VII - HARD TIMES

 by Augusto Gonçalves Ribeiro

7.1 - Introduction        

            In Hard Times (1854) Dickens paints a portrait of how the City - the ideal human community - has been distorted by industrialism into an inhuman monster. Coketown, as Dickens calls his fictional version of the new manufacturing towns, exist not for the sake of its inhabitants' welfare; instead, the workers of Coketown exist for the benefit of its smoky factories.  The gap between the workers and the upper-middle class Bounderbys and Gradgrinds is not limited to wealth, however.  While the workers are imprisoned by their poverty, Bounderby and Gradgrind are imprisoned by their narrow, materialistic minds which cannot see beyond "the facts".  Gradgrind scorns charity with the memorable statement that "the Good Samaritan was a poor economist"; Gradgrind proves by statistics that the poor have more than enough for their needs and should be satisfied with their lot.  Under Dickens' skillful hand, then, Coketown becomes a state of mind as well as a place, where people are oppressed by prejudice as much by poverty.  As a consequence, Hard Times is one of the most powerful indictments of social injustice in English literature.

7.2 - Coketown

                        In the following passage Dickens presents Coketown ironically, as seen through the eyes of Bounderby and Gradgrind.

" Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black, like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.  It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally more like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

            These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned.  The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

            You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful.  If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there - as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done - they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamented examples) a bell in a bird cage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white.  The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.  Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.  The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen." (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 19-20)

                        Just to start up with this illustration the book shows that it will express the Reasoning Period where there would be no more dreams, no more untouchable women or love as in Romanticism Period, no more high feelings, just reason to justify the human ideas and new principles. These principles will favor the new group that appeared with the Industrial Revolution event, that is, the bourgeoisie.  The factories owners will give work to the town and rural people in order to become richer and richer, because only their dreams will come true.  The workers on the other hand will work in filthy conditions and won't have to think because they became alienated by industrial work.  The only thing that matters is "Fact" because they have to work as machines without feelings and change their work force into money to try to survive in this jungle.

            Coketown represents all the industrial cities where its own inhabitants are the workers because they can't afford to have a house somewhere else as the middle class can.   The citizens have to face and survive in the middle of all that smoking getting out of the chimneys from the factories where they work from 10 to 16 hours a day.  As a consequence all the walls of the cities were turned into black and created an atmosphere of illness.  Dickens can depict the city so well by his long narrative, which is also a mark of the Realism, that he shows all exploitation of the workers; we are not only talking of men and women, but also of children.  Their social plight is disgusting that they don't have any touchable way to modify it.  The rich is the only group in the social scale that can have good houses far away of the industrial cities and go to parties and study at universities.

                        This illustrations also depicts the importance given to facts even if in the educational system where they try to prepare the students to serve the system, that is to say, they won't know how to fight for their interests because they have just become alienated by the system.  Everything works in a common flow and what Dickens tries to do is to show whether ironically or not how the society itself  controls the whole.

7.3 - Mr. Gradgrind

"Thomas Gradgrind, Sir.  A man of realities.  A  man of facts and calculations.  A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. ... With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of  human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to." (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 2)

                        This character is one of the most important ones because he himself is the personified reasoning where everything comes into facts such as for example: marriage, schooling, working.  The vicious games and having fun should not exist because there are no aims or better saying no facts at them at all. He teaches his children to behave so and they grow up without having time to think about themselves and will have to work hard to know all about it.

"The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in various departments of science too.  They had a little conchological cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet; and the specimens were all arranged and labeled, and the bits of stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from the parent substance by those tremendously hard instruments their own names; and, to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter Piper, who had never found his way into their nursery.  If the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at more than this, what was it for gracious goodness' sake." (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 9)

            Mr. Thomas Gradgrind is a man of the middle class that lives in his world of facts and teaches his children to live so because no other human feelings could exist beyond facts. His home has everything for the study of his children, that is to say, only material of mathematics, science, physics and so on. There would never have story tales books or any of the kind.  For him he is preparing his children to this new  society that is emerging with the Industrial Revolution.  He becomes blind by the facts that govern his life and his family.

                        We can observe that for him as one of the characteristics of Realism already mentioned is that love and other feelings are subordinated to social interests.  That is why he prepares his daughter to marry Mr. Bounderby.

                        At the end he admitted to have learned a lesson with his daughter after she had told him:

"Yet, father, if I had been stone blind;  if I had groped my way by sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat, in regard to them;  I should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contented, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I have.  Now, hear what I  have come to say.

