Há, na pobreza, muita «riqueza». Livro após livro, Charles Dickens tenta mostrar-nos isso mesmo, evidenciando em simultâneo, e de forma tão sua, que podemos encontrar igualmente uma boa dose de «pobreza» na riqueza.

Em «Hard Times», Dickens traz-nos mais um excelente retrato de época, desta vez, dando ênfase ao desenvolvimento industrial e à pressão económica que este gerou. Como é habitual, guarneceu o livro com personagens cómicas/dramáticas, humildes/afogadas em «snobismo», sérias/trapaceiras, altruístas/egoístas, inocentes/bem sabidas - contrastes entre si mas todas elas excecionalmente bem caracterizadas, todas relevantes para a narrativa e todas únicas.

Através delas, Dickens mostra-nos o valor da honestidade, o possível antagonismo entre o que queremos e o que precisamos e como a perseguição dos nossos desejos nos pode levar a perder o que efetivamente nos faz falta; mas também como não nos podemos deixar guiar apenas pelos factos, pela razão, ignorando as ânsias do coração. Como se fossem marionetas, usa habilmente as suas personagens para transmitir pontos de vista; chama-nos na altura exacta para presenciarmos uma cena, encaminhando-nos para a próxima, e a próxima, pacientemente, de acordo com o seu objectivo, e depois, quando satisfeito, indica que nos afastemos para que estas personagens possam seguir com as suas vidas.

Acreditando na completa racionalização do ser humano, Thomas Gradgrind personifica o espírito da revolução industrial ao considerar as pessoas como máquinas; tudo deveria ter como base apenas os «factos», lógicos e verdadeiros. Assim, Gradgring acaba por educar os seus filhos de uma forma que mais tarde só os poderia levar ao fracasso pessoal, incapazes de reconhecer e expressar emoções, sem capacidae imaginativa. Louisa, a filha, não exibe sequer traços da feminilidade victoriana. Já Bounderby representa as oportunidades advindas das alterações sociais proporcionadas pela industrialização e capitalismo, subindo na vida a pulso, pelo seu próprio esforço, isto claro, se ele não fosse uma fraude! A eles juntam-se Mrs. Sparsit, uma aristocrata em declínio e Stephen um trabalhador que, apesar de todas as dificuldades, mantém a sua honestidade e integridade.

Aprecio muito o cuidado que Dickens teve com cada frase, obtendo do leitor a reacção e efeito desejados, dando-lhe crédito ao não ser demasiado óbvio. «Diz-nos» uma coisa mas deixa-nos entrever outra completamente diferente, permitindo-nos desenvolver opiniões próprias, antecipar acontecimentos e, assim, criar afeições.

O seu estilo muito próprio, reconhecível, permite que nos apeguemos não a um livro específico mas a toda a obra do autor, e até a ele próprio. Não conseguindo contrariar a minha imaginação, conjecturo-o sempre sentado a uma mesa de madeira, debruçado com afinco sobre uma série de folhas; as faces marcadas pelo tempo, o mesmo que lhe trouxe a preciosa sabedoria que anseia por partilhar connosco. Não consigo, de igual forma, contrariar o inexplicável carinho que sinto por este escritor.

Acredito que podemos avaliar a qualidade de um livro, em relação ao seu conteúdo, pelo tempo que poderíamos dissecá-lo em conversa - e, neste caso, a resposta é: muito tempo. Cada «E aquela parte em que…» nos levaria a uma nova discussão, também ela cheia de ramificações.

E é por isso que não me demoro mais: se tiverem a oportunidade de ler Dickens, por favor, façam-no.

