Written deliberately to increase the circulation of Dickens's weekly magazine HOUSEHOLD WORDS, HARD TIMES was a huge and instantaneous success upon publication in 1854. Yet this novel is not the cheerful celebration of Victorian life one might have expected from the beloved author of PICKWICK PAPERS and THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. Compressed, stark, allegorical, it is a bitter expose of capitalist exploitation during the Industrial Revolution - and a fierce denunciation of the philosophy of materialism, which threatens the human imagination in all times and places. With a typically unforgettable cast of characters - including the heartless fact-worshipper Professor Gradgrind, the warmly endearing Sissy Jupe and the eternally noble Stephen Blackpool - HARD TIMES carries a uniquely powerful message and remains one of the most widely read of Dickens's major novels.

In 1839, Charles Dickens, whose popular novel Oliver Twist had just been published, took a trip to Manchester, a city in northwest England. It was a trip that was to change his life and result in one of his most bitter and controversial novels, Hard Times.
In Manchester, Dickens was taken to see cotton mills typical of those that had sprung up in northern England as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The invention of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century was a major force behind this “revolution.” Power became accessible and inexpensive, and factories boomed with production.
There was a darker side to this teeming productivity, however. The methods of organizing the workers for maximum efficiency often led to miserable working conditions; long hours, hard work, dangerous machinery. Young children were often put to work, despite laws that were meant to prevent the abuse of minors. Workers were housed in slums with filthy sanitation. Factories poured poisonous smoke into the atmosphere, darkening the skies and threatening the health of anyone who lived in the town.
Laws were passed that offered some protection to these workers, but factory owners often disregarded them, and the laws were difficult to enforce. So the dangerous machinery and poor sanitation continued, and many owners felt they had no responsibility to their employees except to pay them wages that were estab-
lished by the laws of supply and demand. Prosperity, so said many in charge, depended on high profits and inexpensive labor.
The basis for much of this abuse, according to writers such as Dickens and the Scots essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (to whom Hard Times is dedicated), was the political philosophy of Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism had its roots in the laissez-faire doctrine of the Scots economist Adam Smith, expressed in his book The Wealth of Nations (1776). Laissez-faire means, in the original French, “leave alone,” and Smith’s book detailed his opposition to governmental interference in the economy of a nation.
Smith’s ideas were elaborated by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism, and then further developed by the English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill. In simple terms, the Utilitarians sought “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”- in other words, whatever was correct for the majority, particularly in regard to economic profit, was thought to be correct for everyone. The Utilitarians brought about important social reforms.
Yet, as Dickens and others pointed out, Utilitarianism was subject to abuse, particularly where the poor minority were concerned. In striving for greater profits that would benefit the nation, management often exploited the workers, and politicians winked at their exploitation. In Hard Times, Gradgrind Sr. is portrayed as a strict Utilitarian, who practices his philosophy at home and in the school he governs. Like others of his kind, he sees little reality beyond profit and loss.
After visiting Manchester, Dickens wrote to a friend: “I went to Manchester and saw the worst cotton mill. And then I saw the best... There was no great difference between them.” The workers made a lasting impression on Dickens. He wrote: “...what I have seen has disgusted me and astonished me beyond all measure. I mean to strike the heaviest blow in my power for these unfortunate creatures.” For Dickens, striking the “heaviest blow” meant using his pen. Few writers have ever been so popular in their lifetimes. His work combines elements of hilarious and thrilling entertainment with sharp condemnations of society, and many readers believe he blended these elements more skillfully than any other novelist in the English language- before or since.
Born in Portsmouth, England, in 1812, he was the son of John Dickens, a clerk for the Navy. The elder Dickens, who later moved his family to London, was known as a warm-hearted, generous man, who, however, often found himself broke. (In the novel David Copperfield, Dickens offers a fictionalized portrait of John Dickens in the character of the lovable but irresponsible Mr. Micawber.) John Dickens’s free-spending ways resulted in two traumatic incidents for young Charles. At the age of twelve, when his family’s finances slipped badly, Dickens was forced to work in a blacking factory (which manufactured boot blacking or shoe polish). Dickens was devastated! He felt abandoned and discarded by his family. The lofty ambitions to become a man of learning crumbled.
