Hard Times: Dickens

Utilitarianism, Fact and Fancy

Hard Times, a Victorian novel by Charles Dickens, is the most famous attack on Bentham’s alleged antipathy to imagination called Utilitarian gloom, or Gradgrindian Education. The famous caricature of Benthamite rationality is Gradgrind who asserts that—“now, what I want is, Facts.” At the very early, it is stated, for example, that “Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts.”

From parliament to Coketown to the Gradgrind family, England is affiliated by an obsession with means and ends that has cast out the pleasuers of imagination and smile human affection. As a result, the imaginative or aesthetic subjects are absent from the curriculum, and higher emphasis is laid upon analysis, deduction and mathematics:

“No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are!”

Gradgrind’s own son Tom revolts against his upbringing, and becomes a gambler and a thief. While, Louisa, his daughter, becomes emotionally stunted, virtually soulless: both as a young child, and as an unhappily married woman. Bitzer, who adheres to Gradgrind’s teachings, becomes an uncompassionate egotist. Sissy, the circus performer’s daughter, does badly at school, failing to remember the many facts she is taught, but is genuinely virtuous and fulfilled.

If fact is represented by Gradgrind, then Fancy, the opposite of Fact, is epitomised by the grotesque community of Sleary’s circus, the last vestige of a world held together by bonds of mutual affection and respect. Sleary, who is reckoned a fool by both Gradgrind and Bounderby, understands the need of amusement to escape from everyday drudgery. Utilitarianism links future of sympathy to a more thoroughgoing alienation, which is suspicious of any form of mental life—not obviously ‘useful.’

After all, the maximisation of pleasure was the central aim of utilitarian ethics.

Industrialization

When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were establishing their social critique, Charles Dickens took up the cause of ordinary working class in Hard Times (1854), which is surely “the harshest of his stories” as mentioned by GK Chesterton in Appreciations and Criticisms (1911). Though there was an ample precedent in the eighteenth century fiction for the social dynamics, yet an industrial order, to adapt Carlyle phrase, was ‘unexampled’ in this novel.

Following by-now conventional gesture of the “social problem” novel, it focused on the inner struggle of a single working class character, Stephen Blackpool—a weaver by profession. He was not only caught between the warring claims of labour and capital, but also mistreated by aptly named industrialist Joseph Bounderby. Later, he was wrongly accused of theft, exiled by the trade union, made redundant, and finally falls down an old mine shaft only to dies a disrespected death. His stoic forbearance is summed up in his feeble conclusion as “a muddle.”

The grave situation of workers which were depicted by Dickens were, in the words of Walter Allen, an unsurpassed “critique of industrial society,” which was later superseded by works of DH Lawrence. Though the novelist remained unsuccessful in projecting the correct and comprehends the politics of the time—which forced Thomas Macaulay to brand it a product of “sullen socialism,”—yet was able to find good words from John Ruskin, George Orwell, and FR Leavis.

While the narrator urge his middle class readers to appreciate that the workers were “gravely, deeply, faithfully in earnest” and “through their very delusions, showed great qualities” in fact the memorized union organisers received almost much voices as. Slackbridge’s trade unionism has played more “symbolic” role than a “realist’ function, as mentioned by David Lodge in Working with Structuralism (1981). It is why perhaps George Bernard Shaw was saddened by Dickens’ inaccurate depiction of “trade unionism.” And Yet, as brutal and as unjust as conditions were, and however accurate Gaskell and Dickens were in reflecting these problems, in reality the new industrial system proved to be hugely successful in terms of their overall contribution to the Victorian economy and the way that they sealed Britain’s reputation around the world.

Victorian literature dealt with the industrial epoch in a range of ‘industrial novels,’ which were often called ‘social problem’ or ‘condition of England novels.’

As a sub-genre, the industrial novel peaks during 1840s and 1850s, and then goes into decline after the 1860s. Titles includes Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong: The Factory boy (1839); Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1844); Benjamin Disraeli’s two novels Coningsby (1844) and Sybil, or the Two Nations (1846); Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848); Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849); Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical (1849). Although Industrial strife is also reflected in the work of Victorian women poets such as Caroline Norton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

In this world of moral and emotional bankruptcy, ambition has curdled into mechanical routine, emotional numbness, and brute domination.