In current political discourse I have a particular dislike of the phrase 'Hard working families' since it implies it is not good enough to be working, or in a family, or even merely both of those together. No, only if it in addition to that you are sufficiently hard working are you good enough for your needs to be taken seriously in politics, and if you should slacken in your Stakhanovite ardour by preferring maybe to take a holiday rather than like Boxer in Animal Farm to work yourself into the glue factory, then presumably policy makers will think 'to Hell with you then'.

I feel that it was to counter such utilitarianism and the implicit acceptance of GDP ever increasing and the positive balance sheet as the meaning and purpose of life that Dickens wrote this comic melodrama - and and to assert the burning importance of creating in law a form of affordable and accessible divorce, which was a matter of particular concern to Dickens once he decided that he was bored of his wife and preferred rushing about after a young actress instead.

This is possibly my favourite Dickens novel, apart from or including all my other favourite Dickens novels, although it is a shade more melodramatic, than others - at least it does not try to jerk the tears out of you. It is short, punchy and humorous. I think you see in this one, because it is short, how Dickens suffered from an excess of ideas so at the start we are introduced to school teachers Mr & Mrs McChokemchild who appear twice in the novel before disappearing completely. Indeed they are so insignificant that Dickens needn't have bothered naming them.

Although the novel is set in a Northern English industrial town - Coketown  although that suggests steel and metal working, it seems from the mentions of fluff that the business of Coketown is based around cotton and weaving rather than coke and coking this is curiously not much relevant to the plot. Dickens published Gaskell's North and South, but he isn't interested in writing a shock novel about industrial Britain, Coketown as a setting is largely irrelevant to the story which again is not typical of Dickens for whom location is an important character generally in his books.

Nice themes here are family, the bad characters commit the ultimate Victorian shibboleth and reject, deny, or pimp off their families  interestingly Dickens was pretty ruthless in managing his own wife and children, while the good characters cling to their families and maybe can even be redeemed through family love.

This is novel that is above all about education - the formation of hegemonic social values through schooling in this case a thorough fact obsessed utilitarianism against which fantasy and the right to amusement struggles to be heard, Dickens being Dickens, it is that latter voices which eventually cuts through the 'facts' and eventually we see that Bounderby, the vigorous proponent of the school of hard knocks has in fact created himself as a the richest fantasy of all in his claim to be a self made man. In a beautiful though unsubtle touch (this is not a subtle book) travelling circus performers lodge at a pub called the Pegasus Arms - as though a winged horse wasn't fantastical enough - this one has to have arms too. In this book we are shown that without being taught or indulged with fantasy and pleasure from childhood, we end up depressed and struggling to find purpose or value in life and at continual risk from rogues and bounders all of which brings to mind John Stuart Mill and his complete breakdown following on from a utilitarian education and his eventual recovery through poetry.

This is an interesting one from the point of view of Dickens' radicalism too - which again rests on individual redemption - this stands at variance with the theme of education - if anybody was telling Dickens that he had to be coherent and congruent, that was not a voice he paid attention to.

They say no-one reads a book to get to the middle. Well, for Hard Times, perhaps they should, so disappointing the end turns out to be, this is one of the examples of how literature has improved over the years. Having read Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities and enjoying them all immensely I tried Hard Times, having read here and elsewhere that the book represented Dickens at his best. It does not, and to say that it does devalues his other work. The book is filled with shallow characters where motivations are left unexplained, where the writing is long and overworked, where the reliance on local dialect is used as a substitute for characterisation, this for me is Dickens at his worst. There is, underneath all the wrought wordmanship, a worthy tale of the perils of industrialisation but it is too obtusely flanked by peripheral stories that do nothing but divert the attention away from this central tale. A scything edit and a reduction in word count to around 50,000 would have helped the story shine through but, as it is, it remains as blustery, repetitive overblown, misguided, predictable and boring as old Bounderby himself. Very disappointing.

My eighth Dickens novel (if you count Drood), this was not my favorite. Lacking the subtlety in his social commentary of a Bleak House, or Our Mutual Friend, the melodrama turned to 11, a Dickensian 11, overall this was far less fleshed out than his better works. Having said that, his much more direct social commentary in the novel was scathing and refreshing at times for its frankness, and Hard Times does contain a few of his most eloquent passages. I’ll end by giving two examples:

“In that charmed apartment, the most complicated social questions were cast up, got into exact totals, and finally settled—if those concerned could only have been brought to know it. As if an astronomical observatory should be made without any windows, pen, ink, and paper, so Mr. Gradgrind, in his observatory (and there are many like it), had no need to cast an eye upon all the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all their destinies in a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty little bit of sponge.”

“It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.”

