Hard Times - or, Is Dickens a Novelist? Sunday Salon

Dickens is a bit like Hardy for me (yes, that’s ridiculous, I know, but .. ): I don’t really like either of them, but when I do read them, I admire their mastery of their chosen form, and the skill with which they pander to their respective audiences.  Dickens is clearly the greater master, more dramatic, more inventive, more real and urgent, and he had – which is not evident in Hardy – a pressing sense of being driven to write, which I always admire.  But reading one book made me wonder if he is not a novelist at all, but a satirical cartoonist?

This drive to write was most often expressed in the desire for social reform, and Hard Times, which I read en route to the South Pacific, is a prime example.  The work is in some senses ridiculous – you cannot believe in several of the main characters, and the plot is a mesh of the unlikely, the unbelievable, and the hard to take – and yet, the caricatures represent real flesh and blood you cannot help recognising.  You do not – never could – know anyone like Bounderby, but by gum, you know people with that dishonest, limited vision, and the harshness that proceeds from imperfect understanding allied to the mistaken belief that strength of character is always best demonstrated by putting people down, as thoroughly as possible, in word and deed.

Dickens’ picture shows us two friends – Bounderby and Gradgrind – Bounderby was “as near being Mr Gradgrind’s bosom friend, as a man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual relationship towards another man perfectly devoid of sentiment”! – united in a belief in facts, in numbers, and in the superiority of rational analysis to all other modes of thinking or feeling, including, pity, mercy, humour, affection, and play.  But, just briefly at the beginning and more completely at the end, we see that these are Bounderby’s true colours, but that Gradgrind is at least capable of pity and then remorse.  Gradgrind is not an attractive man, but he comes to the knowledge that he can be wrong, and he says so to the person most affected by his poverty of imagination.

In charting this gradual awakening, Dickens shows us a polluted northern town where profits are worth more than the fish in the river, or the sight of the sun in a workman’s window.  He shows us greed and horror, and he introduces us to the sad and yet touching figure of Stephen Blackpool.  Stephen is a virtuous man, who is a good worker, but has a marriage from hell with a drunkard, thieving wife, a pure and unrealised love, and who goes through being sent to Coventry by his fellows, false accusations of robbery, and an accidental death when hurrying to clear his name.  He is too good to be true, and his end too fitting, but Dickens has written an almost predestination into parts of this book: not for nothing is the third volume called Garnering – as you sow, so shall you reap.

The other characters are rich and bloody, including the fawning Mrs Sparsit who lives for revenge against Louisa who married her master, the dreaded Bounderby, and who makes herself ridiculous and is spurned by her hero through too officious an enquiry into Louisa life and the mystery of the bank robbery.  There is the unctuous and fawning Bitser, the junior bank clerk who is introduced to us with the novel’s most famous phrase, when he puts down “Girl number twenty” (the affectionate Cissy Jupe, whose circus father has abandoned her, something she always refuses to believe) by successfully defining a horse when she is unable to: “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth .. (etc)”.  This sums up the whole of the philosophy Dickens is attacking, because it has the merit of being completely true and completely useless, like the Parliamentary Blue Books he mocks when Gradgrind becomes an M P.

As far as justice and common humanity is concerned, this is a depressing novel.  As a true picture of human life, it is not at all convincing.  And as a thriller, it has weaknesses beyond number.  But as a whole, it takes some important themes, and hammers away at them, and drives unwilling horses through to a desperate conclusion in which few are happy or even justly treated.  But, by opening Gradgrind’s eyes, it offers hope – hope which for the social reformer Dickens, was probably much more important than the artistic integrity of his novel.  He should be considered, not with Austen or George Eliot, but with Rowlandson, Hogarth and Cruickshank, or with Doonesbury.

Comments

[Memory]

I can't say as I'm very fond of Dickens either, with the exception of a select few pieces, but damned if your post didn't make me want to read some!

[Clare D]

Thanks for the review - very refreshing. I am ashamed to admit I have never read any Dickens. I know I should - but other books just keep getting in the way. One day, soon...maybe.

[gautami tripathy]

Dickens has written a ew depressing novels and this is one of them. Dickens is a master of creating weird haraters which make sense when you are reading his novels. But when you analyze those, they simply seem ridiculuos.

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