Introduction

MUDDLE

Charles Dickens’ tenth novel, Hard Times: For These Times, was the first of his own books to be serialized in Household Words, the magazine he edited for his publishers, Bradbury and Evans. It is about a culture in which everything is for sale, especially human beings, who in the novel are enslaved by others for the sake of profit or career. The actual lives of men and women are sacrificed by others on the altar of their own need, and many of this novel’s characters are castaways. Nothing, at last, is of value to the villains of the novel—they are the manufacturers, the government, the spouses or the blood relations of their victims—except their own advantage. Dickens writes, then, of a world of social Darwinism and domestic breakdown in which those with power devour those with less or none. While comedic elements are threaded through the fabric of the novel, it is woven mostly of disapproval, disappointment, and dismay.

Though Dickens’ separation from his wife, Kate, and his liaison with Ellen Ternan, a young actress, took place years after this book’s writing, it is customary for students of Dickens to assume that he was domestically unhappy at the time of the novel’s composition, the spring and summer of 1854. Furthermore, his social criticism was continuous with his being a writer. He had always frowned at his age’s willingness to convert human misery into profits of one kind or another, as we see in his earliest journalism, collected in 1836 as Sketches by Boz. There, he describes an impoverished neighborhood, showing us milliners’ apprentices as “poor girls!—the hardest worked, the worst paid, and too often, the worst used class of the community.” And there, he describes a penniless mother and her infant: “The tears fall thick and fast down her own pale face; the child is cold and hungry, and its low half-stifled wailing adds to the misery of its wretched mother, as she moans aloud, and sinks despairingly down, on a cold damp doorstep.”

It is worth our noting that the unfortunate girls and mother are represented generically—we study them as types. Anger, and the demands of newspaper space, reduce them while distinguishing them for Dickens’ reader. They matter, and yet they are nameless representatives who demonstrate a problem but whom, in Dickens’ prose, we cannot know. The best of intentions diminish people Dickens would elevate.

It is Dickens’ anger in Hard Times that George Bernard Shaw praises, instructing readers to

bid adieu now to the light-hearted and only occasionally indignant Dickens of the earlier books . . . now that the occasional indignation has spread and deepened into a passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world.

The “modern world” of which Shaw speaks is represented by a triumphant industrial, colonialist England portrayed in the novel. It is a culture more and more consecrated to profits, a nation more and more divided into the land of the rich and the land of the poor. Hard times are not merely difficult days; they are the time when the national hymn is mathematics, and we can see how Dickens refused to sing that song. As he prepared to write his novel in weekly installments, he thought of titling the book Prove It, as well as Stubborn Things, and Two and Two Are Four, A Mere Question of Figures, Something Tangible, A Matter of Calculation, and Rust and Dust; Hard Times was sixth on his list. These times of which Dickens writes, as they oppress workers by adhering to the cold utilitarianism of Bentham and Malthus; as they educate (and only a few, at that) for the sake of the acquisition of meaningless facts and lockstep thinking; as they forbid divorce, chaining together miserable husbands and wives—the essential thematic concerns of the novel—these times are hard and heavy enough to crush the individual beneath their weight.

As illustration, Dickens compares the stiff, self-satisfied rectitude and pompous immensity of the times to the lightness, gaiety, happy skills, and life-affirming play of the circus. Like a Fellini one hundred years before Federico Fellini’s films about clowns, Dickens from time to time cuts or dissolves to Sissy Jupe or Sleary’s circus troupe of daredevil horseback riders, counterposing them against characters who represent aspects of the age’s factitious, mind-numbing materialism: Mr. Bounderby, bully, liar, and industrial magnate, the fraudulent worst of the upwardly mobile middle class; Mr. Gradgrind, member of Parliament for northern industrial Coketown, a Utilitarian and a model of misguided fatherhood, two of whose children are named Malthus