Throughout the 20th century, critics regarded Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) as one of his lesser novels. It didn’t have the huge menagerie of colorful, memorable characters that most of his novels did, nor did it provide much comic relief from its hard tale..
Hard Times is back in vogue because the philosophy of its central character, Thomas Gradgrind, is back in vogue. Gradgrind is a schoolmaster and later Member of Parliament for Coketown, a stand-in for the gritty industrial city of Manchester.
Gradgrind’s philosophy is based on the famous fact-value distinction—the idea that facts are objective because they can be proved or disproved, but that values are subjective because they arise from personal feeling.
He operates a school devoted to rote memorization of facts—no games, no art or literature, no appeals to the imagination—and to a philosophy based on the ethic of rational self-interest.
It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.
This was a living philosophy then, and it is a living philosophy still. We now call it neoliberalism, and its adherents are to be found throughout Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the economics departments of great universities.
Gradgrind practices what he preaches. He stifles sentiment and emotion in himself. He denies himself the emotional intelligence to see through the boastful, hypocritical self-made industrialist, Josiah Bounderby.
He encourages his daughter, Louisa, to marry Bounderby, and his son, Tom, to go to work for him, as does his star pupil, Bitzer.
Louisa has a good heart, but she is morally adrift because she never is given any justification for the promptings of her heart. Tom, on the other hand, lacks moral intuition, and is not taught anything to make up for the lack. He is a self-destructive fool because his extreme self-absorption makes him unaware of the possible consequences of his actions until it is too late.
But it was Bitzer who is the most perfect representation of Gradgrind’s teachings. He is diligent at his job, saves his money, doesn’t drink, smoke or gamble and guides his life by cost-benefit analysis. When in the end he turns against Gradgrind in order to advance his career, he calmly justifies his decision by citing his old schoolmaster’s “excellent teaching” about self-interest.
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I read Hard Times as part of a novel-reading group hosted by my friend Linda White. It was published the same year as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, which was our group’s previous book. Although there is no reason to think the two writers influenced each other, there are remarkable similarities.
Both have morally sensitive heroines with inadequate fathers. Both depict self-made industrialists in conflict with labor unions. Both make their noble worker character speak in a hard-to-understand dialect that sets him apart from all the others. Both have their worker character ask the industrialist for help, and be rebuffed.
But the two novels are very different in both style and viewpoint. North and South is an effort to give a fair and balanced account of conditions in 1850s Manchester. Hard Times burns with indignation.
Gaskell’s Margaret Hale has a Christian faith that not only gives her a moral compass, but is a magnetic field that draws others into her influence. Dickens’ Louisa has the same moral impulses as Margaret, but she has no philosophy or faith that would give her the confidence to act on them.
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