Throughout his life he refused to discuss the experience with anyone but vowed
he would never again have to endure such hardship. His wife and children never knew until after his death that he had worked in a factory as a child.
The terror and anger this incident caused found its way into several of Dickens’s novels as he created many children orphaned or abandoned by their parents:
Jo in Bleak House, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and his sister Kate, Sissy Jupe in Hard Times, and others. While some accuse Dickens of often sentimentalizing these characters, others point to how those young people reflect the deep sense of rejection he must have felt.
The second traumatic incident occurred soon after Dickens left the blacking factory, when his father was arrested for debt and sent to prison. For three months Mrs. Dickens and her children lived there with him, allowed their freedom during the day, but locked in at night. Charles lived elsewhere, hating the confines of the prison and embittered at the complicated laws that kept his father there. Little by little, Charles Dickens was developing the soul of a reformer. Life in a debtor’s prison became the basis for one of his more complex and mature novels, Little Dorrit.
A change in his father’s fortunes allowed Charles to return to school. He had always been precocious, reading hungrily whatever he could- newspapers, history, fairy tales, all of which influenced his later writing. A love of the theater inspired him to create lively characters, suspense, comic high spirits, and excitement in his work.
After leaving school, Dickens worked for a time as an office boy in a law firm, and then as a newspaper reporter, writing general news for one paper, reporting on the affairs of Parliament for another. It was through these jobs that Dickens developed a lifelong distrust of the law, a contempt that emerged in such novels as Bleak House and Hard Times.
He began to write short fictional sketches about London life and characters, using the pen name “Boz.” The broad appeal of these sketches led one editor to ask Dickens to try an experiment- to write a novel in serial form, several chapters per month. Novels were usually published in three volumes, making them expensive for the average person. Publishing them in a monthly magazine would make them more accessible and inexpensive.
The result was The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), an immediate success. It may be difficult to understand how the weekly installments of a book could create the fever pitch of excitement that Pickwick did. But if you remember that, without television or movies, Victorians turned to books for their entertainment, you might understand that they awaited the next installment just as eagerly as you may look forward to a new episode of your favorite television show. “Boz” was the toast of London, and everyone wanted to know who he was.
Dickens soon dropped his pen name as he continued to write serials, sometimes beginning one at the same time he was writing another. And while Pickwick Papers is a comic romp through the towns and countryside of England, the later novels began to explore some of the murkier aspects of big city life in the
nineteenth century. Oliver Twist (1837-38) examines the plight of the poor who lurked in London’s underworld. Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) deals in part with the abuses of schools that mistreated and victimized their students. Bleak House (1852-53) looks at the weighty and impossibly complicated affairs of the court system.
Yet if Dickens had been nothing more than a moralizing social critic, it’s unlikely that his works would be read and enjoyed today. He was, first and foremost, one of the supreme entertainers in literary history. His books have intricate plots, memorable characters, brilliant comedy, intense emotion. But Dickens, despite his popularity, was constantly afraid of losing his public. If the sale of a magazine that contained one of his serials began to drop, Dickens might alter the plot in some way to bring people back. That he was able to combine popular appeal with literary genius (second only to Shakespeare, according to many) is a testament to his incredible skill.
Unfortunately, Dickens’s personal life did not always match the success of his writing career. At the time he was writing The Pickwick Papers (1836) he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of one of his editors. For a time the marriage was quite happy, and Catherine eventually bore him ten children. But as the years passed, Dickens began to find his wife lazy, clumsy, socially inept- not at all the kind of wife he felt a man of his stature deserved.
There are those who feel that Dickens so idealized Catherine’s sister Mary (whose death at seventeen devastated Dickens) that no one could hope to com-
pare with her. This worship of the ideal woman can be seen in many of Dickens’s female characters: Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield, Esther in Bleak House, Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, Kate Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby, Sissy Jupe in Hard Times, and others. Some readers feel that this need to put certain women on a pedestal prevented his female characters from attaining the depth and complexity of their male counterparts.
