He’s a gossip. He dishes it out on his characters. His authorial voice is very present. He doesn’t disappear into the text. I imagined him as a very good friend standing slightly behind my right shoulder and whispering all the dirt about everybody into my ear: Who was a piece of work, who was having a rough time and why. All the dope on how my friends and neighbors…by which I mean the characters in his story…were treating each other.
Striking the keynote and then playing the tune. Dickens makes this distinction at least twice as he’s warming up. The keynote is perhaps Coketown, the grimy industrial city, permanently inbedded in its own toxic cloud of pollution. Or perhaps the keynote is the dark art of statistics. I was surprised to see that specific word used several times. It must have been a relatively new word in Dickens’ era.
Hard Times…so mid-nineteenth century that I could sense its language becoming archaic. It’s been 150 years since the narrative was first printed. In other ways it’s still contemporary. If Dickens could be taken up into our own time and shown the England of our day, if we could explain to him our internet and our computers with their ceaseless digital reduction of human lives, he would understand it all in about twenty minutes. He’s been there.
Mr. Gradgrind decides to educate his daughter Louisa in the rigors of a brave new world that consists only of facts. Nothing that is not scientific and statistical is allowed exposure to her mind. Every relationship must be understood as a form of material exchange. There is to be no sentiment, no gratitude, no charity or empathy. Such nebulous mental constructs cannot be quantified. Imagination, fable and story, sentiment and heart are forbidden. Louisa forms the meditative habit of staring into the incinerating flames of her fireplace. In the context of the cold logical positivism of her upbringing, this mild reverie counts as a subversive act.
Dickens makes our contemporary lot of storytellers seem narrow in their focus. Most novelists in our time take a segment of our society, most likely the social milieu into which they were born, and write about that. But Dickens talks about everyone…and I say talks for his writing is confidential conversation.
In sections that bookend the novel and provide contrast with the industrial complex of machines, facts and the triumph of statistics, Dickens introduces circus people. Strollers, people of the road, acrobats and horse riders, and he delights in letting them use their own slang and live by their own code.
Dickens presents management but also labor, called surreally “the Hands”. Each social group is anchored by its own set of characters and story arcs.
There’s an attempted seduction in Hard Times of devilish subtlely. There are formidable, obsessive characters who are undermined by their own strengths. There are characters who are mean and characters whose misfortune is to pull back from meanness too late. There can be a sad belatedness in Dickens, a tragic “too lateness”. Characters who it’s too late to save or characters who have been too late in saving themselves.
When I was a freshman in college I was introduced to a word in connection with Dickens that I had never heard before. The word was “bathos.” I remember being impressed when I was introduced to this concept. Recognizing “the bathetic” was a step up in my maturity as a reader. I was told that Dickens could be “bathetic”.
But reading Hard Times now as a more mature adult, Dickens’ penchant for sentimentality didn’t bother me. I liked it. I enjoyed it in context, I think, quite as much as his contemporary readers did. It wouldn’t work in a Franzen novel or in Henry James, George Eliot or even in Jane Austen but it works for Dickens. It goes along with Dickens’ loquacious discussions of his characters. He never stops talking about his peeps. He has opinions about them all. And he is a character himself, my favorite.
