PAPER NO.104
LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIANS
TOPIC-INDUSTIAL
REVOLUTION-BASED ON NOVEL HARD TIMES
NAME:PANDYA
MAYURI.M
ROLL NO.25
EMAIL ID-pandyamayuri0610@gmail.com
BATCH-M.A
2021-2023
SUBMITTED
TO-S.B.GARDI DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMAR SINHJI BHAVNAGAR
UNIVERSITY
INDUSTIAL
REVOLUTION-BASED ON NOVEL HARD TIMES
“There is a wisdom of
the head, and…
There is a wisdom of
the heart”
-Charles
Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was born on February 7,
1812, in Portsea, England. His parents were middle-class, but they suffered
financially as a result of living beyond their means. When Dickens was twelve
years old, his family’s dire straits forced him to quit school and work in a
blacking factory (where shoe polish was manufactured). Within weeks, his father
was put in debtor’s prison, where Dickens’s mother and siblings eventually
joined him. At this point, Dickens lived on his own and continued to work at
the factory for several months. The horrific conditions in the factory haunted
him for the rest of his life, as did the experience of temporary orphanhood.
Apparently, Dickens never forgot the day when a more senior boy in the
warehouse took it upon himself to instruct Dickens in how to do his work more efficiently. For Dickens,
that instruction may have represented the first step toward his full
integration into the misery and tedium of working-class life. The more senior
boy’s name was Bob Fagin. Dickens’s residual resentment of him reached a
fevered pitch in the characterization of the villain Fagin in Oliver Twist.
After inheriting some money, Dickens’s
father got out of prison and Charles returned to school. As a young adult, he
worked as a law clerk and later as a journalist. His experience as a journalist
kept him in close contact with the darker social conditions of the Industrial
Revolution, and he grew disillusioned with the attempts of lawmakers to
alleviate those conditions. A collection of semi-fictional sketches entitled
Sketches by Boz earned him recognition as a writer. Dickens began to make money
from his writing when he published his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which
was serialized beginning in 1836 and published in book form the following year.
The Pickwick Papers, published when Dickens was only twenty-five, was hugely
popular, and Dickens became a literary celebrity after its publication.
In 1836, Dickens married Catherine
Hogarth, but after twenty years of marriage and ten children, he fell in love
with Ellen Ternan, an actress many years his junior. Soon after, Dickens and
his wife separated, ending a long series of marital difficulties. Dickens
remained a prolific writer to the end of his life, and his novels—among them
Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield
(Dickens’ most autobiographical novel), and Bleak House—continued to earn
critical and popular acclaim. He died of a stroke in 1870, at the age of 58,
leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.
Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, retired merchant in the industrial
city of Coketown, England, devotes his life to a philosophy of rationalism,
self-interest, and fact. He raises his oldest children, Louisa and Tom,
according to this philosophy and never allows them to engage in fanciful or
imaginative pursuits. He founds a school and charitably takes in one of the
students, the kindly and imaginative Sissy Jupe, after the disappearance of her
father, a circus entertainer.
As the Gradgrind children grow older, Tom becomes a dissipated,
self-interested hedonist, and Louisa struggles with deep inner confusion,
feeling as though she is missing something important in her life. Eventually
Louisa marries Gradgrind’s friend Josiah Bounderby, a wealthy factory owner and
banker more than twice her age. Bounderby continually trumpets his role as a
self-made man who was abandoned in the gutter by his mother as an infant. Tom
is apprenticed at the Bounderby bank, and Sissy remains at the Gradgrind home
to care for the younger children.
In the meantime, an impoverished “Hand”—Dickens’s term for the
lowest laborers in Coketown’s factories—named Stephen Blackpool struggles with
his love for Rachael, another poor factory worker. He is unable to marry her
because he is already married to a horrible, drunken woman who disappears for
months and even years at a time. Stephen visits Bounderby to ask about a
divorce but learns that only the wealthy can obtain them. Outside Bounderby’s
home, he meets Mrs. Pegler, a strange old woman with an inexplicable devotion
to Bounderby.
