Charles Dickens‘ Hard Times is a very concise but incisively well-written book that reflects criticism toward industrial society in England during the middle of the nineteenth century. This work is also a very brief moral fable presented in the format of a social novel that repeatedly questions how much we lose as individuals when we value things primarily based on quantitative (“fact”) rather than qualitative (“compassion”) measures.
The author arranges the book into three relatively simple, biblically inspired parts: Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering, thereby reinforcing the concepts of moral logic (i.e., how our actions produce future consequences) throughout the entire piece. Unlike typical novels in which a single antagonist is used, the antagonist here is actually a whole system rather than an individual. The mechanistic viewpoint that is taken in the educational and governmental systems of England is illustrated within a family unit, where the children learn to view human beings as mathematical equations. One of the most powerful lines from Dickens is found just after he establishes one of the main premises of the book in the line, “All I want are facts” (p. 89). Dickens’ short, blunt statement captures the essence of a society that confuses the use of mathematical computations and statistical data with the one true source of wisdom.
The book’s unexpected strength lies in the contrasting way that Dickens uses caricatures versus tenderness. Alongside the broad figures he creates (e.g., the self-made industrialist and formulaic schoolmaster), he gives us characters with deep identities (e.g., the former circus girl raised on stories and wonder who serves as the moral compass, the stoic mill worker representing dignity under pressure, and the gentle/disillusioned daughter who tells the reader the human costs of cold instruction). During their lifetime, Charles Dickens evolved the satire within his work into the despair of hopelessness; he creates an emotional reaction of despair, based on the effect created by the ‘sting’ from his satirical comments, and the ‘bruise’ left from this sting serves as the trigger for this emotional reaction. The entire book is set within a mill town, which has both an air of smoke-filled atmosphere and is all surrounded by brick and mortar, and it also serves as a character (not only do all of the people who live there follow the same pattern of rule, but also every factory or chimney associated with this town adheres to the same control).
In this way, the setting adds an element of claustrophobia and intensifies Dickens’ criticisms of industrial modernity. However, Dickens does not allow for any particular tone to characterize the world. Throughout the novel, he combines scenes that provide comic relief or warmth, similar to what can be found in a theater, as well as lyrical descriptions of things so that even though the novel is primarily didactic, it has an emotional aspect as well.
One amazing trait of Dickens’s economy, especially with this book being so much shorter compared to his longer anti-heroic epics, is that it offers just enough inside information regarding his characters and scenes—when there are some subplots included within a text, they are only to be reduced to concise, readable units such that each scene reads like an expertly crafted instrument (at times comically revengeful as well as heartbreakingly clear).
The text advances swiftly, delivering moral lessons not through endless repetition but through a sense of inevitability.
Many hotly debated issues were being written and discussed around the same time regarding factory reform based on utilitarianism and creating programs for educating the rising class of poor, uneducated people. Additionally, the author expresses significant frustration with various ideological concepts that restrict people’s ability to use their imagination or create anything beyond mere mechanisms for production and consumption. However, one can clearly see how this anti-heroic’ work relates to the current metric-based definitions of success (test scores, productivity rates, numbers for social media). With these points in mind, it is a very critical must-read and should cause all of us to consider just how many positive aspects of humanity will be permanently lost due to our need to define everything in numerical fashion.
If you’re unfamiliar with this author’s work, this essay is a great introduction to them; it is short enough that you could read through it in a few sittings, but there is enough content to allow for rereading and discussing it. If you have read anything by this author before, then you are likely aware of their ability to express the moral imagination in ways that are both satirical and melancholic—or humorous alongside mournful (depending on context).
