‘Hard Times’: Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings
A review of ‘Hard Times’, by Charles Dickens; Bradbury & Evans, 1854.
One has the sense that Hard Times is set amid the humming and whirring of factory machines. Dickens gives us a world of ‘fact’ in which children are force-fed statistics and the imagination is crushed beneath the weight of utility. Men are made cogs and women transformed into ghosts. The rich speak of ‘progress’ while the poor are ground down into dust by their machines. Here, Dickens turns his wrath on the industrialists, the utilitarians, the rationalists and the cold-hearted thinkers who dignify their actions with arguments. It is a world for cynics, in the sense used by Wilde: those who know the price of everything — and the value of nothing.
The setting is Coketown, a Northern English mill-town a little like Manchester:
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.
The town is industry incarnate. The factories belch out smoke and the workers trudge home through the smog. At its heart is Thomas Gradgrind, a schoolmaster who believes only in facts:
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.
His pupils are to be filled with ‘useful knowledge’ and nothing more. Gradgrind raises his oldest two children, Tom and Louisa, on a diet of figures and calculations; sentiment or fancy are forbidden. They are trained to be efficient and unfeeling—creatures of logic, without capacity for awe or wonder.
The town is industry incarnate. The factories belch out smoke.
Into this world comes Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus performer. Her presence is an insult to Grandgrid’s worldview. She knows nothing of facts but she is brimming with feeling: she has a real human warmth that shows up the emptiness of the Gradgrindian creed. She is taken into the household but her kindness cannot mend the damage done. Louisa, forced into a loveless marriage with the odious banker Josiah Bounderby, finds herself adrift, unsure of her emotions. Tom, meanwhile, turns to vice and lies: he proves that facts alone do not make a man good. The collapse of Gradgrind’s system is sure to come. But he sees that too late.
Grandgrind gives human shape to the tyranny of rationalism. Bounderby embodies hypocrisy. He boasts endlessly of his ‘self-made success’, spinning stories of hardship and abandonment in childhood. His factories are brutal, and his marriage to Louisa is a business deal. In Bounderby, Dickens’s very real hatred for industrial cruelty reaches its apogee. The workers of Coketown, ‘Hands’, are faceless to men like Bounderby. The one worker we meet, Stephen Blackpool, is a decent man with the bad luck to be seen as inhuman. He refuses to join the trade union, thinking the gap between worker and master will only grow. Yet he is punished regardless—cast out, unfairly accused, and left to die. His fate is almost expected in a world in which men are judged by their usefulness.
There is a rage that animates Hard Times. The novel, uncharacteristically short, is one long attack on utilitarianism, the belief that what is good is good because it issues in something useful. As I have written elsewhere, this view reduces the complexity of experience to a simple train of cause and effect. It sidelines character, virtue, intention and conscience and puts in their place measurable, objective outcomes—what can be counted and compared. It ignores such questions as ‘What does lying do to the liar?’, ‘What does cruelty do to the cruel?’ ‘What does generosity do to the giver?’ Dickens perceives the basic inhumanity of utilitarianism, which has been linked in experiments to lower empathy and greater Machiavellianism, and in history to all the great political crimes perpetrated in the 20th century. Thus Gradgrind’s children grew up not as rational, contented beings but as broken souls, adrift in a world that is not in fact a machine, and so one they cannot negotiate with much skill. Dickens was keenly aware of the danger of a society run by men who worshipped efficiency but ignored humanity.
There is a rage that animates Hard Times.
But Hard Times is not an argument. It is a story, and one full of life. Its characters are drawn with a flair for caricature that makes them larger than life yet still somehow real. Gradgrind is a tragic, foolish man. Bounderby is conceited, comic and monstrous. Minor characters, such as Mrs. Sparsit, or Slackbridge, the union demagogue, are vividly sketched. In Sissy Jupe, Dickens presents his answer to the world of fact: a figure of stubborn humanity.
Hard Times stands out among Dickens’s work for its length, its lack of preface and illustrations, and its setting: it is the only one of his books not set, at any point, in London. Moreover, it was at the time and remains unusually divisive. As George Bernard Shaw put it: ‘Many readers find the change disappointing. Others find Dickens worth reading almost for the first time.’ Orwell and Chesterton liked it. Macauley and Shaw did not. It is certainly polemical … In the end, it is a kind of warning: a society that runs on the logic of the spreadsheet will be empty, joyless and inhumane. And when it falls apart, which it will, it will not facts that save it, but something softer, something harder to quantify, something like kindness.
