Hard Times: For These Times
Penguin edition with intro & notes by Kate Flint

Beyond the Brontes, there aren't many classic novels set in the North of England, and for years I'd been kind-of-meaning to read a few more, especially about workers and heavy industry, Mary Barton, Sons & Lovers, and Hard Times. (As per comment below, North and South was off the table because I'd already seen the TV series and didn't love the plot, and it's also the story of a middle-class southerner moving north, rather than the north qua north.)

And - though it may be inconvenient to suggest that at least some adults are influenced by fiction - this year I have realised that I need a much higher proportion of fictional works I consume in any medium to be about people who work full time and don't have much money, as that makes me more accepting of normal life, and that I have to get things done. This autumn I noticed a big difference in feelings and effort after I had been watching Victorian Slum (a show which, yes, can be cynically seen as prompting contemporary people to think conditions now - or in coming years given expected falls in living standards due to Brexit - aren't so bad) compared with my comparative laziness when the last thing I'd read was part of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, in which most principal characters are not only rich enough they don't need to work, but can also make life even easier via magic. (Hard Times perhaps didn't contain as many scenes of actually going to work as I assumed it would, and Dickens' esteem for the millworkers is expressed in somewhat patronising ways, but the centrality of work is always there in the background.)

2016 felt like the right time to read Dickens, and especially a book with this title: the gradual reversion to pre-Second World War, or, colloquially, Victorian, degrees of inequality and state support having finally been made obvious by two key Anglo-American votes that seem very unlikely to alleviate that, especially on this side of the Atlantic.

However, I hadn't expected this particular book, chosen purely for its setting, to be so complicatedly pertinent to those political campaigns. (I didn't even know it was Dickens' shortest novel, which my GR friends who know my habits could be forgiven for thinking was my motivation.)

Facts in Hard Times are allied with the nouveau riche and a lack of compassion for the poor among a self-made middle and increasingly ruling class that could be described as Thatcherite. What we have been accustomed to calling the right wing.
Those seeking to understand and humanise the poor and improve their living and working conditions, including Dickens, argue for greater allowance for emotion. What could traditionally be seen as the left.
Apply to the UK and the US in 2016 and the polarities appear to have switched, especially as regards the much-discussed "left behind" section of the electorate. Facts, solid research and a noeliberal establishment presenting itself as the sensible choice were pipped to the post by appeals to emotion, dreams and the lived experience of fed-up people who were tired of being called stupid. (I know about the $50-100k Trump voters, the upper middle class Brexiteers, but I agree that it was the swing vote from prior supporters of Obama and Labour which made that key small percentage difference.) I think Hard Times would be good reading (and thinking) material for those on the left and particularly centre left at the moment.

More so because Gradgrind also isn't as grim as his name appears. He's not actually Wackford Squeers mark II, as I assumed. (And as would be easily assumed from all the readers who hate him. Someone described him as a monster?! I'm pretty certain some of these people would also be the types who say "but he means well, he cares underneath" if he was real.)
Perhaps I don't find him all that grim because he feels like an eminently plausible ancestor. He's rather like some of my own relatives. He's not actively cruel, or violent or angry or inconsistent; he means very well, but he nevertheless has deleterious effects because he just. doesn't. get. it. He's a bit of a robot; he doesn't understand how others are different, why that's okay and how to accommodate their needs, never mind provide emotional attunement. Aspects of Gradgrind family life feel to me like an exaggerated caricature of deeply familiar realities (with people I've known socially, not just some relatives).
But I can understand him; I am also regularly exasperated by people not sharing views of mine which make much more sense on a large scale than common practice (and it is much harder to live with when they are not matters on which one is conventionally "allowed" to speak out and break away) and think that certain social norms ought to be changed.
I daresay others have observed this before me, but Gradgrind is so Aspie. Or more precisely reads like what you get from Aspie + old-school British upbringing.