James Harthouse, a wealthy young sophisticate from London,
arrives in Coketown to begin a political career as a disciple of Gradgrind, who
is now a Member of Parliament. He immediately takes an interest in Louisa and
decides to try to seduce her. With the unspoken aid of Mrs. Sparsit, a former
aristocrat who has fallen on hard times and now works for Bounderby, he sets
about trying to corrupt Louisa.
The Hands, exhorted by a crooked union
spokesman named Slackbridge, try to form a union. Only Stephen refuses to join
because he feels that a union strike would only increase tensions between
employers and employees. He is cast out by the other Hands and fired by
Bounderby when he refuses to spy on them. Louisa, impressed with Stephen’s
integrity, visits him before he leaves Coketown and helps him with some money.
Tom accompanies her and tells Stephen that if he waits outside the bank for
several consecutive nights, help will come to him. Stephen does so, but no help
arrives. Eventually he packs up and leaves Coketown, hoping to find
agricultural work in the country. Not long after that, the bank is robbed, and
the lone suspect is Stephen, the vanished Hand who was seen loitering outside
the bank for several nights just before disappearing from the city.
Mrs. Sparsit witnesses Harthouse
declaring his love for Louisa, and Louisa agrees to meet him in Coketown later
that night. However, Louisa instead flees to her father’s house, where she
miserably confides to Gradgrind that her upbringing has left her married to a
man she does not love, disconnected from her feelings, deeply unhappy, and
possibly in love with Harthouse. She collapses to the floor, and Gradgrind,
struck dumb with self-reproach, begins to realize the imperfections in his
philosophy of rational self-interest.
Sissy, who loves Louisa deeply, visits
Harthouse and convinces him to leave Coketown forever. Bounderby, furious that
his wife has left him, redoubles his efforts to capture Stephen. When Stephen
tries to return to clear his good name, he falls into a mining pit called Old
Hell Shaft. Rachael and Louisa discover him, but he dies soon after an
emotional farewell to Rachael. Gradgrind and Louisa realize that Tom is really
responsible for robbing the bank, and they arrange to sneak him out of England
with the help of the circus performers with whom Sissy spent her early
childhood. They are nearly successful, but are stopped by Bitzer, a young man
who went to Gradgrind’s school and who embodies all the qualities of the
detached rationalism that Gradgrind once espoused, but who now sees its limits.
Sleary, the lisping circus proprietor, arranges for Tom to slip out of Bitzer’s
grasp, and the young robber escapes from England after all.
Mrs. Sparsit, anxious to help Bounderby
find the robbers, drags Mrs. Pegler—a known associate of Stephen Blackpool—in
to see Bounderby, thinking Mrs. Pegler is a potential witness. Bounderby
recoils, and it is revealed that Mrs. Pegler is really his loving mother, whom
he has forbidden to visit him: Bounderby is not a self-made man after all.
Angrily, Bounderby fires Mrs. Sparsit and sends her away to her hostile
relatives. Five years later, he will die alone in the streets of Coketown.
Gradgrind gives up his philosophy of fact and devotes his political power to
helping the poor. Tom realizes the error of his ways but dies without ever
seeing his family again. While Sissy marries and has a large and loving family,
Louisa never again marries and never has children. Nevertheless, Louisa is
loved by Sissy’s family and learns at last how to feel sympathy for her fellow
human beings.
During the 1840s - the decade preceding
the appearance of Hard Times- there emerged a kind of fiction dealing directly
and seriously with social problems and with what came to be called the
'condition-of-England question'. Some still-remembered examples are Disraeli's Sybil
(1845), which gave currency to the idea of the 'two nations' within England,
the rich and the poor; and two widely read novels by the Christian Socialist
Charles Kingsley, Yeast (serialised in 1848) and Alton Locke (1850), which drew
attention to the sufferings of the poor. A sub-category of this variety of fiction
was the so-called 'industrial novel", dealing with life in the teeming new
cities. A well-known example, which Dickens admired, was Mrs Elizabeth
Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), subtitled 'A Tale of Manchester Life'. Soon after
the serialisation of Hard Times was completed in Household Words, it was followed
by another novel about the north of England, Mrs Gaskell's North and South. Hard
Times is sometimes treated as an example of the 'industrial novel', but this is
a little misleading, since the main action of the novel is (as the earlier part
of this chapter has suggested) concerned with a different theme. At the same
time the two themes are not, as we shall see, entirely unrelated. This section
considers the industrial element and the setting, characters and topics that
belong to it.
