Hard Times Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  BOOK THE FIRST

  CHAPTER I - The One Thing Needful

  CHAPTER II - Murdering the Innocents

  CHAPTER III - A Loophole

  CHAPTER IV - Mr. Bounderby

  CHAPTER V - The Keynote

  CHAPTER VI - Sleary's Horsemanship

  CHAPTER VII - Mrs. Sparsit

  CHAPTER VIII - Never Wonder

  CHAPTER IX - Sissy's Progress

  CHAPTER X - Stephen Blackpool

  CHAPTER XI - No Way Out

  CHAPTER XII - The Old Woman

  CHAPTER XIII - Rachael

  CHAPTER XIV - The Great Manufacturer

  CHAPTER XV - Father and Daughter

  CHAPTER XVI - Husband and Wife

  BOOK THE SECOND

  CHAPTER I - Effects in the Bank

  CHAPTER II - Mr. James Harthouse

  CHAPTER III - The Whelp

  CHAPTER IV - Men and Brothers

  CHAPTER V - Men and Masters

  CHAPTER VI - Fading Away

  CHAPTER VII - Gunpowder

  CHAPTER VIII - Explosion

  CHAPTER IX - Hearing the Last of It

  CHAPTER X - Mrs. Sparsit's Staircase

  CHAPTER XI - Lower and Lower

  CHAPTER XII - Down

  BOOK THE THIRD

  CHAPTER I - Another Thing Needful

  CHAPTER II - Very Ridiculous

  CHAPTER III - Very Decided

  CHAPTER IV - Lost

  CHAPTER V - Found

  CHAPTER VI - The Starlight

  CHAPTER VII - Whelp-hunting

  CHAPTER VIII - Philosophical

  CHAPTER IX - Final

  Afterword

  Selected Bibliography

  A Note on the Text

  As a child, Charles Dickens (1812-70) came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A surprise legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success through Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.

  Frederick Busch was the author of eighteen works of fiction, including Closing Arguments, Girls, and The Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens. The winner of numerous awards, he was the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University.

  Jane Smiley is an American novelist. In addition to her many novels (including Ten Days in the Hills, Horse Heaven, and A Thousand Acres), she wrote a short biography of Charles Dickens for the Penguin Lives series (2001).

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  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 and Adam Smith after the grim economists; Mr. McChoakumchild, Coketown's master of the school run by Gradgrind. The battle is between the life of the imagination and the false mercantile values of these hard-hearted men.

  The novel opens as Mr. Gradgrind tests the students. Sissy, who loves, lives with, knows horses, cannot define one to Gradgrind's or McChoakumchild's satisfaction. As the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti might not have recited a fact-laden definition of color, Sissy is "thrown into the greatest alarm" by her test. Bitzer, a student reminiscent of David Copperfield's Uriah Heep, then gives the preferred reply, in which language does not communicate so much as, vanlike, carry freight: "Quad ruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth. . . . Sheds coat in the spring. . . . Age known by marks in mouth." We hear everything but the horseness of the creature. Imagination and affection are omitted, and the arithmetic of existence rides high in the saddle.

  The particularly allegorical names of these characters, and their self-satirizing speech, the manner in which their every aspect consists of eccentricity galvanized by wickedness or errant thinking, suggest that even as Dickens' angry realism informs the novel (and we will see that it does), the effort here is to create a kind of tutelary fairy tale--a small, exaggerated lesson instead of a long journey through space and time (that includes fabulous moments resembling the whole of Hard Times) in which we feelingly witness the education of several souls. In a Household Words essay called "Frauds on the Fairies," published in October of 1853, Dickens writes: "In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected."

  Without reliance on talking animals, then, Dickens creates a kind of fable. He upholds the importance of the imagination by praising the fairy tale, and he employs the processes of the fairy tale as he writes Hard Times. In addition, the novel is compressed and fabulous because Dickens had to produce serial parts on a weekly basis; he hadn't much time to consider what he would produce, and he hadn't the space in which to permit his characters to develop and expand. They had to demonstrate moral and social issues through exaggerated speech and action. Writing to John Forster, always his confidant, sometimes his agent, and his eventual biographer and literary executor, Dickens says: "The difficulty of the space is CRUSHING. Nobody can have an idea of it who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some elbow room always, and open places in perspective." In his long novels--say, Dombey and Son, or Bleak House, or David Copperfield--Dickens wrote both plausible, realistic elements as well as what I'm here calling the fabulous. Of course, he had planned these well ahead; of course, he had more time between the publication of monthly serial parts. In the 1850 Copperfield we have both the powerfully persuasive gloomy elements of David's lonely childhood and the absurdly named stepfather Murdstone, who terrorized him; we have both the frail but lovely, necessary mother and the stronger earth mother Peggotty, his nanny whose buttons ridiculously popped off her clothes and into the air because she was stout and always in motion, and because Dickens wanted her to have a signature gesture.

