If the human race truly sprang from Eden, what could possibly persuade them to move to industrial Lancashire? Of course: the force of necessity.
Friedrich Engels, the elder, owned a mill in Salford. His son, living well on the profits, excoriated the system in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). There is no connection there to Dickens: the English translation didn't appear until 1887.
It didn't need Engels, Junior, to tell the English middle classes of the squalor and brutality of the factory system. A railway journey through through any industrial suburb would have shown what was involved. Dickens himself made many such a trip, and witnessed it for himself.
So I cannot casually pass by on the other side, without adding to my list:
13: Charles Dickens, Hard Times, for These Times.
When I look up there, above my left shoulder — between Michael Dibden and JP Donleavy — Hard Times seems slimmer (even in annotated academic edition) than others of his novels. It is 'only' 110,000 words, which is short-shrift for Dickens. It appeared in twenty instalments over the summer of 1854. It has the classic 'triple-decker' structure to go with the seasons — Sowing, Reaping, Garnering. If we are not already on the same page, try Galatians, 6, particularly verse 8 (and Mr Dickens would never have used anything less than KJV):
For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
The opening of Hard Times bashes us over the head with that antithesis. By name and nature, in a gaunt classroom, Thomas Gradgrind (patron of education and local MP) interrogates:
the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.
Later, chapter IV with Mr Bounderby, we find the forenames of Gradgrind's five children: young Thomas, Adam Smith, Malthius — and (tellingly for gender discrimination) Louisa and little Jane.
Gradgrind meets his match in Cissy Jupe, the circus-clown's daughter:
‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’
‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.
‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.’
‘It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.
‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?’
‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’
Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.
‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Your father breaks horses, don’t he?’
‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.’
‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.’
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse [...]'
Two reasons I failed to be a novelist were inabilities to develop a plot or manage convincing dialogue: but note again the gender discrimination. Dickens always implies far more than he tells us.
Louisa Gradgrind will be married off to Bounderby (the marriage quickly fails: he is disgraced) to be saved by the family life of Sissy. Tom will rob Bounderby's bank: Sissy will try to save him through the circus, and he escapes on a emigrant ship (and dies of fever).
The last chapter is Final. The wrap of a Dickens story is ever a quick once-over-lightly to fulfil the need in a good morality. In Hard Times it seems more abrupt than ever — almost like one of those movies where the production money runs out before the final reel.
There is a complex sub-plot involving exploited work-folk, heroic and honest labourers, and even embryonic trades unions (but also a whiff of Fred Kyte). This tends to grab those looking for 'social realism'.
And yet ...
For me the truly endearing character is Mr Sleary, the owner of the circus and 'Signor Jupe'. He is what Bounderby and Gradgrind fail to be: the successful businessman, who adopts Sissy.
The people of the circus are the antithesis of Gradgrind's natural order:
They all assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor letter on any subject. Yet there was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving often of as much respect, and always of as much generous construction, as the every-day virtues of any class of people in the world.
Dickens makes Sleazy a zany:
Mr. Sleary: a stout man as already mentioned, with one fixed eye, and one loose eye, a voice (if it can be called so) like the efforts of a broken old pair of bellows, a flabby surface, and a muddled head which was never sober and never drunk.
He is, though, always in charge of the admission booth and the takings. He has his mantra, book-ending the main story (chapter VI of Sowing and — here, in the fuller version — the penultimate chapter of the book):
Thquire, thake handth, firtht and latht! Don’t be croth with uth poor vagabondth. People mutht be amuthed. They can’t be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a working, they an’t made for it. You mutht have uth, Thquire. Do the withe thing and the kind thing too, and make the betht of uth; not the wurtht!’
‘And I never thought before,’ said Mr. Sleary, putting his head in at the door again to say it, ‘that I wath tho muth of a Cackler!’
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