Of course, the politics aren't quite as simple as they first appear, because Dickens' impoverished characters are presented as nice people whereas the 2016 rightward populist voter is often characterised as racist, or at least not placing a candidate's racism high enough up the list as the other side think they should. A more definite difference is that the Dickensian industrialist fact-propagators are the ones who believe there's almost no such thing as too much hard work, a position now established among the emotional appeals of right-wing populism in Britain and the US. The most constant difference between right and left of 1854 and 2016 appears to be on locus of control and the notion of a deserving and undeserving poor.

At the time I started this book - 15th Nov - I was desperate to try and understand how humour might have a place in such a world of increased poverty, inequality and progressively more dystopian news: I knew it had to, but I couldn't see how, feeling that there must be the beginning of an answer in going back to old comic authors, like Dickens, and Shakespeare's mechanical scenes, written in worlds where life was harder for a far higher percentage of people. Or there was the very specific idea I had for a post-apocalyptic comedy in which one of the main characters in an ensemble was a witty, flamboyant gay guy based on a composite of a couple of friends and some famous people; but no-one else has made it and I haven't quite the chops to write it myself. The thing which has actually given me the greatest sense of "life goes on", even whilst the news feels strange and volatile and full of potential Archduke Ferdinand moments, has been switching for a couple of weeks to the Goodreads community newsfeed - i.e. random people, in theory everyone on the whole damn site. They're a lot more interesting and varied than some of you give them credit for.

So much for all these big a/illusions about the relevance of Hard Times: it's also another of Dickens' sentimental soap operas starring cartoon characters painted in black or white, and minimal greyscale. I like the whole a bit too much to say "mawkish", but agree it's forgivable to use that word of certain scenes. I'm glad I read it when I was old and cynical enough to know that, actually, people rarely change as much as Gradgrind does here, and on the few occasions they do, never as quickly. (I reckon it would take about 18 months of therapy, as well as sheer aptitude, to acquire that amount of emotional insight and expression from cold - it puts me in mind of a case study in one of Daniel Siegel's books, in which a chap described as having a fairly high degree of avoidant attachment, but who also sounds like he has Aspie traits, became much more emotionally open after deciding to do therapy in old age in order to communicate better with his family.) The accumulation in implicit memory over many years of novels and films in which people have rapid character transformations - if someone only says the right thing - led to way too many disappointments when I was younger. Even if one or two people did seem to have observed something like that in me. As a practically middle-aged adult, Gradgrind's Damascene conversion seems as obviously fantastical, impossible fairy-tale wish fulfilment, and a product of Victorian sentimentality, as does the higly improbable and pulpy - and yes, arguably, ultimately mawkish - coincidence between other characters a few chapters later. Such as the bit where Rachael and Sissy find Stephen despite other search parties having failed.

The negative authorial view of suave cad Harthouse  - whilst it was evidently unlikely to happen, I hoped Louisa would shag him because I wanted her to have some throwaway fun with someone infinitely fitter than her husband -  could be an interesting comparison with takes on similar characters of the fin de siecle. His amorality, levity and chameleon nature appear to be used as indictments, but so used am I to seeing near-identical phrases adopted as positives by Wilde and other aesthetes (Did Oscar nick them from Charles? I would not be surprised) that these attributes have lost 90% of their power as criticism.

Hard Times is a funny old thing really, part complex/relevant/political, part pulp of yesteryear - though I guess those are the essence of what Dickens is.

-----

I never used to leave an academic introduction until after I'd read the book, but this time I did.