            With a  hunger and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a moment appeased; with an ardent impulse towards some region where, and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute; I have grown up, battling every inch of my way.

            I never knew you were unhappy, my child.

            Father, I always knew it.  In this strife I  have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel into a demon.  What I  have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising , regretting, what I have not learned; and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest.

And you so young, Louisa! He said with pity.

And I so young.  In this condition, father - for I show you  now, without fear or favor,  the ordinary deadened state of my mind as I know it - you proposed my husband to me.  I took him.  I knew,  and, father, you knew, and he knew, that I never did.  I was not wholly indifferent, for I had a hope of being pleasant and useful to Tom.  I  made that wild escape into something visionary, and have slowly found out how wild it was.  But Tom had been the subject of all the little tenderness of my life; perhaps he became so because I knew so well how to pity him.  It matters little now, except as it may dispose you to think more leniently of his errors." (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 194-5)

            Mr. Gradgrind said:

                                  

"I had proved my- 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 favorite, my favorite child, that I have meant to do right."

           

7.4 - Mr. Bounderby

"I hadn't a shoe to my foot.  As to a stocking, I didn't know such a thing by name.  I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty.  That's the way I spent my tenth birthday.  Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch... I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation.  For years, ma'am, I was one of the most miserable little wretches ever seen.  I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and groaning.  I was so ragged and dirty, that you wouldn't have touched me with a pair of tongs ... How I fought through it, I don't know.  I was determined, I suppose.  I have been a determined character in later life, and I suppose I was then.  Here I am, Mrs. Gradgrind, anyhow, and nobody to thank for my being here, but myself. " (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 13)

                        In this quotation the character is viewed as someone that had to struggle for his life in a so hard way.  He managed so well that he became the owner of a factory and a bank. He wants to show everybody that he suffered very much but through hard work he got well along with it.  He gives here and idea that it is possible to get well through hard work and determinism.  He suffered in the hands of the society but now he is the one that makes people suffer because he is the owner and gives orders and the employees have to be well acquainted with that in order to guarantee their jobs. The exploitation of the people is seen here as the basis of the new system the Capitalism where what really matters is the profit.  Consequently there is minor group that controls the means of production and becomes richer because of that and a bigger group that serves as working force which work to survive in the wildlife established by the capitalists.

            Mr. Bounderby is supposed to have faced many difficulties in his life as he does whenever he talks to people. He always mentions how he suffered and feels proud of that because it's probably a way to justify his rudeness and to demonstrate how much he had to struggle to get what he does have now. He owns a factory and a bank, so as it may seem he is a man of good wealth. He represents to us  the great manufactures of the Industrial Revolution where he could exploit the work of the people of his city named Coketown. However, interesting it may be, he doesn't live in the town itself because the city is just for the working people to live in filthy conditions and breathe the polluted air.

                        At the end of the book his mother tells that he didn't have faced so many difficulties because she had given all the love a mother could. One can see here how the owners of factories, banks and whatsoever it may be, create their own world to justify their own living principles. We can observe this in the lines below said by his mother:

"I deserted my Josiah! Cried Mrs. Pegler, clasping her hands.  Now, Lord forgive you, Sir, for your wicked imaginations, and for your scandal against the memory of my poor mother, who died in my arms before Josiah was born.  May you repent of it , Sir, and live to know better !

Do you deny, then madam, that you left your son to - to be brought up in the gutter ?

Josiah in the gutter! exclaimed Mrs. Pegler.  No such a thing, Sir.  Never!  For shame on you!  My dear boy knows, and will give, and will give you to know, that though he come of humble parents, he come of parents that loved him as dear as the best could, and never thought it hardship on themselves to pinch a bit that he might write and cipher beautiful, and I've his books at home to show it! Aye, have I ! said Mrs. Pegler, with indignant pride.  And my dear boy knows, and will give you to know, Sir, that after his beloved father died, when he was eight years old, his mother, too, could pinch a bit, as it was her duty and her pleasure  and pride to do it, to help him out in life, and put him apprentice.  And a steady lad he was, and a kind master he had to lend him a hand, and well he worked his own way forward to be rich and thriving.  And I'll give you to know, Sir - for this my dear boy won't - that though his mother kept but a little village shop, he never forgot her, but pensioned me on thirty pound a year - more I want, for I put by out of it - only making the condition that I was to keep down in my own part, and make no boasts about him, and not trouble him.  And I never have, except with looking at him once a year, when he has never knowed it. And it's right, that I should keep down in my own part and I have no doubts that if I was here I should do a many unbefitting things, and I am well contented, and I can keep my pride in my Josiah to myself, and I can love for love's own sake!  And I am ashamed of you, Sir, for your slanders and suspicions.  And for I never stood here before, nor never wanted to stand here when my dear son said no.  And I shouldn't be here now, if it hadn't been for being brought here.  And for shame upon you.  O for shame, to accuse me of being a bad mother to my son, with my son standing here to tell you so different!" (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 234)