I taught this novel many times--oh, a dozen--because it's the shortest Dickens, fits into a college course easier than Nicholas Nickleby, my favorite, which I only taught once. Likewise with War and Peace only once because it took mostly the whole semester. Hard Times is excellent on education, only Nicholas surpassing it--and perhaps Tom Sawyer, on American and Church education.

Gradgrind, the businessman who sets the tone of M'Choakumchild's school, disapproves of his daughter Louisa's reading*, almost as much as circus performer Sissy Jupe's, who read to her circus father about the Hunchback, and Dwarfs. Gradgrind says, "Never wonder." He disapproves of such fiction, of the workers who "sometimes sat down after fifteen hours work to read mere fables about men and women, more or less like themsleves, and about children..."(38). Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby has the Member of Parliament opposing bills "for giving poor grubbing devils of authors a right to their own property," adding that in writing his speeches, Nicholas "can be as funy as you like about the authors; I believe the greater part of them live in lodgings, and cannot vote"(199).
The suspicion against novels which Dickens cites runs back to Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, though I think in her book she says women should read what men do, not the novels they waste time on.
Besides a great dog story, there's the amusement of the circus-owner's lisp, Sleary. He says, about circuses and novels, "People mutht be amuthed. They can't alwayth be a leaarning"(222, Norton critical 1966).
M'Choakumchild is no Wackford Squeers; maybe Gradgrind is closer, but more narrow and limited, and after all, Hard Times involves public education, which nobody in the 19C expected much from (except possibly in the U.S.), whereas Nicholas involves private boarding schools in the North.
Hard Times also sums up industrialized work such as Mancastrian loom-workers and repairmen who built (1830-1890) the factories in the city where I taught, Fall River, MA. So it provided a good 19C summary of Fall River's mills and mill-workers. One of my paper suggestions invited college students (often women in their 20's) to compare their own education, and their criticisms of it, with those here.

*Louisa grows, marries, and on the last page comes to wish her children have "a childhood of the mind no less than a childhood of the body."

John Ruskin declared Hard Times Dickens' best novel. It is worth asking why this was Ruskin's opinion since he would have been the first to recognize that comparing works of art with each other and discussing which is the best is a sportsman's habit, not a judge of enlightened art. Let us understand that Ruskin meant Hard Times was one of his favorites among Dickens's books. Was it a whim of taste? Or is there another rational explanation for the preference? I think so.

Excerpt from the Introduction to Hard Times, in 1911 by Bernard Shaw.


In this very committed novel, but also profoundly moving (from my point of view, in any case), Charles Dickens denounces, beyond the living conditions of the workers of the first mechanized spinning mills in the North of England, the Industrial Revolution in his outfit. This historical process was not content with modifying the landscapes, the scales, and the ways of living, thinking, and producing; it simply replaced them with others, without resemblances or standard measures with the landscapes, the scales, and the ways of living, thinking, and producing of the agricultural and artisanal age that preceded. In this way, the Industrial Revolution was a fundamental change of civilization. A shift in civilization of such brutality that the sky adopted another color, the earth no longer had the same consistency or the same relief, and the two no longer joined on the same line as before. Before that, the air changed its smell and density, and disoriented men and women experienced the most difficulty adapting to the furiously utilitarian, madly materialistic, hideously disfigured world they had created. In this respect, Difficult Times is undoubtedly among the first novels describing the Anthropocene.
These proletarians and these bourgeois who were born in the space of a handful of years were all individuals thrown into the unknown at the speed of throwing stones. Of course, they did not all land in the same place. Still, whatever their point of fall, all had been forced to conceive new ways of living or surviving in this new world; all had to reinvent themselves as human beings in this society dedicated to machinery, perpetual motion, and profitability; everyone had to find justifications or explanations for their existence as rich or poor. It is the stories of some of these men and women that Dickens tells us in this dark social novel, which, beyond its biting irony and its virulent criticism of a greedy, contemptuous bourgeoisie sure of its good right (but also of a working class that is too gullible and easily influenced), is also a plea in favor of imagination and fantasy.
It would seem that Hard Times was the subject of numerous negative reviews for various reasons, whether at the time of its publication or more recently. It is profoundly different from the author's previous great novels, if only because it is or seems more austere, more desperate, and we do not find as many truculent characters as usual, but I loved it. All the more adored because it could be that the questions he asks about the thirst for power, the taste for profit, economic alienation, or education have lost none of their relevance since 1854.

This book is another evidence of Charles Dickens' brilliancy when it comes to writing. He starts with one person and her destiny, but gradually the story becomes more and more intricate and complex, and in the end you end up with a completely different story from what you started out with.
I have quite an ambivalent relationship to Charles Dickens and his books. Some of them I love, some of them confuse me or end up disappointing me. "Hard Times" was a good story, but I was mildly disappointed with the fact that it changes direction. I wanted to continue reading about Sissy and her destiny, but I was disappointed to realize that her story became kind of a parallel plot to the main plot. Nevertheless, the main plot was definitely full of surprises and at times kept you at the edge of your seat, and I liked that.
However, I can't disregard the fact that I was quite bored during most of this novel. I felt like the story became more and more predictable, and I felt like it kept dragging on the same characters and their worries and views on life. Therefore, I ended up rating this one 3 stars, because it's definitely worth a read, but it's not my favourite of Dickens'.