  In his longer, more leisurely novels, Dickens offered both endearing or satiric silliness, allegorical names and actions and serious, realistic portrayals of endangered children and brooding adults. In addition, his eye for political nuance and the absurdity of institutions, trained when he was a young reporter, was wedded to his anger at the cruelties of his age. The eye informed the voice, and the anger they expressed became a separate tonality in his long novels. Often, then, we hear declamations of rage--(here, from the 1853 Bleak House) "As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers"--as Dickens contemplates a London slum. Dickens' disapproval compresses actuality into faceless generality and description into sermon.

  I'm suggesting that the language of his anger in Hard Times is all that he can muster time and space to develop. The novel is conceptual from the start--an examination primarily of issues more than souls. As Dickens wrote to Thomas Carlyle, "It contains what I do devoutly hope will shake some people in a terrible mistake of these days." Dickens has pace and room enough only for the anger that usually accompanies his issue-oriented perspective. Character is, of course, offered in the novel; Dickens cannot help but express his genius for presenting us with people who are unforgettable. But the major portions of his talent, energy, and column inches, of necessity, are devoted to crucial topics; and, given the way Dickens' talent works, we get, necessarily, more of the journalistic voice, the voice about issues--and more issue-forced caricature than character.

  As he learned to master the monthly serial, he would come to control the weekly form. In his next novel written in weekly parts, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his own emotional life will be more directly tapped, and Dickens' sense of character will hold its own with his anger over injustice and his fear of mob rule; in the weekly Great Expectations (1860-61), he will write in the first person and will recall his own early years, creating a triumph of structure, character, and mood.

  In writing Hard Times, as he wrestles with deadlines and a necessary compression of story, Dickens arrays the forces of imagination--of life--against the forces motivated by mercantile profit--the forces of death. Stephen Blackpool, a Coketown weaver, carries the metaphoric weight of a number of the issues Dickens confronts. In 1854, Dickens went north to Preston, to cover a strike for Household Words. While he was sympathetic to the laboring poor, he was also unhappy at the prospect of class reversal--workers dictating to manufacturers, the lower class confronting the management of the middle class--and worried, as he always had been, over anything resembling mob rule. His ambivalent response to the strike--

  In its waste of time, in its waste of a great people's energy, in its waste of wages, in its waste of wealth that seeks to be employed . . . in the gulf of separation it hourly deepens between those whose interests must be understood to be identical or must be destroyed, it is a great national affliction

  --is echoed in his novel as Blackpool, acting on Dickens' beliefs or uncertainties, refuses to join a union and is ostracized; whom Dickens will kill, he first excludes from the human community. Blackpool, in love with Rachael but haunted by an alcoholic wife, also carries the burden of Dickens' marital unhappiness and wish for more liberal laws about divorce. He falls i
nto a disused mineshaft and is a victim, then, of industrial carelessness and parliamentary obtuseness. He is also, physically, hurled down--the place of his accident is called Old Hell Shaft. Dickens does much in this novel about social decline and descents toward a kind of hell. Blackpool says, for his author who cannot support union action but who wishes to support the workers, "See how we die an' no need, one way an' another--in a muddle--every day!" Stephen uses that description frequently. As Peggotty's buttons are her signature theme, "muddle" is Stephen's.

  "Muddle" refers perhaps to Dickens' confusion over labor relations as well as to the confusion--the mess--in which decent men and women of his day found themselves. The word denotes turbidness, muddiness; it connotes unclarity, impurity; it derives, perhaps, from the Middle Dutch verb for making muddy. In other words, it is about dirtiness that pollutes a wet surface and makes vision through that surface difficult or impossible. Dickens used it in Bleak House--"We both grub on in a muddle"--to signify a disordered or confused condition. In the 1865 Our Mutual Friend he will describe a shop window lit by a candle "surrounded by a muddle of objects."

  We can surely see its relationship to Blackpool and to the issues that Dickens in this novel joins. Furthermore, muddle, in nineteenth-century Scots and English slang, as a variant of meddle, denotes copulation. And the state of being "muddled," in English and American slang of that time, suggests oafishness or intoxication. In 1840, writing against mob rule in Barnaby Rudge, he speaks of being "slightly muddled with liquor." Dickens knew slang well and appreciated it. We cannot discount his employing Stephen Blackpool to label the villains of his world and of his book.

  But "muddle," besides suggesting confusion, hints at filth, at sewage, at a wet dirtiness. And this aspect of the image--not associated by Dickens, incidentally, with the healthy world of Sleary's Circus and the natural product of its horses' metabolism--is part of the realism I mentioned earlier. Dickens' sense of psychology, his penetrating realism about guilt and alienation, is keen; he prefigures Dostoevsky, say, and Freud. His genius produces, in Hard Times, the dark, dirty mind of Mrs. Sparsit, Bounderby's housekeeper, who is enraged with jealousy over her master's arranged marriage to Louisa Gradgrind. She spies on Louisa, who seems to be heading for an adulterous disaster with Harthouse, the wastrel dandy with his crushing ennui; Harthouse appeals to Louisa as a destructive solution to her frustrated anger at her father, whose ambition has led to her unhappy marriage.