Hard Times - Charles Dickens

Hard Times - Charles Dickens 

Examine Hard Times as a social novel. / Discuss Dickens as social reformer with special reference to Hard Times.

J.W. Beach points out, Dickens's Hard Times, attacks the very basic assumptions and the characteristic ideology of industrial England. This novel, says Beach, is a dramatization of what Carlyle took to be the meaning of utilitarianism and of the orthodox liberal system of Laissez-faire. This novel clearly shows the role of Dickens as a critic of social structures and as a social reformer.

“Utilitarianism” owes its full theoretical development to Jeremy Bentham, who said that society should aim at the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Bentham held that the aim of life was happiness; and this happiness-philosophy made an immediate appeal to the superficial kind of thinking which is known as “utilitarianism” because this philosophy emphasized the importance of material goods and seemed to ignore completely the moral and spiritual needs of human beings. According to this philosophy, if the amount of happiness secured was equal, then gambling was as good as poetry. It also meant that the happiness of thoroughly selfish life was equal to or even grater than the happiness of greatest number, Bentham added a second principle namely that every man was the best judge of his own interests. This second principle led to the formulation of a policy that came to be called Laissez-faire, meaning that ‘people should be left free to act for themselves’.

The theory of utilitarianism was severely criticized by philosophers like Carlyle who were believers in the moral and spiritual values of life. The principle of Laissez-faire became in course of time during the Victorian Age, a term of abuse in the vocabulary of socialism because it stood for governmental refusal to intervene in the cause of social justice, to protect the weak against the strong, and to allow individuals to pursue their own selfish interests. Hard Times shows Dickens’s antagonism to both utilitarianism and laissez-faire. Dickens attacks the Victorian Society which has characteristic of the greed for money that he regarded as the root of all evils.

The utilitarian principle finds its exponents and champions in the two leading characters of Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby. Grandgrind’s theory of education is evidently an offshoot of his utilitarian attitude to life. This man emphasizes the importance of facts, and fails to attach any importance of feelings and emotions. He wants to develop the reasoning faculty of the pupils in his school and, to that end; he exhorts the new schoolmaster to teach the boys and the girls in his model school facts, and facts alone, and to root out everything else. Gradgrind is man of realities, man of facts and calculations. He always proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four and nothing more. This “eminently practical man” goes about with rule, a pair of scales and the multiplication table always in his pocket, because life and human beings are matters of facts and figures for him.   

Bounderby, banker and industrialist, is another embodiment of the utilitarian principle; he illustrates the principle of Laissez-faire. Bounderby is described as a “man perfectly devoid of sentiment”: while Gradgrind does show signs of human feeling by taking the abandoned sissy under his protection and he certainly changes his outlook upon life by the time the story ends, Bounderby shows no signs of any human feeling and remains till the end what he is at the beginning. Bounderby is a man “made out of a coarse material”. He constantly boasts of his being a self-made man; he looks upon his workmen as tools by using which in the proper manner he can enrich himself. He is frankly contemptuous of the needs, requirements, and demands of his workmen; because he thinks that these people would not be satisfied with anything less than turtle soup and venison, with gold spoon. He shamelessly regards industrial smoke as “meat and drink” for the workers and for the factory-owners; this smoke is in his opinion the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the lungs. Dickens’s portrayal of Bounderby is as severe a condemnation of utilitarianism as could be imagined from the pen of a great satirist.

Thus Hard Times is considered a social novel or of Dickens as a social reformer in this novel. Dickens’s criticism of the hypocrisy and false pride of the upper classes as represented in the portrayal of Mrs. Sparsit, Slackbridge, and Harthouse and his unemotional pursuit of Louisa.   

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