I’m really glad I read a novel which I thought would bore me at the beginning; and it wasn’t at all as I expected! Dickens is so modern that, if it weren’t for the Victorian context, clearly recognizable, I’d have considered him a contemporary writer! He just delivers the story in the best way possible, both for literature and the general public. His very elegant and well-pondered irony in describing the Victorian era, his extreme characters (really difficult to forget) interacting with each other as set in their ways as they can be, make his novels unique in the nineteenth-century English literature.
Hard Times deals with education and the idea on which industrial revolution and positivist philosophy were based at the time: everything had to be rational. Everything was a rational Fact and could be explained only through Reason. The characters in the novel are educated to the science of Facts and are completely void of any unnatural and uncontrollable manifestations of the heart. How will they develop in life is the main interest of the writer: will they success in finding a well-paid job in Coketown, bargain a profitable marriage, live decently and happily? And will their parents, the champions of Positivism, who took care of their education first-hand, be happy with their choices, support them throughout their lives and be proud of them?
Some of the other issues addressed in this novel: the gap between rich and poor, the conditions of workers and of the orphans (Dickens himself was a humanitarian in his everyday life).

In a Muddle

This is probably where Dickens found himself to some extent when sales of his periodical Household Words were falling and he started publishing his new novel Hard Times on its pages in order to improve sales figures. These latter did in fact improve, albeit the novel itself seems to have suffered from the weekly publication mode that was the consequence of Dickens’s decision: Now Dickens had to deliver weekly and to cut up his story into shorter chapters. Apart from that, Dickens must have had great ambitions with regard to the message of his novel, and the enemy he was attacking was indeed a powerful and a sprawling one – the philosophy of utilitarianism, which, in a vulgarized form, found its way into everyday life, changing production patterns, public welfare and the school system.

So Dickens had a lot to say, but all in all little weekly space to do this – and he had to tell a story into the bargain. The result is an unusually short novel, for Dickens’s standards at least, whose narrative strands hardly unite and whose course appears rather piecemeal and choppy – it takes, for instance, almost a third of the novel’s length before we see some plot development of any sort. What has happened up to then can be characterized as the parading of ideas before the reader’s eyes. Now, what are these ideas?

”‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’”

These are the famous opening words of our novel, and one of the topics Dickens pursues on its pages is the criticism of utilitarian schooling, which favoured the instilment of dead and often unrelated chunks of knowledge according to a certain system and which stifled the pupils’ imagination and power of induction along with their motivation to learn. Mr. Gradgrind is the proponent of this kind of uninspired, narrow-minded schooling, and not only is one of the teachers of his school most tellingly named Mr. M’Choakumchild, but also Mr. Gradgrind’s own children, Louisa and Tom, who are paradigms of Mr. Gradgrind’s educational system, will be revealed as failures in real life: Louisa, stunted in her emotional development, will allow herself to be driven into a loveless marriage, and Tom will end up an opportunistic good-for-nothing. Another example of Mr. Gradgrind’s schooling, a pale young boy named Bitzer, will rise in society but become a calculating, self-serving monster. Mr. Gradgrind’s reliance on facts and his exclusion of anything fanciful and interesting to children from his own household and from the lives of his scions may seem a bit of an exaggeration, but given the significant impact utilitarianism had on the educational system in Dickens’s day and age, Mr. Gradgrind can be seen as a type and a caricature that is artistically justified. His sudden change and redemption at the end of the second part of the novel is, in comparison, more difficult to stomach and quite unbelievable.

”Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.”

Coketown, which is the name of the fictitious industrial town in which Dickens set his novel, is inextricably linked with the system of utilitarianism represented by Mr. Gradgrind, for it is a “triumph of fact”. One of its main features seems to be efficacy – after all, it’s an industrial town – but efficacy, seen from another angle, all too easily translates into monotony and drabness, hence the ‘melancholy elephant’ and the unvaried streets. Mr. Josiah Bounderby is one of the factory-owners in Coketown, and he likes to present himself as a self-made man who had no advantages in life but owes it all to himself. Mr. Bounderby delights in uncouth behaviour to show his humble origins, but he also likes to have a housekeeper who has high family relations but has come down in the world financially and to marry “Tom Gradgrind’s daughter”, as he puts it – because these are signs of his personal achievements. Yet, little does it surprise us because Mr. Bounderby blows his own horn too unscrupulously, Mr. Bounderby will turn out a humbug, thus allowing Dickens to deal a blow to those who voice ideas like the following, which the often very satirical narrative voice of the novel denounces as another of Coketown’s pet fictions:

”Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don’t you go and do it?”