The notes by Kate Flint (I really like the name “Kate Flint” – spellable, doesn’t stand out too much, yet memorable, poetically consonant and so very definite and solid ) are pretty good as notes in contemporary editions go: there aren’t too many of the explanations of things that should be common knowledge to the vast majority of readers of Eng Lit at this level, but there are still some oddities inexplicably missed out, of which I’d have liked elucidation, as they simply don’t lend themselves to encyclopaedias or search. The latter was every thus; notes never seem to be complete. The introduction is decent – I have a feeling that the reason that nearly all introductions feel somewhat insubstantial these days is only because I first got to know the Penguin / OUP Classics intro as a form whilst aged 10-14, and that is still the time at which I read the greatest concentration of them; inevitably they would have seemed that bit more difficult and more of the information novel at that age.

The central premise of Flint’s commentary is that the novel intentionally defies easy categorisation and (although the term is not used) its binary oppositions are incomplete because it is setting itself up against the rigid system of Victorian Utilitarian philosophy and education. (For example it tends to favour the “natural” over the artificial (unlike the decadents of 40 years later, as I mentioned above), and the section titling headlines this, with agricultural terms in contrast to the industrial setting (how did I miss that?!) But that is not total. It is “not a programmatic book, and is the stronger for it”. Dickens shies away from being too radical politically: his working class characters are sympathetic as individuals with predicaments, and ostracised by the organised trade union (however, those who try to keep them so very downtrodden reform spontaneously, or are exposed as hypocrites).

Whilst reading the first part of Hard Times, I was convinced it must have been written whilst Dickens’ marriage was breaking down, as there is not a good marriage in the book. His pedestalising of Louisa seemed transparently like someone who was becoming attracted to younger women but wrestling with this, as the author evidently thinks the marriage with an age gap of 30-odd years is a bad idea from the first – on checking the history, I saw he had not met Ellen Terry at this point. The introduction has a little but not too much on that well worn topic “the role of women”, found in every list of possible Eng Lit essays to choose between. Dickens does not overtly criticise Louisa’s being educated in the same way as a boy, which makes the book more palatable to modern readers, although there are hints of disapproval in the text that Flint points out, especially when it is seen in the context of nineteenth century advice to women. In the end it is Sissy Jupe who emerges as the most balanced character.

I haven't read a lot of Dickens in recent times (my last was Bleak House in 2005), so was it me, finding this one particularly soapy, or is it the book? Flint mentions that Hard Times was the first book in thirteen years that Dickens wrote as a weekly - rather than a monthly - serial, which may explain that.

..
الرواية من روايات الأدب الإنجليزي القليلة
اللِّي شدتني .. بعكس (قصة مدينتين) مثلًا ! رغم إنها لم تكن سيئة..
حياة تشارلز ديكنز وطفولتُه البائسة
اثرها ظاهر بِشكل كبير علي شخصياته اللِّي بيرسمها بإحترافية
التجارب الأليمة التي يمر بها كُل شخص هي التي تصنعه بالتأكيد وبالتالي تترك تأثير عظيم
فى نفسه،
رواية تترك بصمة إنسانية عميقة ف الوجدان.
تتضمن الرواية حديث عن الأطفال الصغار الَّذين عانوا الكثير من العذاب والقهر والضياع بسبب
الظروف الاجتماعية السائدة ف مجتمعاتهِم.
البعض يختار الظروف لتكون عونًا له علي الأيام، يستمد منها القوة، والحكمة أيضًا
وهناك آخرين.. يجدوا منها الفرصة السانحة لتُصبح الظروف شماعة لإرتكاب الأخطاء في حق أنفسهم
ومن حولهِم.. حياتك البائسة من الممكن أن تكون مدرستك. فقط إذا اردت.

عمل إنساني، بيوصل رسالة فعلًا
الأسلوب سهل وبسيط بكُل ما فى هذه الحياة من أمل وألم.
رغم البؤس بها إلا إنه لم يُظهر لنا الدنيا سوداوية .. بل يرى أن
كل شيء قابل للإصلاح ..

