Hard Times by Charles Dickens

A few years ago, along with countless other readers I fell in love with Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South after discovering it first through the BBC mini-series. Reading N&S prompted me to read more of Gaskell and I spent about a year reading her front-to-back while I read the wonderful Jenny Uglow bio of her. In the bio, I learned about what a patronizing rat Charles Dickens was to Gaskell, how he upstaged her N&S with his own Hard Times, and how he blamed N&S for the decline in readership of his periodical Household Words.

This is my way of saying that I read Hard Times with an agenda. This Classics Circuit tour may be an Austen vs. Dickens throw-down, but for me it is a Dickens vs. Gaskell Main Event, with Hard Times going head-to-head with N&S.

Suffice it to say that Hard Times is one of the weakest Victorian novels I've ever read. My personal vendetta aside, I just didn't like it. I found the first half of the book to be a series of character sketches--well, actually caricatures--and the second half to be a fairly interesting, but conventional short story. I like good writing, writing that takes my breath away and makes me sit up straight and see things in a new and clearer way. I didn't find that in Hard Times--it felt slick and jaded and calculating.

After I finished Hard Times, I did a bit of reading about where Dickens was in his life and career when he wrote the book and the response to it by critics since its publication. This actually turned out to be a more interesting project than reading the book itself, which really was a slog-fest.

I found an absolutely wonderful Norton Critical Edition of the novel that also had a terrific section called Backgrounds, Sources, and Contempory Reactions.

Hard Times was the tenth novel by Dickens, written between January and August 1854, when he was 42 years old. Chronologically, it comes after Bleak House and before A Tale of Two Cities. It was written for serial publication in Dickens' periodical Household Words, and its full title is Hard Times - For These Times.

It was written while Dickens was still living with his wife, albeit unhappily, and before he met his mistress, Ellen Ternan. As such, it reflects a bitter, discouraged, tired outlook and in my view is little more than propaganda for a position that it's not clear that Dickens completely supported.

The novel takes place in Coketown, a northern industrial town based on Preston, which was the scene of a prolonged strike by loom-workers. Dickens visited the town very briefly, attended one meeting of the workers and listened to part of one speech by a labour organizer. Based on this thin research, he wrote a story in which he satirizes Utilitarianism and political economy using characters that are one-dimensional. I found Hard Times to be little more than a morality play and not a good one at that. The good are very good and are rewarded for their virtues, the bad are very bad and are punished for their vices.

Despite John Ruskin's assertion that Hard Times was Dickens' best novel, most contemporary critics found much to dislike and it wasn't until the late twentieth century that many fans of the book appeared. It seems that currently the novel is held in high regard by the academic world, but the pieces I read in the Norton Critical Edition failed to sway me into liking it, especially when I compare it to Gaskell's N&S.

What I love about N&S is that there are no clear-cut good people versus bad people, with perhaps the sole exception of Fanny Thornton, and this cuts across class. Margaret Hale is a dutiful daughter with a large heart but prejudiced and, at times, arrogant; John Thornton is a harsh master with an open mind and compassionate nature; Mrs. Thornton is fiercely loyal and stern with deep maternal affection and pride, and so it goes. These are people, real people with real qualities trying to make their way as best they can in a world that can be confusing and frightening.

In Hard Times, the people in charge (i.e., the mill owners, the labour leaders, the politicians, etc.) are bad people--they are narrow, peevish, and self-serving, as reflected in their names...Mr. Bounderby, Mr. Gradgrind, Mr M'Choakumchild, Mrs. Sparsit, Mr. Slackbridge. The poor and the vulnerable are good people--Old Stephen, Mrs. Pegler, Rachael, Sissy Jupe, and the circus performers. These aren't real people, they're stock characters who don't sound or act like real people but give speeches and utter platitudes.

The world of Hard Times almost seems Suessical--the education system that Dickens lampoons (i.e., based entirely on the teaching of facts) is so prepousterous that it can't be taken as a serious threat. Jane Sinnett wrote an anonymous review of Hard Times in the Westminster Review in October 1854 in which she says of the education system described in Hard Times "we are not aware of such a system being in operation anywhere in England." Perhaps I am simply not a fan of satire, and Hard Times is nothing if not satirical.

One of the things I like best about Elizabeth Gaskell is that she felt that she had been given a gift (i.e., her ability to tell a good story), and she tried to use it to make the world a better place. Why then do I have such a problem with Dickens trying to do the same thing? I think it comes down to intent.

Dickens wanted to move from being perceived as merely a popular novelist to serious social reformer, and the result is that Hard Times reads like a political tract. Gaskell, on the other hand, was motivated by the desire to tell both sides of a story so that each could find common ground with the other. It's a common adage that writers do best when they write what they know. Dickens didn't take the time to know the people of the northern industrial towns, neither the masters nor the hands, and so Hard Times, his story about them, rings false regardless of the wit, energy, and skill that he brings to it.

