disgraced,
laid his hand upon each erring
child, and said:
‘Louisa!! Thomas!!’
Both rose, red and disconcerted.
But, Louisa looked at her
father with more boldness than
Thimas did. Indeed, Thomas did
not look at him, but gave
himself up to be taken home
like a machine.
[Extract - Book 1, Chapter 3]

“This Is a Very Obtrusive Lad!” Said Mr. Gradgrind

This illustration depicts Thomas Gradgrind, Josiah Bounderby,
E. W. B. Childers, and Master Kidderminster in Sissy’s room
at the Pegasus’ Arms
[Book 1, Chapter 6]

“It Would Be A Fine Thing
To Be You, Miss Louisa!”

This illustration depicts Louisa
Gradgrind and Sissy Jupe in
the study at Stone Lodge
[Book 1, Chapter 9]

“Heaven’s Mercy, Woman!” He Cried, Falling Farther Off
From The Figure.
“Has Thou Come Back Agen?”

Going to the hearth to set the candle down upon a round
three-legged table standing there, he stumbled against
something. As he recoiled, looking down at it, it raised itself
up into the form of a woman in a sitting attitude.
‘Heaven’s mercy, woman!’ he cried, falling farther
off from the figure. ‘Hast though come back again!’
[Stephen Blackpool discovers that his long absent alcoholic
wife has returned – Book 1, Chapter 10]

He Felt A Touch Upon His Arm

This illustration, which takes place
in the street outside Bounderby’s
house, depicts Mrs. Pegler on her
annual visit to Coketown asking
Stephen Blackpool for news of what
went on in Bounderby’s.
[Book 1, Chapter 12]

He Went Down Upon His Knee Before Her On The Poor Mean
Stairs, And Put An End Of Her Shawl To His Lips

This illustration depicts Stephen and Rachael in front of the
steps leading to the street near Stephen’s room.
[Book 1, Chapter 13]

“This, Sir,” Said Bounderby,
“Is My Wife, Mrs. Bounderby.”

This illustration, which takes place
in the Bounderbys’ parlour,
depicts Bounderby introducing his
wife to James Harthouse.
[Book 2, Chapter 2]

“What A Comical Brother-In-Law You Are!”

Mr James Harthouse smiled; and rising from his end of the sofa,
and lounging with his back against the chimney-piece,
so that he stood before the empty fire-grate as he smoked,
in front of Tom and looking down at him, observed:
‘What a comical brother-in-law you are!’
‘What a comical brother-in-law old Bounderby is, I think you mean,’
said Tom.
[Extract - Book 2, Chapter 3]

“Heaven Help Us Aw In
This World!”

This illustration depicts Stephen
Blackpool, Mr Bounderby, James
Harthouse, Louisa, and Tom. It
shows Stephen leaving Bounderby’s
house having just been sacked.
[ Book 2, Chapter 5]

“Mrs. Bounderby, I Esteem It A Most Fortunate Accident
That I Find You Alone Here.”

This illustration depicts Louisa and James Harthouse
“among the leafy shadows of retirement” in the garden
at Bounderby’s country estate.
[Book 2, Chapter 7]

Left Alone With Her Mother,
Louisa Saw Her Lying With An
Awful Lull Upon Her Face

This plate depicts Louisa and
her mother, Mrs Gradgrind, in Mrs
Gradgrind’s bedroom at Stone Lodge.
[Book 2, Chapter 10]

Mrs. Sparsit Advanced Closer To Them

Bending low among the dewy grass, Mrs Sparsit advanced closer
to them. She drew herself up, and stood behind a tree, like
Robinson Crusoe in his ambuscade against the savages; so near
to them that at a spring, and that no great one, she could have
touched them both. He was there secretly, and had not shown
himself at the house. He had come on horseback, and must have
passed through the neighbouring fields; for his horse was tied to
the meadow side of the fence, within a few paces.
“My dearest love,” said he, “what could I do? Knowing you were
alone, was it possible that I could stay away?”
[Extract - Book 2, Chapter 11]

“I Only Entreat You To Believe,
My Favourite Child, That I
Have Meant To Do Right”

“I had proved my system to myself,
and I have rigidly administered
it; and I must bear the
responsibility of its failures.
I only entreat you to believe,
my favourite child, that
I have meant to do right.”
[Extract - Book 3, Chapter 1

“You Have Seen Me Once Before, Young Lady,” Said Rachael

This illustration shows Rachael seeking Louisa’s sympathy and help,
since Stephen Blackpool is falsely accused of a crime and
is missing.
[Book 3, Chapter 4]

She Stooped Down On The Grass
At His Side, And Bent Over Him.

Stephen Blackpool is rescued from
the Old Hell Shaft.
“I ha’ seen more clear, and ha’
made it my dyin’ prayer that aw th’
world may on’y coom together more,
an get a better unnerstand’in
o’ one another, than when I were
in’t my own week seln.”
[Extract - Book 3, Chapter 6]

“Now, Thethilia, I Don't Athk To Know Any Thecreth, But I
Thuppothe I May Conthider Thith To Be Mith Thquire.”

Sleary, in his ringmaster costume, speaks to Cecelia and Louisa,
and reassures Louisa that her brother, Tom, is safe.
[Book 3, Chapter 7]

Here Was Louisa, On The Night
Of The Same Day, Watching The
Fire As In Days Of Yore.

Louisa quietly contemplates the
fire after her brother’s escape.
[Book 3, Chapter 9]

Untitled

He drew up a placard, offering
Twenty Pounds reward for the
apprehension of Stephen Blackpool,
suspected of complicity in the robbery
of the Coketown Bank on such a night;
he described the said Stephen
Blackpool by dress, complexion,
estimated height, and manner,
as minutely as he could . . .
[Extract - Book 3, Chapter 4]

These illustrations are taken from The Victoria Web. Some of the descriptions have been taken from that website, too, or modified.