Hard Times

by Charles Dickens, 1854, published by Penguin Classics with introduction by Kate Flint in 1995. 319 pages.

1 September 2007

For a story that starts out on the precise wrong footing, I thought this worked really well.
What I mean is this: The first scene in “Hard Times” is of a headmaster, Old Tom Gradgrind—stodgy and domineering—drilling a class of mostly working class children. His strategy, we are told, is to emphasize pure reliance on facts and to suffocate all traces of imagination, fancy, passion and wonder from these children’s minds.
Furthermore, we find out that as a father, old Gradgrind has made his own two children, Young Tom and Louisa, the prototypical examples of his no nonsense ideas.
The problem is that Dickens has so much fun drawing a buffoonish caricature of Old Tom Gradgrind and his thinking. Then for the rest of the book, we’re asked to witness the story of Louisa’s journey into womanhood, her failed marriage to a wicked and lecherous old man, and her brother Tom’s devolution into a gambler, petty thief, and first-class lout. The story fleshes itself out with remarkable detail, but every time things really get rough, Dickens points us back to Old Gradgrind, and reminds us that his philosophy is the root cause of all this suffering, and it just can’t be believed.
Kate Flint’s notes make it abundantly clear that Dickens meant Gradgrind to stand for the Utilitarian school of thought, especially for the key assertion that all people act only in self-interest. But though both Tom and Louisa bemoan the way their youth has been stolen from them, we never really see what’s so awful about the way they were brought up. We’re merely told that at one point in her girlhood, Louisa said, “I wonder . . .” and her parents told her she must never wonder.
Old Tom Gradgrind is nothing but a paper tiger, and you’d really expect more from the man who brought us Ebenezer Scrooge.
Or even Mr. Bounderby, the aforementioned lecherous old blowhard who sucks Louisa into a loveless marriage. With all his hypocrisy and lack of compassion, Bounderby is a first-rate villain. More importantly, he has a first-rate foil: Mrs Sparsit, a nosy old widow who’s willing to slog through muddy, slug infested gardens in order to get Louisa out of the picture and become the new Mrs Bounderby.
The scenes with Mrs Sparsit are downright hilarious. Indeed, there are so many excellent things in this book that it really is worth reading for all its flaws. From the slimy womanizer James Harthouse—a bored aristocrat who plays carelessly with the emotions of both the Gradgrind children—to the surprisingly realistic account of the way the entire city of Coketown rallies to rescue a worker who’s fallen down an abandoned mineshaft, this book inadvertently proves a very Utilitarian lesson: that a story doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it can be enjoyed.