Coketown
is intended to be a typical, fairly large industrial town in the north of
England. We know that Dickens visited Preston in Lancashire at about the time
he began work on Hard Times, and there is other evidence (e.g. Stephen Blackpool's
surname) that he may have had Lancashire and its cotton towns in mind. But it
would be a mistake to attempt to identify Coketown with Preston or any other
actual place, even though attempts have sometimes been made to do so (in a
letter of 4 September 1866, Dickens states that 'every cotton-spinning town
said it was the other cotton-spinning town'). Unlike Mrs Gaskell, who lived in
Manchester and knew the life of the poor from first-hand experience, Dickens's
experience of the industrial north was limited to short visits. His portrait of
Coketown is, as a result, not a detailed account of an actual community based
on first-hand experience but a generalized rendering of what might be called
the typical or stereotypical northern town.
His account of Coke town, notably in
the fifth chapter of the novel, stresses its ugliness and monotony - qualities
that are external manifestations of the life and work of its inhabitants.
Instead of growing slowly and naturally in response to human needs, such towns
have mushroomed as a result of the Industrial Revolution: what had origin- ally
been small market-towns became within a few years crowded cities.
This growth was solely caused by the
profit motive: capitalists built factories and surrounded them with narrow
streets of cramped, insanitary houses to accommodate the workers. The 1850s was
a period of agitation for sanitary reform, though the great series of public
health acts which ensu·red better standards for such housing came only much later,
indeed after Dickens's death. At the time of which he writes, the expectation
of life for the inhabitants of these communities was low, partly as a result of
the lack of proper diet, insanitary conditions and long hours of work. Sunshine
rarely penetrated the pall of smoke that hung over Coketown and its neighbours.
(In Manchester at this time the infant mortality rate was 60 per cent.) Dickens
tells us that Stephen Blackpoollooks older than his years; he is also 'a rather
stooping man' no doubt as a result of the very long hours spent bending over his
machine. Although there had been a series of Factory Acts in the 1830s and
1840s, conditions in the factories- for men, women and children -were still
very harsh by modern standards, not only in terms of long hours and infrequent holidays,
but owing to the absence of safety regulations (see Section 3 .2( e) below).As
indicated above, Stephen is typical of his class - the skilled but badly paid
factory operative -in his poor physical condition and his premature ageing.
Stephen, however, is not only a victim of the factory system but has domestic
problems that complicate and embitter his life. He is therefore not necessarily
representative of the class to which he belongs: in his wish to make Stephen a
more dramatically interesting character, Dickens has made him untypical. As it
turns out, we see almost nothing of Stephen in his capacity as a worker: we see
him leaving the factory, calling on Bounder by, at home in his lodgings, and so
forth, but we are given no detailed account of how his time in the factory is
actually spent, presumably because Dickens knew little about the subject.
Dickens's critics have generally judged
Stephen Blackpool to be a failure on the grounds that, so far from being an
acceptable portrayal of a typical factory-worker of the period, he is
exceptional, idealized and sentimentalised - a working-class hero rather than a
convincing figure. John Ruskin (seep. 75) described him as 'a dramatic
perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman', and this
neat formulation has been followed by later critics. George Gissing, writing in
1898 (and himself the author of novels depicting realistically the life of the
poorer classes), puts his finger on a serious defect in Dickens's presentation
of Stephen when he states that 'Stephen Blackpool represents nothing at all; he
is a mere model of meekness, and his great misfortune is such as might befall
any man anywhere, the curse of a drunken wife.' Nearer our· own time, F. R.
