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To a greater or lesser degree, all novels are a composite of an author's imagination in creating characters & settings and that author's own worldview. Hard Times by Charles Dickens, a relatively brief but still complex novel, attempts to fashion the author's views on industrialization in the north of England during the 1850s, the stratified British class system & a mode of education with an emphasis on facts, while also fashioning memorable characters making the best of their lives at a difficult time.



As with many of Dickens' works, the names are distinctive, with Mr. Gradgrind & Josiah Bounderby chief among them. The mill workers are referred to dismissively as "Hands", the rivers & streams polluted by industrialization and the air heavily contaminated by the soot from factories & coal burning homes in an area just near Manchester.

There are so many things at play in this novel that at first, it seems the characters are merely caricatures & the themes rather heavy-handed, with Dickens very much on the side of the downtrodden, underpaid & often abused workers.

However, if one perseveres with Hard Times, there is ample chance that the book will begin to represent a much richer fusing of well-defined characterizations and an author's desire to represent the frailty of the underside of British life at the mid-point of the 19th century.



Countering the grime & tedium of life for the average worker in this novel is a school founded by Thomas Gradgrind, one based on the memorization of rules & data, steeped in facts that can't be questioned, to the complete exclusion of fantasy or poetry or one's individual imagination. Here is the enforced response to a description of a horse, given by a well-versed student named Bitzer:

Quadruped. Graminivorous. 40 teeth, namely 4 grinders, 4 eye-teeth & 12 incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hooves too. Hoofs hard but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.

When another student, referred to as "Girl #20", who had grown up riding horses with a traveling circus company gives a much more experiential response, she is severely admonished. She is in fact, better known as Cecilia or "Sissy Jupe" and has been adopted as a kind of modified servant by the owner of the school, having been abandoned by her father, a clown who could no longer cause circus-goers to laugh.

What Hard Times conveys is a sense of compassion for those contending with the new reality of machines, tall chimneys "belching serpents of smoke, a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dyes, where pistons of steam engines worked monotonously all day long, up & down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness." In this milieu, the human population of Coketown is quite subservient to the machines.



Mr. Gradgrind, the school superintendent & a member of parliament and his friend, Mr. Bounderby, a self-made man who owns a bank & a factory--someone who had no exposure to a model school & is proud of it--both subscribe to a Utilitarian philosophy that is purely results-oriented but wrapped in a belief that machines will cause needed development, whatever the costs may entail. Even Gradgrind's children are seemingly in tow with this approach to life, at least until they become victims of it.

After a time, the workers begin to rebel against conditions and Stephen Blackpool, another of novel's formidable characters, is forced to choose between honoring his loyalty to a saintly woman named Rachael & his fellow factory workers as a strike looms...

Oh my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown! Oh my friends & fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an iron-handed & a grinding despotism! I tell you that the hour has come, when we will rally round one another as One united power & crumble into the dust the oppressors that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the seat of our brows, upon the labor of our hands, upon the strength of our sinews, upon the God-created glorious rights of Humanity & upon the holy & eternal privileges of Brotherhood.

When Stephen is derided & dismissed both by his nascent factory union and fired by Bounderby, the factory owner, Hard Times quickly becomes more dynamic, particularly with the budding rebellion of Mr. Gradgrind's once very complacent daughter, Louisa.

Meanwhile, the traveling circus & its owner, a lisping Mr. Sleary, stand as anathema to Mr. Gradgrind & Bounderby but the circus serves as a relief valve for the oppressed of Coketown & other places along the circuit of the traveling circus.

Dickens manages to juxtapose the rigidity of Gradgrind & the buffoonish Bounderby with the apparent flexibility & casual intimacy of the circus family, with its owner, Mr. Sleary, of the belief that in a harsh world, a little levity & a brief escape can take the circus spectator a rather long way.



The formality of some of the language employed, with many complex sentences + the unfamiliarity of circus jargon & other slang of a particular time & place in England will entail frequent trips to the notes within the appendix. Added to that, there is at times some heavy-handed moralizing by the author.

However, there is a great deal more at play in Hard Times than one might initially expect. And, while hardly one of Dickens' most beloved works, it is a novel that I found full of pleasant surprises & an uplifting message about the need for compassion & forgiveness.

I saw a dramatized rendering of Hard Times in 2018 by the Lookingglass Theater of Chicago, complete with trapeze artists representing the spirit of the traveling circus. However, not having read the Dickens novel at that point, the importance of some of the individual relationships was lost on me.

Some years ago, I visited Saltaire, once a model town in West Yorkshire at the north of England, centered on a massive linen mill factory at Bradford, near Leeds. Its owner, Sir Titus Salt had acted with the best of intentions in creating the town with factory & new red brick houses for the workers at about the time that the Dickens novel is set. However, his insistence of an absence of alcohol, compulsory church attendance & payment in scrip eventually caused the workers to rebel & to strike.

The Salt's Mills factory eventually became derelict & on the verge of being torn-down, it was salvaged by Bradford-born artist David Hockney, now upgraded to an assemblage of shops, restaurants, a small theater & other venues, very much worth a visit.



*The version of Hard Times I read was a 1995 Penguin edition, with an introduction & quite helpful notes by Kate Flint. **Within my review are images of Charles Dickens; print of a polluted English city in mid 19th century; a photo image of factory worker from the same period; photo of circus trapeze artist from the Chicago theatrical performance of the novel in 2018; view of Saltaire, the now-refurbished Victorian linen mill & surrounding houses that comprised a mid 19th century "model town". ***There is an interesting 1994 BBC film of Hard Times with Alan Bates as Bounderby.