Hard Times is a critique of utilitarianism
-- Charles Dickens is one of the greatest authors of the
19th century, unique among his peers in the level of
celebrity that he achieved during his lifetime. Dickens published a
number of different novels and short stories, but it was his sharp social
critique for which he is now most famous. Hard Timesharnesses
Dickens’ passion for reform with his skilled writing ability to produce a
biting novel that was based on the poor working conditions in Victorian
England. Hard Times drew from both the author’s
experience as well as his previous works, and it contains themes that were
particularly relevant to the society of the time.
The story opens with a discussion of utilitarianism, the
philosophy that emphasizes rationalism and education at the expense of emotion
and imagination. Thomas Gradgrind is a utilitarian who educates his
children to abide by his philosophy. This imparts on them the importance
of science and careful study, and it discounts what Thomas believed to be
fanciful pursuits. The utilitarian education takes its toll on Thomas’s
two children. His son becomes a self absorbed hedonist, concerned only
with himself and with little else. His daughter, however, is less
overwhelmed by her father’s dispassionate upbringing. Louisa Gradgrind
ends up marrying a very wealthy factory tycoon, an industrial magnate quite a
bit older than she.
Another main character, Stephen Blackpool, is embroiled in
emotional anguish because of his love for another factory worker. This
would not normally be a problem, but he was already married at the time to a
woman without the realistic possibility for a divorce. Divorce was
largely reserved to the upper classes, as only the wealthy could go through the
necessary process to get a civil divorce. Stephen’s wife treats him very
poorly; she is rarely ever home and she drinks a great deal. Stephen goes
to Bounderby to ask about the divorce and he meets a particularly devoted
lackey of Bounderby named Mrs. Pegler.
Louisa is set upon by a man named James Harthouse, a
particularly unscrupulous individual who seeks to corrupt and seduce the young
woman for his own aims. Harthouse thinks that he has seduced Lousia and he
exhorts her to meet him in Coketown, however Louisa instead goes to her
father’s house where she angrily tells him that his child rearing philosophy
has left her unable to live her life with her own emotions and her own
goals. Mr. Gradgrind actually has a change of heart at this point,
realizing that he perhaps had raised his children wrong. At the same
time, the factory in Coketown undergoes labor organization which ultimately
fails because of the inept and corrupt leadership. Stephen is accused of
robbing a bank after he vanishes from a job and seeks agricultural work in the
country.
Louisa is essentially saved by her younger sister’s
intervention who convinces Harthouse to flee Coketown indefinitely. Stephen
dies after falling into a mining pit and Tom, the actual robber of the bank, is
smuggled from England with the help of a circus. Mr. Bounderby confronts
his mother, a witness to the bank robbery, and it is shown that far from being
a self made man he is actually a product of wealth. Bounderby exiles his mother
to her death on the streets of the city, while Gradgrind has a complete change
of heart and begins helping the poor with his considerable influence. The
play ends with a bit of a depressing epilogue; Tom dies without ever seeing his
family again, and Louisa dies as a spinster.
Victorian England was a complex place, affected by the rapid
trend towards industrialization and still attempting to navigate the moral
dilemma behind the relationship of laborers to the government, and exactly how
much the government could be expected to protect the laborers and how much the
government should support corporations at the expense of those very
laborers. The interplay between labor, specifically labor organization,
and the government is a recurring theme of literature during the Victorian
period. As we have seen by exploring the themes within Hard Times, there was a great deal of tension between
labor unions and the corporate and industrial world.
The Victorian period saw a great deal of turmoil and
upheaval in the British society. The rapid rise of industrialization
among the British world led to an enormous degree of societal change.
Industrialization, the use of machinery and steam energy to produce great
quantities of merchandise, allowed businesses to reap enormous profits using
less and less labor. It also led to the gradual reduction of the working
class
individual into a tool of the industrial machine rather than
a skilled individual. In factories, simple tasks could be performed by
nearly anyone, and that repetitive labor was farmed out to the lowest paid
possible people. The value of skilled labor thus decreased greatly as the
quantity of eligible laborers increased. Businesses were able to hire
virtually anyone, so they were able to drive down wages. This led to a
very negative perception of laborers in their own minds, because they no longer
saw themselves as quite as important to the production of goods, and they
realized that without organization it would be far too easy for the factory
owners to take advantage of them. As “cogs” in the machine, workers were
treated as replaceable. Increasing unemployment due to the nature of
industrialization (requiring fewer workers to do the same jobs) also meant that
businesses were able to drive down the average working wage.
In the Victorian era, worker organization was in its early
days. It was difficult for workers to demand changes in their working
environments because collective bargaining had virtually no previous usage in
the United States. Working class conditions were extremely poor in
Victorian England; factories generally had poor safety records, and because of
the ease of worker replacement there was little incentive for businesses to try
to keep workers safe. The work force was both cheap and disposable.
The population of Victorian England grew explosively.
During Queen Victoria’s reign, England doubled in size, creating a great deal
of strain on the urban infrastructure of a growing nation. English cities
just weren’t intended to deal with the enormous number of people that clogged
them in this era. Sewers and roads were filthy and absolutely overwhelmed
with the number of people that had to use them. The population increase
led to a proportional decrease in the overall quality of living for the people
within England. Fertility rates had been growing in the years preceding
the Victorian era due to the decrease in the average age of marriage along with
the increased availability of large quantities of relatively cheap food.
In addition, there were no major epidemics of disease to keep the population in
check, so it was able to grow unabated by such natural disasters as the
previous influenza and plague epidemics that had so stunted the growth of the
British islands.
The Gothic revival school of architecture greatly influenced
the construction of new buildings, but so did the more modern designs as seen
in the construction of the Crystal Palace at the World’s fair. The
Crystal Palace was criticized by some as being dehumanizing in its appearance,
but it was still a major innovation that impacted architecture throughout the
nineteenth century.
In addition to the psychological and social impact of
industrialization, there was a health decline as well. Coal burning factories
made the health in the areas surrounding them go down, as respiratory ailments
became more and more common. Pollution of the rivers in England from the
factories was so severe that in places the rivers became flammable because of
all the waste.
Industrialization led to the decrease in wages and the
inability for the primary wage earner of the household to support his
family. This created a great change in the way the family operated within
Victorian England. As the primary wage earner was increasingly unable to
earn a living wage, other members of the family were forced to seek
employment. This began with the oldest sons, and progressed to even the
youngest children in the home who were paid pittances for their labor.
Child labor was very common in Victorian England, and due to the poor working
class conditions in the factories, many children were disfigured or killed
while working in the factories.
Unemployment was very high in Victorian England due to the
displacement of workers by the increased mechanization of factory labor.
In addition to the high unemployment, the real estate market had become
increasingly extortionate. Land owners were able to construct
increasingly unsafe tenement housing, and they were able to charge rates that
kept the people in virtual bondage to their employers.
The critical reception to Hard
Times was
mixed. It was seen as one of Dicken’s greatest books by critics such as
Leavis who thought it was a powerful manifesto for working class laborers.
However, some other critics believed the book was essentially the middle class
imagination of a very real social problem, and they discounted the novel’s
value because it failed to address labor organization or the ideas of socialist
thinkers at the time.
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