الكاتب الأول عن البؤس .. لم يستطع أي كاتب آخر ان يصل لمستوي تشارلز ديكنز في الكتابه عن البؤس والمعاناه .. طريقة كتابته تشعرني دائما بنفس شعور الأبطال ويبكيني احيانا كثيرة

أوقات عصيبة من أفضل الروايات .. علي الرغم من اني اعجب بجميع كتابات تشارلز ديكنز وعندما اجد كتاب له ابدأ في قراءته بدون تفكير

3,5/5
Seguramente 'Tiempos difíciles' no se sume a mis Dickens predilectos pero aún así creo que es una novela muy interesante y que he disfrutado.
El contexto político y social es realmente el centro de la historia, y más que los personajes es la trama la que importa en esta novela con temas muy claros como la Revolución industrial, la educación victoriana, la diferencia de clases, la hipocresía generalizada... y sobre todo la lucha entre la ciencia, los hechos y la imaginación.
Me han encantado todas las reflexiones de Dickens en esta novela aunque sí que es verdad que me ha faltado algo para llegar a adorarla.

Romanzo sociale, ambientato nella cittadina industriale di Coketown dove il proletariato nascente lavora senza speranza di riscatto. Ma l’intento principale di Dickens è quello di criticare l’ideologia dei “fatti” che considera soltanto ciò che può essere dimostrato razionalmente e che si rivela utile praticamente. Al bando le fantasticherie! Ideologia che abolisce il cuore, le sue ragioni indimostrabili e tuttavia vere.
Personaggi completamente negativi, come Bounderby, che rappresenta la classe sociale dei nuovi ricchi, astuta e volgare, si contrappongono a quelli assolutamente postivi, come la giovane Sissy, sottratta bambina alla vita del circo (simbolo dell’immaginazione calpestata) e acquisita come serva dalla famiglia Gradgrind .
Nel mezzo si muovono i personaggi tormentati e ambigui come Louisa, figlia dell’educatore fervente utilitarista Gradgrind, andata in sposa all’arido, ormai maturo Bounderby per amore del fratello Tom, un giovane inetto e imbroglione. Tom e Louisa, infatti, sono il risultato infelice di un progetto educativo fallimentare, quello che fa del principio dell’utile un metodo e una bandiera.

Gli ingredienti sono quelli a cui siamo abituati, leggendo Dickens. Ma i difetti della narrativa dickensiana qui sono accentuati, anzi più che difetti si tratta di eccessi: troppa (patetica) teatralità, troppo sentimentalismo, troppe sdolcinature. Il popolo è sempre buono, onesto, paziente, umile e accetta con spirito di sacrificio l’ingiustizia a cui viene sottoposto; spesso i personaggi positivi sono poco sfaccettati e quelli negativi rappresentano deboli stereotipi. Nel complesso mancano tutti di spessore e di credibilità.

Insomma: Tempi difficili non è il romanzo più riuscito di Dickens. L’analisi sociale si ferma alla superficie e nessuno dei personaggi ti rapisce davvero il cuore. Siamo molto lontani dalle vette raggiunte, in questo campo, da Emile Zola. Ma forse i tempi, pur essendo difficili, non erano ancora maturi per essere davvero raccontati.

A slim and compact tale whose characters and story packs a powerful punch, Dickens’ Hard Times is as vitriolic an indictment against the institutionalized teaching model Paolo Friere scathingly criticized as the “banking concept” in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Josiah Bounderby is delectably drawn, as is the crooked and colorful characters of James Harthouse, Mrs. Sparsit, and our cold and calculated heroine, Louisa Gradgrind. Dickens, at first, seems to forgo his typical habit of idealizing women and turns to poor, noble Stephen Blackpool, our vessel of compassion and relative to Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit, who all share the soppy and saccharine blood of all that is good and pure.

In the same vein, Tom Gradgrind is a more evil and broken version of his predecessor, Richard Carnstone. Dickens makes his downfall so wickedly delightful that we can’t help but take pleasure in the fact that sometimes it feels so good to be so bad. The book, like Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South, also raises a harsh and scrutinizing brow towards Industry, dismissing the stoic heartlessness of businessmen who only have minds and spend time on cold, hard facts. Our saving hope eventually swoops in and typical to the great Chuck D. only Sissy Jupe’s kind, warm heart can melt the icy stubbornness of an otherwise frigid cast.