Leavis (seep. 77) has said that Stephen is 'too good and qualifies too
consistently for the martyr's halo'. It might even be suggested that this
character's name reveals Dickens's divided purpose: his surname suggests his
Lancashire origins - as does his dialect, on which Dickens evidently expended
con- siderable pains - and seems to promise a realistic treatment; but his Christian
name, that of the first Christian martyr (see Acts vi), hints at a more heroic
and idealised conception. At the same time it is not quite fair to say, as
Gissing does, that 'the curse of a drunken wife' is Stephen's 'great
misfortune' and that this hardly distinguishes him from very different
characters in very different novels: it is in fact only one of his 'great
misfortunes', and we must now look at the tragedy of his position between a
hostile employer and hostile fellow-workers.
Bounderby is one of the most important
links between the two main themes of the novel, the educational and the
industrial. He is a friend of Gradgrind and becomes the husband of Louisa and
the employer of Tom; at the same time he is a prominent man of business,
'banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not' (1,4), and is the owner of the factory
at which Stephen and Rachael are employed. For Dickens he represents both a
satire on the self-made man whose ruthless methods have enabled him to prosper,
and an attack on the heartlessness of the factory-owners; and in the latter
capacity Bounderby's qualities emerge most clearly in his relationship with
Stephen Blackpool and, specifically, in his two interviews with Stephen in I,
11 and 11,5. In the first of these scenes, Bounderby accepts and even glories
in the class divisions that separate man from man. When he tells Stephen that
there can be no question of his divorcing his wife, since divorce is a luxury
available only to the rich, Stephen replies, ' "'Tis just a muddle a'together"
',whereupon Bounderby retorts: 'Don't you talk nonsense, my good fellow, ...
about things you don't understand, and don't you call the institutions of your country
a muddle, or you '11 get yourself into a real muddle one of these fine
mornings. The institutions of your country are not your piece-work, and the
only thing you have got to do, is, to mind your piece-work. ... '
The repeated reference to 'the institutions
of your country' shows Bounderby's complacent Toryism: it does not occur to him
that in some areas, inclpding the law relating to divorce, reform is long over-
due, and indeed the word 'reform' is likely to convey to his mind associations
with riot and revolution. In the years after the French Revolution (1789) the governing
classes in England were much preoccupied with the fear that England might
follow suit; and the threat to vested interests represented by the Chartist
movement, which arose in the 1830s and demanded a more democratic society, came
to a head with a mass meeting and petition to Parliament in 1848 - the 'year of
revolutions' in Europe, and only six years before the appearance of HardTimes.
In 11,5 Bounderby refers to the
factory-workers who are trying to form a trade union as 'a set of rascals and
rebels whom transportation is too good for': since transportation had been
superseded by penal servitude as a form of punishment in 1853, the year before
Hard Times, this is a neat instance of Bounderby's dogmatic conservatism and refusal
to keep up with the times. He also refers to Stephen as 'a tidy specimen' of
the kind of trouble-maker to be found among the operatives -ironically enough,
since Stephen in fact only wishes for peace and quiet and has refused to join
the union because he wants to keep out of trouble and disputes. Just as Stephen
represents an idealised rather than an accurate portrayal of a member of the
working classes, Bounderby represents the worst that can be said of the employers
at this time. No doubt there were masters who were less ruthless and
indifferent, but it suits Dickens's dramatic purposes to make him 'a dramatic
monster' –the phrase is Ruskin's and complements his description (quoted above)
of Stephen as 'a dramatic perfection'. At the same time the heartlessness of
many of the factory-owners, and the subservience of all humane considerations
to the profit motive, are a matter of history and could hardly be exaggerated.
Nor is Bounderby's entrenched conservatism difficult to parallel from
historical examples.
We saw above that one of the objections
that has been raised against Dickens's portrayal of Stephen Blackpool is that
he is not a representative of the class to which he belongs but a man with
exceptional problems, not all of which are directly related to his role as a
factory-hand. Objections have also been made to the characterisation of Slack
bridge, the agitator; and in this case there is a curious inconsistency between
what Dickens offers in the novel and what he had done a little earlier in the
Household Words article 'On Strike' (see p. 6), which records his very recent
impressions of the situation in Preston. Strikes were not at all uncommon in
England in the early 1850s there had, for instance, been a much-publicised
strike of the Amalga-mated Society of Engineers in Manchester in 1851 - but the
strike of the Preston weavers attracted a great deal of attention, partly on account
of its scale (over 20,000 workers were involved), and partly because it lasted
for twenty-nine weeks and for most of that time the outcome seemed uncertain.
