Hard Times by Charles Dickens, 1854

It is probably an exaggeration to put it this way, by Hard Times invoked in me a strange sense of cognitive dissonance. Why? Well, on the one hand it is quintessential Dickens – an industrial setting, light social satire, and a series of over-written comic characters. But there are also some strikingly obvious differences. First, the novel was written for weekly publication, unlike almost all his other works which appeared monthly, and this is often cited as the reason for it being significantly shorter – under 300 pages – than his typical blockbusters.

Secondly, storylines are started and then peter out with either no resolution or an anti-climatic one. An example of this is where a character is adopted having been abandoned by their father. Nope, the father never returns. That’s just it, they are adopted, end of. Third the cast of characters is much smaller than a typical Dickens novel and their story-arcs are all truncated or abbreviated. By way of example, Mr Harthouse, is introduced halfway through the novel. He is a rather two-dimensional comic-book villain and sets out to seduce a married female character. She runs away from him when she realises what is happening. Disgruntled, he leaves. Again, that’s it. This pattern is repeated time after time – storylines start and then are aborted. It’s almost as if this is an outline for a Dickens novel rather than the real thing.

Are these elements – storytelling and characterisation in particular – neglected because Dickens was focussing on other elements of his story? Is Hard Times different from the standard Dickens novel because it is trying to do something different? The book is usually characterised as an ‘issues’ novel in which the author attacks utilitarianism, personified by Mr Gradgrind, school-board superintendent and spokesperson for the theory that all we need in life are facts, and that emotions and imagination are damaging:

“Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?” The character Sissy Jupe replies, ingenuously, that she would because, “If you please, Sir, I am very fond of flowers.”

“Fact, Fact, Fact!” said the gentleman. And “Fact, Fact, Fact!” repeated Thomas Gradgrind

“And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?”

“It wouldn’t hurt them, Sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, Sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy….. -“
“Ay, Ay, Ay! But you mustn’t fancy,” cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. “That’s it! You are never to fancy.”
“You are not, Cecilia Jupe,” Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, “to do anything of that kind.”

This perspective is established in the novel’s first chapter and maintained throughout the first part of the novel. But once Gradgrind is reconciled with his daughter, it is largely forgotten. It is almost as if having demonstrated that lack of affection and imagination can be harmful to personal relationships, were such a demonstration really necessary, Dickens didn’t really know where to go with the idea – it’s certainly not enough to structure a whole novel around.

Dickens was never reluctant to write caricatures. Few of his characters could be called well-rounded. They usually have clearly identified idiosyncrasies of behaviour or, more commonly, speech, and these are repeated relentlessly long past the point where they are needed to establish the character in the reader’s memory. This pattern is adopted in Hard Times – Mr Bounderby talks relentlessly about the poverty of his childhood for example – but exceptionally a large number of other characters in the novel, not just the central personalities, aren’t burdened with these features. They are just people with a role in the story rather than sources of entertainment themselves.

Stephen Blackpool is an example of the underwritten nature of this novel. He is established as a prototype of the honest working man. He is burdened by an alcoholic wife who he is unable to divorce. He is a hard worker and refuses to join the trade union being formed in the mill at the time. His reasons for not joining are unclear – but nevertheless presented as heroic. Dickens may have had his concerns about the way the working classes were treated by industrialists, but he had no faith in trade unionism as a way to address those problems. Blacklisted and sacked, Blackpool leaves Coketown to find work elsewhere, and apart from a brief melodramatic reappearance at the end of the novel is seen no more. His role in the novel, as a contrast to the pompous and over-bearing industrialists who initially take centre stage, seems perfunctory.

I suppose where I am going with this critique is that short form novels, written for weekly publication, were not Dickens’s strength. He must have realised that the experiment had not worked, because although Hard Times was moderately successful and did the job it was intended for, to improve sales of his Household Words, it was not a format he ever returned to.

Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, 1854