Sissy Jupe, a truly fascinating woman, is sadly left unexploited as a character. The abandoned daughter of a circus performer turned savior to Coketown, so much potential is lost in a conclusion that is sadly rushed and seems slapdash at most. With a transparent plot that rockets each character into a fiery trajectory, their destinations dissipate into deflated summary at the end of the novel. Dickens strength is utilizing the environment and surroundings of his story to open up his characters and give depth to his themes. This is a wonderfully condensed example of how to use Place to shade characters and direct action.

Alright, so I was quite prejudiced going into this. I read and disliked A Christmas Carol and in my head I feel like I'm not a Dickens fan. Despite this being the first novel of his I've tried. It's his shortest finished book and depicts the social structures of the time, which I'm interested in reading. So it made sense to start here.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised. I didn't like all of the characters and at times I was frustrated with the plot, but I enjoyed listening to it on audiobook and wanted to find out what happened in the end. So it held my attention, didn't annoy me and has made me consider reading more of his work. I'd call that a win.

This definitely seems like a change of pace from Dickens other novels. I suppose it being so much shorter than most of them makes a difference, but it has a different feel to being entirely set in a fictional place called Coketown.

As usual, there are some vivid characters in this novel and the theme of the struggles of the impoverished working-class in the face of uncaring mill owners is clear enough. Charles clearly had a great deal of compassion for the poor, and it shines through in this book, though I don’t think he agreed that trade unions were the answer. I’m not sure what he thought was the answer to the inequities of his era, human kindness maybe? This is so clearly a morality tale about the virtuous working-classes versus the unfeeling upper classes as well as imagination and sentiment versus cold logic and the philosophy of Utilitarianism.

Most of the nicer people in the story such as Sissy Jupe, Stephen Blackpool, and Rachael were from the lower classes, while the nastier ones like Mr. Bounderby, Mrs. Sparsit and James Harthouse tend to be from higher up the social ladder.

Mr. Bounderby seems to think that he can get a lot of mileage from how far he supposedly pulled himself up from the gutter considering all the lies and trouble he went to in order to create that myth. He ends up getting exposed as a fraud and deservedly so. Personally, I think he overrates the value of his self-made man story. He is the very image of the wealthy capitalist who can’t understand why poor people have so much trouble getting by. He insists on attributing bad motives to every one of them. There are plenty of his ilk around to this day.

Mr. Gradgrind starts out seeming kind of ridiculous with his overblown utilitarian philosophy, but he ends up having a heart after all. Though he has to deal with the bad crop that he had spent a lifetime sewing. There’s a pretty transparent moral lesson in all that.

Speaking of things that are transparent, I’m not sure why Louisa is spoken of as being such a mystery to others and so out of touch with her own feelings. They were pretty obvious to me and I found her to be a strong, likeable character, unlike her brother.

If Bitzer had succeeded in arresting Tom and dragging them back to face justice, I wouldn’t really have been bothered. Was all that effort to save him from facing the consequences of his actions really justified? He did rob a bank and then framed an innocent man for the crime, an action that indirectly led to that man’s death. I think a real appropriate ending here would have been to have thrown the book at him.

Nineteenth-century England seems like an awfully dangerous place to go walking. Watch out for those hidden mine shafts! It’s definitely a good thing that Rachael and Sissy decided to go for a stroll that day. It’s amazing what you can find when you do that in a novel. They didn’t save Stephen’s life but they did save his reputation. I wish it were that easy in the real world.