Where there are factory owners, there must also be workers but in Hard Times the ratio of employers and employees is rather odd because whereas we have Mr. Bounderby, Mr. Gradgrind, his family, Mrs. Sparsit and also Mr. Harthouse as – usually morally flawed – representatives of the higher classes, there are only Stephen Blackpool and Rachael as fully-fledged characters with a working-class background. Did I say ‘fully-fledged? That is exactly what they are not, they are not even representatives of the working class because for some reason Stephen Blackpool has taken a vow never to join a trade union, and thus he is shunned by his fellow-workers, who remain a faceless mass on the pages of this novel. Being all on his own, ostracized from his colleagues, doomed to love Rachael but never to find his love fulfilled because he is already married to a hopeless alcoholic, whom Dickens does not even name in order to concentrate the reader’s pity on Stephen and not to have any of it diverted to his wife, sacked by Mr. Bounderby and stumbling from one misfortune into another – pardon the pun –, Stephen Blackpool is more of a melodramatic stock-character, a meek martyr, than an apt representative of real life workers’ grievances. Just consider the following little scene:

”‘Sir, I were never good at showin o ’t, though I ha had’n my share in feeling o ’t. ’Deed we are in a muddle, sir. Look round town—so rich as ’tis—and see the numbers o’ people as has been broughten into bein heer, fur to weave, an’ to card, an’ to piece out a livin’, aw the same one way, somehows, ’twixt their cradles and their graves. Look how we live, an’ wheer we live, an’ in what numbers, an’ by what chances, and wi’ what sameness; and look how the mills is awlus a goin, and how they never works us no nigher to ony dis���ant object—ceptin awlus, Death. Look how you considers of us, and writes of us, and talks of us, and goes up wi’ yor deputations to Secretaries o’ State ’bout us, and how yo are awlus right, and how we are awlus wrong, and never had’n no reason in us sin ever we were born. Look how this ha growen an’ growen, sir, bigger an’ bigger, broader an’ broader, harder an’ harder, fro year to year, fro generation unto generation. Who can look on ’t, sir, and fairly tell a man ’tis not a muddle?’

‘Of course,’ said Mr. Bounderby. ‘Now perhaps you’ll let the gentleman know, how you would set this muddle (as you’re so fond of calling it) to rights.’

‘I donno, sir. I canna be expecten to ’t. ’Tis not me as should be looken to for that, sir. ’Tis them as is put ower me, and ower aw the rest of us. What do they tak upon themseln, sir, if not to do’t?’”

The good thing about Stephen is that he never gets angry but always suffers patiently, and he never really finds fault with anybody. This might have invited Victorian readers to spill many a morally edifying tear over his lot without being too much afraid of him, but to modern readers less given to sentimentality, Stephen is one of the major flaws of the novel, not only because he is clumsily worked into the plot – which is already clumsy in its own right in many ways – but also because he is such a meek lamb.

All in all, Stephen Blackpool and Rachael show Dickens’s greatest weakness, his propensity to cheap melodrama and icky sentimentalism, whereas the novel itself is so short that the author’s relatively weak hand at creating believable plots cannot find a proper counterweight in Dickens’s artistic strengths – namely masterful and atmospheric descriptions, the creation of memorable, larger-than-life characters and the careful building of a slowly and wow!-ly unfolding microcosm that readers feel at home in and that they are familiar with long after closing the book. It is strange that after Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and his masterpiece Bleak House Dickens should have written a book like Hard Times but one might really put this down to the unusual circumstances in which Dickens was writing. It is not as bad as The Old Curiosity Shop but in my opinion it is the weakest of his later novels. Of course, being a Dickens novel, it is still head and shoulders above much other Victorian and non-Victorian writing.