Sissy's triumph: Charles Dickens's 'Hard Times'

I finished Dickens' Hard Times a couple of hours ago, and I am still not entirely sure what to write about it or, even, think about it. On the one hand its didactic pummeling of the reader, the polemical stance it takes can grind one down. It appears the work of a journalist rather than a novel writer. And yet, why shouldn't it react to, and portray, the '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'; a town which could only offer 'all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels' - there were hundred such conurbations in 1850s England; why shouldn't the author reveal 'one of the many small streets for which the favourite undertaker (who turned a handsome sum out of the one poor ghastly pomp of the neighbourhood) kept a black ladder, in order that those who had done their daily groping up and down the narrow stairs, might slide out of this working world by the windows', when there were thousands suchlike streets in reality; and why shouldn't the pudding be slightly over-egged by describing Mr. Gradgrind - a man of facts and calculations - as seeming 'like a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them (the boys and girls in his school) clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge.' Many Gradgrinds existed in Victorian England.

      

   

                       Charles Dickens (1812-1870)                  Gradgrind and children

The unrelenting perfidy of young Thomas Gradgrind; Bitzer's 'unwholesomely deficient [skin] in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white'; that 'ill-made, high-shouldered [Slackbridge] with lowering brows, and his features crushed into an habitually sour expression' who is to destroy, with Bounderby, Stephen Blackpool's life (yes, too idealised, too sentimentalised, too much of a martyr - Trollope's Dickens as Mr Popular Sentiment hits home here); all these images crowd our minds as we read on into an evermore depressing story.

Bounderby? what a man! 'It was one of the most exasperating attributes of Bounderby that he not only sang his own praises, but stimulated other men to sing them. There was a moral infection of clap-trap in him.' Lucy changes; Mr Gradgrind changes; one could argue Harthouse, however reluctantly, changes. Bounderby does not - dying of a fit in the Coketown street five years after the novel ends. Bitzer does not change, well-schooled as he was in Gradgrind's classroom; young Tom does not, until, dying thousands of miles away, 'writing, on paper blotted with tears, that [Louisa's] words had too soon come true...'.

And yet - there is Sissy (Cecilia to Gradgrind) Jupe. Thankfully, she does not change. She refuses to be, and is not, cowed by Gradgrind, Facts or Coketown. From our meeting of her in Gradgrind's classroom, 'so dark-eyed and dark-haired that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun when it shone upon her' to the book's conclusion where 'happy Sissy's happy children loving her [Louisa]; ..' She is, in some ways the one positive thread throughout the narrative: she sustains Rachel, she transforms Lucy; she mellows Gradgrind; she transports Hartshorne.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, in his introduction to a 1912 edition of the novel - '[it] was written to make you uncomfortable...'          It has certainly done that.