Anyway, this wasn’t a bad book though I had a tougher time getting into it. Maybe you need all that extra length that you find in a typical Dickens novel to really lose yourself emotionally into the story. One thing you can say about Dicken’s pleas on behalf of the working class is they didn’t cause is much trouble and bloodshed as Karl Marx’s did. Charles may have been a bit overly sentimental in his outlook, and I’ll leave that to wiser heads than mine to decide whether he was misguided, but it’s pretty clear that he cared about people more than some philosophy.

I study it At my last High School year...
It was seriously Hard Times :)
I loved the story and lived in my head the places,the characters ... I even create a cast for the novel to live it :)

Hard Times it's an atypical Dickensian novel, because usually he writes thousand-pages novels and this one instead it's only about 300. I was sorry of it, because it was a very gripping story and I would have liked it to last more.
It's set in the fictional town of Coketown, where there is a factory and the sky is always grey for the smoke.
Here lives Mr Gradgrind, a very rigid schoolmaster, that raises his children Tom and Louisa in a hard way, without letting them be free and have imagination. When they will grow up, though, Mr Gradgrind will have to repent of his educational methods, because both they will be unhappy persons.
The book is full of social issues, like life in the factories, represented by the character of Stephen Blackpool, a working-class man who leads a hard life with a drunkard wife.

I appreciated it very much.

«أوقات صعبة» لتشارلس ديكنز
كتبت الرواية في زمن الثورة الصناعية زمن الفوارق الطبقية والانتفاضات العمالية والشعبية.
و في إمكاننا أن نقول إن تشارلز ديكنز، الكاتب الإنكليزي الكبير والذي كان من أكثرهم شهرة وتأثيراً في القراء الأوروبيين عموماً بكتاباته تلك التي من النوع الشخصيّ جداً كان رائعًا في هذه الرواية.
ديكنز لم يعش الفقر والصراعات الطبقية نظرياً، عبر التأمل والقراءة، بل عاشها بنفسه ميدانياً، هو الذي كان منذ طفولته يعاني غرق أهله في الديون ووصول أبيه إلى السجن أحياناً بسبب تلك الديون. ومن هنا، فإن الواقع في الرواية نابعاً من معاناته الشخصية.
تدور أحداث رواية «أوقات صعبة» في مدينة كوكتاون، حيث كانت تزدهر الصناعات الناشئة وبدأ ينتشر نوع من التبديل الجذري في ذهنيات أفراد الطبقة العاملة كما في الأحوال الاقتصادية للناس. في الرواية يظهر صراع بين طبقتين(البورجوازية والبروليتاريا)
ديكنز رمز إلى البروليتاريا بشخصية العامل بلاكبول
ورمز الى البورجوازية عبر شخصيتين أساسيتين :
1-مديرُ المدرسة غراد غريند، الذي كان -لفرط ما لديه من نزعة مادية- يربي أولاده على الوقائع الحقائق حتى أنه كان يوجه إليهم الأمر المباشر بكل قسوة (لا تتخيل..لا تسرحي)
تربية مجرّدة من العاطفة والحب وكان لها تأثير على ابنته الكبرى وشقيقها بطريقة مختلفة..فكل منهما له شخصية مختلفة تظهر خلال تطور الأحداث.
2- السيد باوندرباي، رجل الأعمال والمصرفي، صديق مدير المدرسة، والذي يطمع في الزواج من ابنته الجميلة وهو هنا بورجوازي حقيقي يعيش حياته وأفكاره في خط واحد لا يتطور..(عكس شخصية غراد غريند غير الراسخ طبقيا التي تطورت في النهاية)