Mavis Staples sings Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZsO3...

Hard Times is what they now call The Great Depression, about which Studs Terkel wrote his monumental work of oral history. But Hard Times by nineteenth-century English writer Charles Dickens is a book about working class northern England, about which he said,

"My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else."

I read it in my twenties, and read it now in a time when “data-driven” bureaucracies rule the day, and even in public education, where some teachers get their pay docked if their students do not exceed district data expectations. Performance-based development, they call it, performance being exclusively determined by student scores on standardized tests.

“One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that [stats and quantitative guy] Edward L. Thorndike won and [progressive, democratic, conversation- and community-based theorist] John Dewey lost”— Ellen Condliffe Lagemann

The most memorable scene in Dickens’s 1854 novel Hard Times (by Dickens) is the first one, where the teacher, Thomas Gradgrind, asks his class to define a horse:

"Bitzer," said Thomas Gradgrind. "Your definition of a horse."
"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) from Bitzer.
"Now girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind. "You know what a horse is."

Girl number twenty is Sissy who rides horses every day, whose family owns horses. To “define” a horse in this way is incomprehensible and silly to her.

An accumulation of facts is the only knowledge that matters to Gradgrind. Facts, not feelings. The businessman who helped shaped the American Common Core, the set of standards that continues to drive school curriculum in the US, said,“If you want to apply for a job at GM, they don’t give a damn how you feel.” He was speaking here against the teaching of the personal essay in school, and stories, something he and his committee intended to drastically reduce in American public school curricula. And they were successful, to the detriment of the love of learning for millions of children. The Common Core privileges argument over story, nonfiction over fiction and poetry, a process that coincides with the conservative takeover of US politics more than a quarter of a century ago, but Dickens saw it already happening 150 years ago in England, skewered in this book.

“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”—Gradgrind

Gradgrind raises his own kids, too, without stories, without feeling, only reason, which leads daughter Louisa to a miserable marriage without love, based only on practical (wealth, social status: Facts!) considerations. Love is not part of the necessary vocabulary of the Gradgrind family or school. But this fact-based approach also leads to societal consequences where the bottom line matters more than humans.

The last thirty years in economic and political philosophy is correctly assumed by many to be guided in part by the brutally selfish ideology of Ayn Rand, but a century before her it is Dickens (in 1854?!) who makes this harsh indictment of mid-19th-century industrial practices and their dehumanizing effects:

“Any capitalist . . . 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?” As if! And those not achieving that goal correspondingly feel guilty; they know it is their fault they have not had the proper pluck, the determination, to achieve what others have done.

And social practices begin in school:

“. . . it was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.”

But Dickens is clear in his view about school and society:

“There is a wisdom of the head, and. . . there is a wisdom of the heart.”

Both have to be present for children in school and society to thrive.

Instruction is now required in most school districts to be “data-driven,” which means that which can be reduced to numbers, to statistics, which are more easily gleaned from multiple choice tests than, say, more organic, community-driven projects where the effect might be more complex, un-graph-able, unquantifiable.

What a good book! It’s satire, but insightful satire, useful. Sure Dickens can be preachy and sentimental as he rails on social practices he finds dehumanizing. But he also can be fun; are there sillier names for teachers than Gradgrind and--this is the best--Chokumchild?!

Janice Ian’s Better Times Will Come:

https://www.bettertimeswillcome.com/s...

A link to the whole Better Times Will Come musical project:

https://www.bettertimeswillcome.com/?...

Creo que voy a comenzar una tradición en mi cuenta de goodreads, y esta no es más que, al igual que el año pasado mi primera reseña fue un Dickens con "Grandes Esperanzas", voy a estrenar las reseñas de este 2022 con otro Dickens, "Tiempos Difíciles".

"Tiempos Difíciles" está ambientada en el Coketown industrial, supervisada por el Sr. Bounderby y Thomas Gradgrind, quien dirige una escuela empeñada en enseñar solo hechos y eliminar cualquier tipo de sentimentalismo o fantasía. Los hijos de Gradgrind, Tom y Louisa, son sus principales ejemplos de cómo funciona su educación. El circo del Sr. Sleary ofrece una visión diferente de la vida y desde allí Sissy Jupe ingresa a Coketown. A medida que hacemos un seguimiento de sus vidas, también vemos a los trabajadores de la ciudad a través de los cuales se exploran las consecuencias del industrialismo.