7.5 - Louisa Gradgrind

"My, dear Louisa, " said her father, "I prepared you (...) You have been so well trained, and you do, I am happy to say, so much justice to the education you have received, that I have perfect confidence in your good sense.  You are not impulsive, you are not romantic, you are accustomed to view everything from the strong dispassionate ground of reason and calculation." (Dickens, C. H. Times, 85-6)

                        The eldest child of the Gradgrinds that had to give the examples to the others. She had learned quite well at school. She had tried to play at a circus event but she was immediately reprehended by her father.

                        She gets married to Mr. Bounderby in spite of his age which represents to us a convenient arrangement. Here Dickens depicts the society of that time where it was important to wealth people marry their members inside their common circle and not to mix up with the poor people. The marriage with convenient arrangements shows that what matters is the social interest and not the feelings. Feelings are destined to the weak and reason should and must rein the heads of people.

7.6 - Thomas Gradgrind

"It was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up under one continuous system of unnatural restraint, should be a hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom.  It was very strange that a  young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for five consecutive minutes, should be incapable at last of governing himself; but so it was with Tom.  It was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of groveling sensualites; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom." (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 118)

                        Dickens shows here the consequence of such an education based on facts.  This lad lives as child and a young man in the shadow and protection of his sister Louisa. He knows that she loves him and would do anything to help him. He sees that through her marriage to Mr. Bounderby he would not go on over his father's eyes anymore and could stay with Mr. Bounderby and work for him at the bank.

                        Not being observed by his father he began doing things that will disgrace his life and the honor of his family. First, he starts drinking and smoking with friends. Then he begins gambling where he would spend his money and all the money he could take from Louisa. And after that he steals money of the bank where he is supposed to work and blame Mr. Stephen Blackpool who has nothing to do with it.

7.7 - Cecilia Jupe

            A different girl at school because she is unable to see such facts in everything. At home she had learned so many beautiful things with the story tales books that she has a complete different mind and she shows it at school but the teacher reprehends her all the time because for him she can't see the facts.

                        Her father works in a circus so it is easy to understand why she is different from the other children at school.

"Jupe sent his daughter out on an errand not an hour ago, and then was seen to slip out himself, with his hat over his eyes, and  a bundle tied up in a handkerchief under his arm.  She will never believe it of him, but he has cut away and left her. 

Pray, said Mr. Gradgrind, why will she never believe it of him ?

Because those two were one.  Because they were never asunder.  Because, up to this time, he seemed to dote upon her. " (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 29)

             

            This passage shows a time in her father's life that he decided to go away and leave her there because he feels he isn't getting anywhere and he also feels that he is incapable of bringing her up.

                        Mr. Gradgrind is the one to take responsibility of her and decides to take her home. At his house she tries to help in everything she could, but at school she thinks she is not so good and gives up studying although she had tried so much.

                        At the end of the book she is the one that will help Louisa and Mr. Gradgrind to solve the robbery plight and help them all the way around.

                        Here one can notice that almost every child in Dickens' books has some sufferings at the early age, as he had by himself.

7.8 - Mr. James Hearthouse

"If you want to bring in, for any place, a handsome dog who can make you a devilish good speech, look after my brother Jem, for he's your man." (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 112)

            Mr. Hearthouse is a young man that arrives in the city being invited by Mr. Gradgrind and get well acquainted with Mr. Bounderby and his wife Louisa.  During this period he will fall in love with Louisa and will try to get her confidence. He finds out what was happening to Thomas and talks to Louisa and try to help her and gets closer to her in the meanwhile.