In the end, it seems self-serving to me. Even his most sympathetic character, Stephen Blackpool, seems little more than a mouthpiece for Dickens' increasing discontent with the married state and his ardent desire to rid himself of his wife. Here's an image showing Blackpool's reaction to the return of his wife, whom Dickens blessed with the most vile attributes. I can just imagine Mr. Knightley saying, "Badly done, Charles, badly done."

North and South vs. Pride and Prejudice - Part III

I posted on the similarities of plot lines here, and the background on Gaskell and her reputation pre-N&S here.

So the next step is to look at similarities between the two novels, beyond the plot outline.

With regards to similarity in language, when rereading N&S last month I was struck by the frequent use of words that I tend to associate with P&P—namely, the words blind, offend or offensive, shame, honour, pride, disdain and prejudice. So I did a little, crude word count of these words in both novels, and then, by way of comparison, I counted the number of times these words appear in Dickens’ novel, Hard Times, which was written at the same time and about the same topic as N&S, namely labor relations in Manchester in the 1850s. I discovered that in both P&P and N&S the words honour, shame, and either offensive or offends show up significantly more than they do in Hard Times. I wouldn’t stake any claims regarding Austen’s influence on Gaskell based on this, but it was personally interesting to me to see validated my impression that the same language was being employed in two novels with such apparently different subjects as P&P and N&S.

Now let’s look at a few out of many passages in N&S that evoke P&P.

Here’s a passage in which Mr. Thornton has called at the Hales for the umpteenth time, and he has been, according to his friend and teacher, Mr. Hale, uncharacteristically quiet and out of sorts—like Mr. Darcy, Mr. Thornton repeatedly puts himself in situations where he can encounter the woman he admires but perplexes her by talking to her in a way that provokes her into irritating him:
“…uneasy at the thought that they [Margaret’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hale] were detaining Mr. Thornton against his will, which was a mistake; for he rather liked it, as long as Margaret would talk, although what she said only irritated him.”

With regards to both gentlemen being seen to best advantage in their own home:
“Margaret's attention was thus called to her host; his whole manner as master of the house, and entertainer of his friends, was so straightforward, yet simple and modest, as to be thoroughly dignified. Margaret thought she had never seen him to so much advantage. When he had come to their house, there had been always something, either of over-eagerness or of that kind of vexed annoyance which seemed ready to pre-suppose that he was unjustly judged, and yet felt too proud to try and make himself better understood. But now, among his fellows, there was no uncertainty as to his position. He was regarded by them as a man of great force of character; of power in many ways. There was no need to struggle for their respect. He had it, and he knew it; and the security of this gave a fine grand quietness to his voice and ways, which Margaret had missed before.”

I think it fair to say that Margaret might answer when asked how long she has loved Mr. Thornton, that "…it has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing him in his house at Marlborough Mills."

Now on to the first proposal scenes—in P&P, it is famously in the exact center of the novel, a testament to Austen’s love of symmetry and her careful construction of the tension in the novel. In my paperback edition of N&S, there are 436 pages of novel text—the first proposal scene begins on page 193, slightly under the half way mark. Coincidence…I think not!

Another interesting point related to this is that N&S was serialized—meaning that Gaskell wrote and published chapters before completing the entire story. Although she did expand the ending when she readied it for publication in book form after the serialization, I would venture to state that her outline of the story, should we ever find it, would show the proposal smack in the middle of the outline just as P&P’s first proposal is precisely in the middle of the text.

Next time I post on the subject, I really will get into why I think N&S resembles P&P in so many ways.

North and South vs. Hard Times, part 1

I haven't yet read Hard Times but it's coming up soon so I was particularly intrigued with the write up of this summer's Dickens Universe at UC/Santa Cruz in which the featured books were Hard Times and Mary Barton. I'm not sure why Mary Barton was chosen over North and South, but the review of the meeting at The Literature Compass Blog is very interesting, and this was my favorite part:

Tuesday morning’s lecture was delivered by Priti Joshi of the University of Puget Sound. With apologies to Helena Michie for not referring to “novels of poverty,” she explained that her title, “Synching Dickens with the Industrial Novel,” was derived from her recent foray into the technical revolution and the limitation of being able to “synch” her iPod to just one computer. The pressure to limit the ability to “synch” iPods, she explained, came from the music industry. With the ideas of “industry” and “pressure” in mind, why, she asked, did Dickens not write his industrial novel until 1854, after the popularity of such “social problem novels,” or “condition of England” novels, had passed? Disraeli, Kingsley, Eliot, Gaskell, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Brontë had all written their social problem novels by 1849. In fact, Joshi argued, Hard Times marks the death of the industrial novel. And it is not a terribly good industrial novel at that. Dickens “addresses workers lopsidedly,” Joshi said. We learn nothing about the condition of Bounderby’s mill; in fact, the “fairy palaces” of the factories are merely a backdrop for the novel. But while Hard Times signals the death of the industrial novel, Gaskell’s North and South, which followed, is the culminating work of the genre.”

Judging from the rest of the review of the Dickens Universe, Dickensians are not all that appreciative of the surging tide of Gaskellians so it's nice to hear that North and South is recognized for the powerful work that it is. I can't wait to read Hard Times so that I can compare the two myself.