Charles Dickens, Fred Kaplan, Graham Law, Jane (AFT) Smiley, Sylvere Monod - Hard Times

After having been miserably bogged down in "A Tale of Two Cities" (grudgingly read for school) and tragically having lost the plot of "Bleak House" (read for pleasure), I was expecting that "Hard Times" (also read for school) would be difficult, to say the least - and, judging from the title, full of ponderous social commentary. So I was surprised to find that it was a page-turner! Dickens masterfully crafted a novel that, however manipulative, awkward, and uneven, totally wins the reader over with its unique characters and voice.

The book deals with "hard times" in two senses - the hopeless lives of the laborers during the Industrial Revolution, and the unimaginative, conformist education that led people no to question this system. They say that revolution is fomented not when society is worst, but when it's improving, because the hoi polloi become unrealistically ambitious. And though Dickens eloquently foreshadows revolution, the characters in this book are at their absolute lowest point, with only the desire to keep on surviving through the penniless drudgery of their lives.

The thing I've discovered about Dickens is that he's one of the most difficult writers to follow. His prose is quite succinct and relatively easy to comprehend, generally - but the twists and turns of the plots come in the most seemingly-insignificant phrases. When I was reading "A Tale of Two Cities", I found myself frustrated and increasingly lost by the more-and-more-complex plot, so much so that I'd throw in the towel every time I tried to read further, and turn back to the chapter "Still Knitting" (which I consider to be one of the high points of English prose) to indulge in Dickens at his best, free of convolution and confusion.

But there's none of that in "Hard Times". There are relatively few characters to follow, and the plot is simple to understand. Even I, who have a chronically short attention span, was easily able to follow it.

The setting is Coketown, an industrial city in Northern England, during Victorian times. Coketown itself is a character of sorts, and Dickens brilliantly evokes this setting with sarcasm and bitterness: "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 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...You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there...they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it."

The human characters, then, are an assorted bunch of members of the bourgeois, the fading aristocracy, and the lower class. They're all symbolic to some extent, some more so than others, but most of them show a startling humanity that makes them much more three-dimensional than the mechanized invectivoids you might expect from a book so abundantly full of social commentary.

The book is basically about the trials and tribulations of a bunch of different characters. Thomas Gradgrind, headmaster of the Gradgrind School, is busy teaching his students the evils of imagination and flights of fancy. He takes in one of his students, Sissy Jupe, after her circus-performer father abandons her. At the same time, he's busy trying to get his daughter Louisa married off to his horrible friend, Mr. Bounderby. Another little melodrama develops around the relationship between Gradgrind's blackguard son, Tom, and his bored, wealthy friend Mr. Harthouse. Finally, there's Stephen Blackpool, a factory laborer who is being actively ostracized on account of his opposition to unions.

Anyway, Stephen is driven out of the city by the union people, and away from his true love Rachael - this fleeing marks him as a suspect in a mysterious bank robbery. Louisa begins an affair with Harthouse, Gradgrind begins to realize the evil of his teaching methods, etc., etc., and the plot gets better as only Dickens can manage it, with all kinds of shocking revelations, tragic death scenes (per Vladimir Nabokov, "in the novels of Dickens, characters die in the reader's arms"), and generally wonderful, vivid verbal trickery.

The novel revolves around the axis of conformity. The children at Gradgrind's school are "little vessels, ready to have imperial gallons of facts of facts poured into them until they are full to the brim". We explicitly see the effects of this miseducation in the adult characters of Sissy, Bitzer, and Louisa - the last of whom finally confesses, in an absolutely incredibly scene, her hatred of how her father brought her up with no imagination or enjoyment.

Then there's the Stephen Blackpool subplot. This subplot, first of all, demonstrates to us the simple cruelty and inhumanity of the "hard times" in which the book is set. Stephen, a decent (though blockheaded) and hard-working man, is driven away from the only place where he can find work, "leaving a true and loving heart behind". His eventual fate is quite tragic, and laden with bizarre religious overtones; it's a bit difficult to figure out the significance of these overtones, but they're nonetheless interestingly achieved, and add an evocative, emotional dimension to his final scene.

The real villain in the book is Bounderby; though Gradgrind does have vaguely villainous elements at the beginning of the book, we're also told that he's got a touch of the humane (damn, I can't find the page!) which poses a strong contrast to Bounderby's Snidely-Whiplash melodramatic, hypocritical antics, the most amusing of which is revealed in a wonderful scene near the end of the book, involving a previously-unknown relation. I won't say any more, because Dickens's humor still shines through as much contemporarily as it must have in the days of the book's publication.

And then there are all the other characters - the vivacious Sissy, the acute, disaffected Louisa, the wretched Tom, the hilarious Mrs. Sparsit, the admirable Mrs. Pegler...Dickens brings them all to life beautifully; they develop independently of his social critiques, and take on a fascinating life of their own.

Dickens is not a realist, but an aesthetician. He has messages to share with his reader, which he does very convincingly...but he's also got a story to tell, and as far as I can see, "Hard Times" is Dickens at his best.