Hello readers! I am writing this blog in response to a Thinking activity assigned by Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I am going to discuss the novel 'Hard Times'.
Name: Charles John Huffam Dickens Boz
Occupation: Novelist, Journalist
Born: 7 February 1812
Died: 9 June 1870
Genre: Victorian literature
Charles Dickens was a British author who penned beloved classics such as ‘Hard Times,' 'A Christmas Carol,' 'David Copperfield' and 'Great Expectations.' Charles Dickens was a British novelist, journalist, editor, illustrator and social commentator who wrote such beloved classic novels as Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.
He was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, son of John Dickens, a feckless and improvident navy clerk with a great love for literature. A happy childhood in Chatham, during which he read voraciously, ended with a move to London in 1822. Family poverty meant the young Charles had to earn money, and he spent a humiliating year labeling bottles in a blacking factory; during this period, his father was imprisoned for debt. Dickens is remembered as one of the most important and influential writers of the 19th century. Among his accomplishments, he has been lauded for providing a stark portrait of the Victorian-era underclass, helping to bring about social change.
Charles Dickens, an author witnessing firsthand the harsh impacts of the industrial revolution, wrote a novel that contains in it some of the themes still present in degrowth discourse today. His novel Hard Times demonstrates the invasion of utilitarianism and its economic implications into human relationships and education. Art is Dickens preferred form of dépense to replace the hegemony of utilitarianism. Dickens novels are
Fact vs Fancy:
The novel takes up the theme of Fact vs Fancy on its very first page. The opening words of the novel, spoken by Mr Gradgrind,
"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!”
Being a spokesperson Mr. Gradgrind denied any role for fancy or imagination. Imaginative or aesthetic subjects are removed from the curriculum of his school. No literature, music, or poetry. For Mr Gradgrind, the Circus represents the cradle of fancy. But Dickens portrays it in a favorable light. Sleary, the proprietor of a circus, believes that people must be amused. Not surprisingly, it is Sissy Jupe, who comes from the circus and is not apologetic about her imaginative faculty, who is able to lead an emotionally fulfilling and morally responsible life. Gradgrind’s own children fail in life and relationship. Louisa, trained to repress her emotions, enters and walks out of a loveless marriage. Upon returning to her father’s house, she almost suffers a nervous breakdown. Tom, her brother, also trained in analysis, deduction and mathematics, suffers a terrible moral decline and ends up in burglary. Bitzer, who has adhered to Gradgrind’s teachings as a child, turns out to be an uncompassionate egotist. The dynamics of human life cannot be reduced to a collection of material facts and statistical analyses. If the future citizens of a country are brought up on Gradgrind’s maxims, the result is a mechanized society and soulless individuals. Dickens seems to be emphasizing the need for a holistic personality which, apart from the capacity for reason and calculation, also possesses emotional sensitivity and aesthetic outlook. Through Hard Times Dickens also educates his readers about the miserable and exploitative working conditions of factories in the industrial towns of Manchester and Preston. Hard Times is set amid the industrial smokestacks and factories of Coketown, England. In Victorian England workers, referred to as “the Hands” in Hard Times, were forced to work long hours for low wages in cramped, sooty and dangerous factories. The Hands, exhorted by a crooked union spokesman named Slackbridge, try to form a union. The workers are caught between the devil and the deep sea. Dickens turns the lens of his art to focus attention on the plight of the poor and to awaken the conscience of the reader.
Hard Times is the greatest critique of industrial society in English literature before D.H. Lawrence. George Bernard Shaw called Hard Times a novel of “passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world.” Shaw also criticized the novel for its failure to provide an accurate account of trade unionism of the time, calling the venomous orator, leader Slackbridge “a mere figment of middle class imagination.”
Utilitarianism:
Dickens was a staunch anti-utilitarianist. While Dickens was writing Hard Times, Utilitarianism was the prominent philosophy in industrial England, founded by Jeremy Bentham. Utilitarians believed that human actions should be judged based on how much pleasure or pain they produced for the greatest number of people. Anti-utilitarians, as described in the anthology Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, believe there is more behind human action than selfish desires for pleasure or aversion to pain.
Utilitarianism is the assumption that human beings act in a way that highlights their own self-interest. It is based on factuality and leaves little room for imagination. Dickens provides three vivid examples of this utilitarian logic in Hard Times. The first; Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, one of the main characters in the book, was the principal of a school in Coketown. He was a firm believer in utilitarianism and instilled this philosophy into the students at the school from a very young age, as well as his own children. The children are encouraged to maximize utility through their actions by basing their decisions on selfish, cold calculation. In turn, the children are punished for enjoying artistic entertainment such as storybooks about fairies and watching circus performers. With lives dominated by facts and void of art, the children are frustrated and discontented. Gradgrind’s children ultimately grow to find that the utilitarian system of ethics fails them when they are confronted with the complexity of justice and emotions.
Mr. Josiah Bounderby was also a practitioner of utilitarianism but was more interested in the profit that stemmed from it. At the other end of the perspective, a group of circus members, who are the total opposite of utilitarians, are added by Dickens to provide a sharp contrast from the ideas of Mr. Bounderby and Mr. Gradgrind.
Dickens’ ultimate message is to show the value of imagination, art, and human connection in a place dominated by fact and rationality. When Tom Gradgrind’s children, Louisa and Tom face hardship because they followed their father’s utilitarian thinking, it is ultimately Sissy who will be the one who pilots change in the imaginary of the Gradgrinds. Sissy is a magnetic storyteller, someone who can light the spark in the minds of others that illuminates a new vision of the world. That vision might be a fantastic one of fairies and other forest spirits, or of a different, more compassionate future. We see this in Sissy’s undying hope that her father might still come back home to her one day. She has faith in a better tomorrow that is based on love, not material improvement.
Conclusion:
'Hard Times' is a social novel with a well defined cluster of themes. It is the indictment of Victorian society in general and some of its evils and abuses in particular. Since Dickens is considered as the novelist with a purpose, so is the Hard Times, which is full of the battered utilitarianism in all the three aspects of society such as the educational system, social system and economical system.The main attack of Dickens is on the utilitarian theory of education based on facts, figures and calculations. This novel on the whole conveys that if the educational system is one sided the young generation of the nation will also be one sided. This novel shows the society of the Victorian era and how it is completely battered by the utilitarian philosophy of Bentham and Smith.
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