Dickens’s vanity grew with his success, and he began more and more to see Catherine critically. The couple began to separate, first emotionally, and then literally. You’ll see in Hard Times how his frustration at the divorce laws found its way into that novel.
Dickens began to see a young actress, Ellen Ternan, who at eighteen was young enough to be his daughter. He loved her deeply, and she was at his side when he died.
Dickens’s writing skills and his social conscience merged when he began a weekly periodical in 1850. He invited many of his friends to contribute history, fiction, reviews, and essays that portrayed social matters. The purpose of the periodical was “to cherish the light of Fancy which is inherent in the human heart.” (Remember this phrase as you read Hard Times.) Each issue (or number) of the magazine, called Household Words, dealt with a social problem: government aid for education, alcoholism, illiteracy, factory accidents, industrial schools. These articles often championed radical ideas, and they were so skillfully blended with entertainment that the magazine was an enor-
mous success. Pioneers in sanitary and housing reform gave Dickens much credit for bringing their causes to the general public.
It was at a time when sales of Household Words were low that Dickens decided to write a weekly serial that would match the popularity of some of his earlier works. Since his previous novels had been written in monthly numbers, the task of writing weekly episodes was exhausting. Yet he was spurred by the challenge of writing about the horrors of the Industrial Revolution that had so shocked him in Manchester fifteen years before. In this way Hard Times was born and helped the magazine’s popularity considerably. Dickens said at the time that the purpose of the novel was not to create social unrest, but to foster understanding between management and labor.
Hard Times has not enjoyed the critical success of such Dickens’s masterpieces as David Copperfield (1849-50) and Great Expectations (1860-61). Some readers have charged that it does not explore factory life with the same perceptive detail with which he exposed the courts in Bleak House. (And it is strange that, for all of the talk of worker hardship in Hard Times, Dickens never takes us within the factories themselves.) Some readers even point to the Stephen Blackpool sequences as melodramatic and unbelievable.
The novel does have its champions; some regard Hard Times as one of his finest works of satire. They cite its economy (it is one of Dickens’s shortest novels), its passion, and its prophetic portrait of social ills in their praise of the book. As always, Dickens tells a wonderful story, one with suspense, humor, deeply felt
emotion, and tenderness. Dickens the entertainer is never blotted out by Dickens the reformer.
How successful was Hard Times as a document of radical social change? It’s often impossible to gauge the exact influence a book has on a culture, since its effects materialize slowly. And Dickens was not the only writer pointing to the hideous results of industrialization. (Elizabeth Gaskell, another novelist and a friend of Dickens, wrote about similar topics in such books as North and South.) Yet his immense readership guaranteed that the public would become aware of the plight of the factory workers in greater numbers than could be reached by any newspaper.
By the 1890s, conditions for the workers had improved somewhat, thanks largely to the workers themselves, who formed trade unions that forced reforms on employers. Even though Dickens criticizes the unions in Hard Times, he would have been the first to applaud these reforms. Such passionate social critics as George Bernard Shaw acclaimed Dickens as a supreme influence on the betterment of English society. (He thought Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit was as radical and rebellious a work as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.) In 1858, Dickens began to give a series of public readings from his own work. He was a marvelous performer, as popular onstage as he was in print. But the exhausting performances damaged his health, which declined seriously over the next few years.
Despite illness he took a trip to America. He had been there years before, and a resulting book, American Notes (1842), made some Americans furious at the way Dickens had portrayed them. But during this visit in 1867, he was greeted with a frenzy we might reserve for a rock star today.
Dickens returned to England in extremely poor health. He died of a paralytic stroke on June 9, 1870. At the time, he was writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which he never finished.
Even if you’ve never read a Dickens novel, it’s likely that you know his work anyway. Countless movies, television shows, musicals, and plays have been based on his work. Scarcely a Christmas season goes by without a new version of A Christmas Carol (1843). So you may “know” Dickens without having read a word of his writing. But there’s no substitute for his own words. No adaptation can do justice to his genius. Like all great writers, Dickens created worlds both recognizable and magical. Like Shakespeare, Dickens embraced all levels of society and invested each one with his own generous touch of humanity.