1. Charles Dickens as a Social Reformer
HARD TIMES
Charles Dickens as a Social Reformer

2. Life Born in 1812, Landport near Portsmouth
Father a clerk in navy pay office
1822, family fortunes severely impaired
1824, withdrawn from school, sent to blackening warehouse, father imprisoned for debt
Rejoined school only to leave in 1827 to become a solicitor’s clerk, a shorthand reporter in law courts, and a parliamentary reporter

3. 1833, began contributing stories to newspapers
1836, Pickwick Papers, married Catherine Hogarth who bore him ten children between 1837 and 1852
1843, A Christmas Carol
1850, David Copperfield “favourite child” semi autobiographical
1854, Hard Times
1861, Great Expectations, first-person narrator
1865, Our Mutual Friend, last complete novel

4. Victorian Education
"If you would reward honesty, if you would give encouragement to good, if you would stimulate the idle, eradicate evil, or correct what is bad, education -- comprehensive liberal education -- is the one thing needful, and the one effective end" Birmingham, 1844
"If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more” 1.2

5. M’Choakumchild
Education based primarily on facts
Gradgrind, man of facts and calculations
Girl number twenty
Bitzer defines horse as “a graminivorous quadruped”
No fancy wallpapers or carpets with flower designs
“metallurgical Louisa” and “mathematical Tom”
Education theory, one aspect of utilitarianism

6. Attack on Utilitarians
Parody of utilitarian doctrine “Now, what I want is facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.”
Thomas Gradgrind, a man of realities, a man of facts and calculations
Systematic theory in approaching Louisa’s marriage, love is called “misplaced expression”
Dickens seems to have harboured great distrust and dislike of all makers of statistics

7. Dislike of Worker’s Unions
Distrusted trade unions, presented them in ugly light
Unfortunate youth experiences in House of Commons as a reporter, own life long contempt of political bodies
Blackpool refuses to join workers’ union, prefers to be ostracized, though genuine believer in the cause
Personal dislike of workers unions weakens the defense of the workers he had intended

8. Satire Against Kind of Thought
One of most thought-about books
Greater complication of plot than before
Intended to use his work as a vehicle of a more concentrated sociological argument
His journalism shows that he was thinking much more about social problems
Grandgrind not just burlesque and exaggeration but satire directed against kind of thought
Grandgrind only major Dicken’s character who is meant to be “intellectual”

9. The Idea of Personality in an Individual Industrial Worker
Impoverishment of human life
Stephen Blackpool, defeated by law, the trade union, and his employer
Slow record of inglorious misery and defeat
Stephen’s obstinacy in not joining the union
Dicken’s hatred of Slackbridge
Attitude of other worker’s towards Stephen

10. Gradgrind : A Personification of the Utilitarian Principle
Gradgrind’s theory of education
“Eminently practical man” goes about with a rule, a pair of scales, and the multiplication table
Life and human beings matter of facts and figures
Lives in “Stone Lodge”
Mrs. Gradgring urges the children to be “somethingological” directly
Round character, change of heart

11. Bounderby, an Embodiment of Utilitarianism, Laissez Faire
Banker and Industrialist
“man perfectly devoid of sentiment”
Flat character, no signs of any human feelings
“made out of a coarse material”, looks at his workers as tools and calls them “hands”
Proud of housekeeper with aristocratic connections
His treatment of Stephen, dismissal, divorce
Regards industrial smoke as “meat and drink” for workers
Treatment of his mother

12. Harthouse : Un-emotional Pursuit of Louisa
Bored with everything that he has tried in life
Does not believe in virtues of benevolence and philanthropy, sees “assumed honesty in dishonesty”
Louisa is looked upon as an object of planned conquest, uses every device and stratagem
Utterly incapable of genuine sentiment, pursues her as a sport
Typical product of the kind of utilitarianism that prevailed in Victorian Society

13. Louisa’s Life Wrecked Agrees to marry Bounderby
Utilitarian motive in promoting Tom’s interests
Capacity of self assertion is crushed by years of training
Harthouse effect : “Upon a nature long accustomed to self-suppression, the Harthouse philosophy came as a relief and justification.”
Eventually finds life completely wrecked, puts blame squarely on Grandgrind
Round characters, grows to forgive Sissy and admire her

14. Sissy Jupe Her ignorance of facts
Abandoned by her father, her unwavering faith in him despite this
Unsatisfactory performance at school
Relations with Louisa
Initiative and courage in dealing with Harthouse
Help rendered by her to Tom
Sterling qualities, a minor heroine

15. Critical Opinions
This is, as I have said, not the saddest, but certainly the harshest of his stories. It is perhaps the only place where Dickens, in defending happiness, for a moment forgets to be happy. : G.K. Chesterton
Dickens is at once central and untypical in the ‘social novel’. : Louis James
On every page Hard Times manifests its identity as a polemical work, a critique of mid-Victorian industrial society dominated by materialism, acquisitiveness, and ruthlessly competitive capitalist economics. : David Lodge
The target of Dickens’s criticism, however, was not Bentham’s Utilitarianism, nor Malthusian theories of population, nor Smith’s free-market economics, but the crude utilitarianism derived from such ideas by Benthamite Philosophical Radicals, which tended to dominate social, political, and economic thinking and policy at the time the novel was written. : John R. Harrison