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Easy reading on difficult times What's to like about Hard Times: A lot. It's short, at least for a Dickens novel. It's accessible—anyone can read it without requiring a great deal of learning or getting lost in convoluted descriptions. It's vivid—the characters are sharp and memorable; the settings are quickly and strongly drawn. It's exciting—a great story, part mystery, part romance, part social satire. And it's moving. It's a great novel. What's not to like? There's a price to be paid for the lack of Dickens's usual wordiness. The characters and situation are perhaps too succinctly drawn. They tend to caricatures. Hard Times is closer to Dickens's shorter morality tales like A Christmas Carol than to his longer developed novels like David Copperfield or Great Expectations. While all his works have their comically exaggerated characters, this novel has less subtlety than most. But it's a price we're happy to pay. Like I said, it's a great involving story. Hard Times is also one of the great novels of social criticism. I hesitate to say it's a novel of social realism because Dickens is far too romantic a reformer to give up a happy ending of sorts. Nor does he issue a call for revolution to overthrow the injustices he exposes. Rather he asks us to find the solutions in our hearts. A humanist more than a politician. I won't get into now whether this should be entered on the positive or negative side of the ledger when assessing Dickens. It's just the way he is and what has made him beloved for going on two centuries. We're better for having works such as Hard Times. The injustices that Dickens exposes in Hard Times are those caused by the Industrial Revolution in the fictional and well-named Coketown. But he is not taking the side of the proletariat in fighting exploitation. Rather he is protesting the attempt to extend the mechanization of production to the forming of the human mind and his protesting the replacement of the human spirit by market values. The most memorable caricature is that of the schoolteacher Thomas Gradgrind, responsible for the statements partially reported in "First lines" above. Even the man's name shows his industrial inspiration and his utilitarian approach to forming the minds of the students under his care. (You can get a taste of this in the sample text of the second chapter.) Of course Mr. Gradgrind is unsuccessful. In school, as well as in his family and in the larger society his cold project is foiled by common folks who hold onto their old-fashioned, compassionate morality. And he himself is converted by the example of his daughter who languishes in a loveless marriage to the manufacturer Josiah Bounderby and is taken advantage of by the heartless politician James Harthouse. Despite what I've said about Dickens's irrepressible romanticism, Hard Times is one of his least sentimental novels. Particularly in the tragic story of Stephen Blackpool, who is falsely accused of robbery, Dickens is as hard-eyed as any modern realist. Hard Times was condemned by many as a radical novel at the time, derided as "sullen socialism" by the prominent critic Thomas Macauley. But in the past century, as its views have become common wisdom and real socialist literature has made its appearance, Hard Times has become seen as socially progressive without being dogmatic. The personal peccadilloes of its characters have come more to the fore. An engaging, inspiring human story with a sharp point—which is likely what Dickens intended. — Eric |
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© Copyright 2003-2004 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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