الجزء الأساس من الرواية يتتبع مسار حياة الشخصيتين «البورجوازيتين» بالإضافة إلى مسار شخصية الصغيرة
سيسي الفقيرة، ابنة مهرج السيرك التي تلقي بها الأحداث إلى ساحة البيت لتتربى مع أولاد (غراد) بعقليتها الخيالية وشخصيتها العاطفية وكل ذاك الحب الذي تحمله..كان من المنطقي أن تحظى بحب الكاتب، لأن الفقراء، في رأيه «يعرفون عادة كيف يحافظون على أفئدتهم صافية نقية».
تتتبع الرواية أيضًا مسارشخصية العامل البسيط بلاكبول، الذي يقع ذات مرة ضحية لمؤامرة يحيكها ضده ابن سيده صاحب العمل، ومرة ثانية ضحية لسذاجة رفاقه في العمل في مصنع الحياكة.
..هنا يمثل الكاتب شرف الطبقة العاملة ونزاهتها في شخصية العامل (بلاكبول) بينما سمثل الوجه السوداوي منها في شخصيات رفاقه في المصنع
النهاية كانت مريحة اللهم إلا شخصية ابنة غراد غريند التي تزوجت من صديقة المصرفي الذي يكبرها بثلاثين سنة ..وددت لو أنها حظيت بنهاية أفضل.
هذا العمل يبقى من أجمل أعمال تشارلز ديكنز.

I can remember watching this Granada series in the late 1970s.
The first scene was grey, brown and dirty when all of a sudden
brilliant colour just errupted everywhere - the circus had come
to Coketown. Dickens gave "Hard Times" an unrelieved seriousness,
there are no beloved comic characters apart from Mr Sleary, the circus
manager. Preston was experiencing some intolerable working conditions
among the down trodden workers - a local newspaper article said
that if factory workers from other parts of England were able to
get a wage rise, you could rest assured the people from Preston
wouldn't. Dickens even used his journalistic knowledge to travel
to Preston which he felt was the town at the heart of the "condition
of England" problem. Sympathy for workers and their rights was
being investigated thoroughly in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell,
in fact the introduction states that only in Gaskell's novels
could someone read of the true state of factory workers. Dickens
however is very vague about things. When Stephen Blackpool is sent
to Coventry I just assumed it was because he was a scab but the
book seemed to imply it may have been because his drunken wife had
returned to him.
It wouldn't be Dickens without some oddball names - Master
Kiddiminister, a young circus worker and Mr. McChoakumchild,
one of the teachers in the Gradgrind school that "spews out
children from a huge "facts, nothing but facts" cannon". The notes
at the back provide an illuminating look at the British school
system circa 1840 - 1,000 pupils taught in 1 room by only 2 masters
and 1 mistress - it was an explanation on why Dickens had his pupils
numbered (Pupil 20 etc). Gradgrind has bought up his own children
in this sterile atmosphere where fairy tales and flights of fancy
are forbidden - Louisa, however, has been caught looking at the
circus and she is far from repentant, so with the arrival of Sissy
Jupe at the Gradgrind's home (she is a carnival child whose father
has abandoned her) you just know that before the end the solid
Gradgrind values are to be turned on their ear.
Almost a novella by Dicken's standards, Sissy disappears from the
book until the last quarter, when Louisa returns to the family
home to find that Sissy has been weaving some "wondering" magic
on the younger children and even her parents. Louisa who inhabits
an emotionless void has obediently married that supreme humbug
Mr. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown who never tires of telling people
that he was born in a ditch, rejected by his mother and brought
up by a drunken grandmother (which makes the revelation by his
soon to appear again mother all the more sweeter). He is encouraged
by the reptilian Mrs. Sparsit who once moved in a very different
social circle as she is fond of exclaiming to all and sundry.
Louisa has married Bounderby because of her great love for her
brother Tom who feels he could really get on if Louisa was there
to smooth his path. He is shown as all that is wrong with his
father's rigid educational system, as is Bitzer, who proves he has
soaked up Gradgrind's principle rules too thoroughly to forget them.
This novel really diverges off the path of the usual Victorian
novel with the appearance of Tom Harthouse, a young gentleman who
stays around just long enough to bring out Louisa's compassion
and to make her realise that she can make a break from Bounderby
with some huge support from Sissy.