Admito que en un principio me llevó un poco de tiempo entrar, cargada como está la novela de descripciones interminables en los primeros capítulos. Pero después de un tiempo se vuelve evidente que esto era simplemente un prólogo, y una vez que la historia comienza correctamente, vuela delante de nuestros ojos. Si bien el crimen, la educación, la vida laboral, la política y el estatus de clase ocupan un lugar central aquí, no se puede negar que esta es una historia de humanidad y una acusación abrasadora del equivalente victoriano del capitalismo: "a los hechos no les importan tus sentimientos". Denuncia la forma en que la sociedad educa no para permitir que sus ciudadanos prosperen, sino para encoger sus almas e imaginaciones.

Es a veces hilarante y trágica y, dada su brevedad en comparación con muchas de sus otras novelas, es una forma mucho menos intimidante de mojarse los pies en su extensa colección.

this is what victorian people had to explain utilitarianism because they didn't have the good place on netflix

"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."

My reading of theories of pedagogy and knowledge development usually is quite separate from my reading of fiction for the pure pleasure of being human!

But now recently I have come across several references to the wonderful Dickensian caricature of positivism with the suggestive name of Gradgrind. There is a war going on in the world of schooling, with a clear front between those who are in favour of the measurable fact-based model that fictional Gradgrind tried on his own environment, with quite heartbreaking results, and those who have interpreted the opposite of Gradgrindianism as the way forward, and claim that inquiry, creativity and transferable skills are the pillars of education, and that facts are obsolete before they enter the heads of the suffering child vessels.

Now I am quite sure that Dickens could have written a brilliant satire on the extreme opposite of Gradgrind's pedagogy if he had seen it in action. How are children to develop ideas if they have no knowledge to get inspired by? How are they going to proceed in inquiry if they have no basic understanding of the scientific concepts? How are they going to create exciting and artistic visual and textual artefacts without the literacy skills that are the tools leading towards linguistic and artistic mastery? How are they going to "research" a history topic independently that they have never heard of before, and definitely cannot put into context?

As happy as I am whenever Gradgrind shows up in the educational debates, I have to say that his very presence as a negative example of old-school knowledge is an ironic symbol of the value of "knowing" the iconic history of literary or scientific reference points. If you haven't had some kind of basic schooling in literature, you won't understand what Gradgrind's evil represents: to evaluate his mentioning in the school debate, you have to know about Victorian standpoints, Dickens' position within them, Gradgrind's failure, and educational theories over the past century that have swung like a pendulum from one extreme to the other.

So cheers to the fact that facts are part of life - and the devil is in the PART!

“The only difference between us and the professors of virtue or benevolence, or philanthropy - never mind the name - is that we know it is all meaningless, and say so, while they know it equally and will never say so.”
Charles Dickens, Hard Times

One of Dickens' shortest works deemed as one of his best by some readers and critics.... deemed his worse by me. The almost sledgehammer-like satirising of the ills of industrialisation and utilitarianism, with the trials and tribulations of the Gradgrinds. Also a look at the practices, beliefs and education of the ruling classes and how it impacts on the lesser class residents of factory town Coketown (a fictionalised Manchester). Hard times had by all, does not a story make. 3 out of 12.

2009 read

Hard Times is my return to Charles Dickens as an adult. I have read Oliver Twist and David Copperfield as a child. I didn't have an appetite for Dickens when I was young, for his subjects were sad and depressing. But as an adult, I understand and appreciate him. He touched so many sides of the society which were rarely spoken of before. He penetrated into human minds so thoroughly and exposed both their black and white sides. Although these qualities in his writing made me sad and depress before, the same qualities have made me fall in love with his writing now.

Hard Times is Dickens's shortest novel. Through a well outlined and well-written story, Dickens comments on the lives, living, and conditions of towns in the light of industrialization. This social commentary gives a perfect picture of the lives and conditions of living of working-class people and the dominating power exercised on them by their masters over every aspect of their lives, suppressing them and using them to secure their wealth and position in life.

There is also a strong criticism of utilitarianism. This theory was introduced in the aftermath of the industrial revolution to make it easy for the masters to control the working class, depriving them of any capacity to reason and making them live a submissive life according to their whims and fancies. Dickens's use of Facts against Reason throughout the book subtly mocks the theory and exposes the social downfall that it would lead to. He brings the character of Louisa Gradgrind and demonstrates what tragedies one would face if they are suppressed of their capacity to feel and to reason. Although it is a little overstated, the point is clearly proved.

I liked the character variety in the book. They ranged from kind, goodhearted, sweet-tempered to cunning, boastful, treacherous. This wide variety added colour and contrast to the book. The story was engaging, his social views kept me well connected with it all along. I enjoyed his satire very much. Dickens is a realistic writer of the Victorian era and that is the secret of his popularity even today.