7.9 - Stephen Blackpool

"Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life.  It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen's case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else's thorns in addition to his own.  He had  known, to use his words, a peck of trouble.  He was usually called Old Stephen,  in a kind of rough homage to the fact...  He held no station among the Hands, who could make speeches and carry on debates.  Thousands of his compeers could  talk much better than he, at any time.  He was a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity." (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 57)

                        This man works for Mr. Bounderby at the factory. He is married to a woman that has given up living and just knows how to drink and sells everything in the house to get money to her drinking.  He is fed up with it and wants to get a divorce but that is to difficult for a common person without the means for such a thing. He would have money for that. He lives in a poor place as every worker in the city rounded by the ashes of the factories.  He represents in Dickens' novel the working class. He changes his work power into money which is not enough to have a decent life. It also shows how the capitalism system works. One cannot take profits if you don't exploit someone.

                        After talking in public against the exploitation of the workers he is not well seen by Mr. Bounderby and will certainly lose his job. And that was what happened indeed. It also represents the power of the factory owners that could do at that time whatever they wanted because they were the ones to offer jobs.  But this public talking tells us of something of the future the unions. The unions that would work for the benefit of the workers, that is to say, the exploited people.

            Finally, unemployed he went away to search something to do somewhere else although knowing it would be very difficult because of Mr. Bounderby's influence.

            Without  knowing he was accused of stealing money of the bank and because of that he was looked for everywhere. Rachel wrote to him and was waiting for him to come to the city but he dies on the way.

7.10 - Rachel

"She turned her head, and the light of  her face shone in upon the midnight of his mind.  She sat by the bed, watching and tending his wife.  That is to say,  he saw that some one lay there, and  he knew too well it must be she; but Rachel's hands had put a curtain up, so that she was screened from his eyes.  Her disgraceful garments were removed, and some of Rachel's were in the room.  Everything was in its place and order as he had always kept it, the little fire was newly trimmed, and the  hearth was freshly swept.  It appeared to  him   that he saw all this in Rachel's face, and looked at nothing besides.  While looking at it, it was shut out from his view by the softened tears that filled his eyes; but not before he had seen how earnestly she looked at him, and how her own eyes were filled too." (Dickens, C.  H. Times, 73)

            From this passage we can observe  how helping was Rachel. Stephen's wife was always drunk and she helped him at his own house after work.  Both of them were friends when they were younger.  It also shows how deeply they are linked but his wife impels them of a love relationship.      Stephen doesn't have enough money to pay a  lawyer and get divorced, so they have to live as friends.

            Rachel was Stephen beloved friend and never doubted him. Even if  Stephen was accused of stealing the money from Mr. Bounderby's bank. She knew he was unable to steal anybody's money.  Stephen worked hard during all his life. She is sure of  his integrity and honesty.

            Rachel tells the story to Louisa and Mr. Gradgrind and they promised to clean up Stephen's image in the city.

7.11 - Conclusion

                  

                   No Victorian writer depicted those contradictions more fully or more passionately than Charles Dickens.  As a child he worked for a time in a London blacking factory, and he never forgot this first-hand experience of urban poverty and misery.  In almost all of his novels he was concerned with the problems of injustice created by the new industrial society.  He championed the cause of those condemned to a life of wrenching poverty under degrading living conditions.  His solutions to social problems are overly simplistic, depending as they do on individual charity and wealthy philanthropist.  Simply put, Dickens' solution to society's ills is for everyone to act decently.  Nevertheless, in spite of the inadequacy of his solutions, his powerful indictments of social ills made his readers aware, as on Victorian critic stated, "of the evils that cluster around our institutions, which, as plague spots, fester beneath the respectabilities of English life."

                        We can attribute Dickens' remarkable popularity to several factors. He peoples his novels with a fantastic gallery of characters, whose variety and vitality are unmatched in English Literature outside of Shakespeare's works.  Dickens' minor characters are especially memorable.  Many of  them represent brilliant exaggerations of a single human quality to the point of caricature. Moreover, the world he creates is a world of the grotesque, where the ideal City has become a kind of swirling madhouse. In Dickens' City sinister factories and nightmare slums seem to come alive and move, while the characters are often locked into a single obsessive pattern of action.

                        As we can see the book was divided into three parts: sowing, reaping and garnering. And it represents a Bible teaching: "whatsoever is sows it would be reaped". So sowing is first part of the book because the personalities of the characters are being formed. The second part is what they have reaped. If  they had planted the good they will reap the good but otherwise if they sowed the evil it will turn into evil. The last but not the least is the third part where everybody has to learn through the experiences of life.

                        What we could conclude from the division of the book is that each character is being developed through the chapters in order to represent the fears, afflictions, expectations of the society during the Industrial Revolution.