Starting as a strike for a 10 per cent increase in wages, it turned into a
lock-out when the owners closed the mills and hoped to starve the workers into
submission (hitherto those on strike had been maintained by donations from
those who were still working). It thus turned into a full-scale confrontation
between capital and labour; and soon other communities were involved, since the
Preston workers could only continue to strike with the support of contributions
from workers in neighbouring towns. As Geoffrey Carnall notes in his essay
'Dickens, Mrs Gaskell, and the Preston Strike' (Victorian Studies, 1964), the
eyes of England were turned upon Preston: 'The Times and Daily News sent
special correspondents. The lllustrated London News sent an artist. The strike
was the subject of leading articles, magazine features, and innumerable letters-to-the-editor.'
Dickens had two reasons for going to Preston: not only was he anxious to
collect material for his new novel, but he wanted to write something that would
show that his magazine Household Words was abreast of contemporary issues.
While in Preston he attended a meeting of factory-workers and listened to the
orators who addressed them. One of them was a certain Mortimer Grimshaw, who appears
in the article thinly disguised as 'Gruffshaw' and was probably the prototype
for Slackbridge. Grimshaw, like Slackbridge, seems to have been a mob orator
with an abrasive style: another journalist who heard him described him as speaking
'with a dogmatical invective and a blatant vituperation more worthy of a
Russian despot than an English patriot'. But- and this is the really
significant point -Grimshaw was not the leader of the Preston weavers: this was
George Cowell, who seems to have been a man of much more moderate views and who
was a local man, not an agitator brought in from outside like Slackbridge.
There is thus a distinct element of unfairness in Dickens's use of Slackbridge
as a typical union leader: in depicting him as he does, Dickens is loading the
dice against the unions and shows a marked hostility towards their activities.
On similar and complementary lines, it might also be main- tained that the use
of Bounderby as a typical boss is not much less unfair. But Dickens's art, like
that of fairy-tale and melodrama, relies heavily on conventions to which
realistic notions of 'fairness' are largely irrelevant: he characteristically
presents an extreme case in order tomake his point as emphatically as possible .As
Carnall says, 'there is a notable discrepancy between the portrait of
trade-unionism in the Preston article and in the novel'. Why should Dickens
have changed his attitude in such a short time? The answer must be, I think,
not in terms of Dickens's politics but in terms of the difference between a
piece of reporting and a work of fiction: in the latter, Slackbridge's
demagogic methods, and his success in leading the miners to send Stephen to
Coventry against their natural instincts and better judgments, create a more
dramatic situation both in the short and in the long term. In the short term
Slackbridge's oratorical style and ruthless attitudes (no less ruthless than
Bounderby's, though quite different in their origins) produce a more powerful
scene than the more moderate stance of a man such as Cowl would have done; and
in the long term his fellow-workers' lack of support adds considerably to Stephen's
burden and causes him to be sacked by Bounderby and hence to leave Coketown. In
the process, however, Dickens has sacrificed realism and authenticity in his
portrayal of Slackbridge; and many of his critics have viewed this character as
an inaccurate and unfair presentation of the prevailing mood of the trades
unions at the time. G. B. Shaw for instance, sees him as 'a mere figment of the
middle-class imagination', and adds: 'No such man would be listened to by a
meeting of English factory hands.' Edgar Johnson echoes Shaw in calling
Slackbridge 'a figment of [Dickens's) imagination'; and F. R. Leavis sums up
this element as a weakness in a great novel: when Dickens comes to the Trade
Unions his understanding of the world he offers to deal with betrays a marked
limitation. There were undoubtedly professional agitators, and Trade Union solidarity
was undoubtedly often asserted at the expense of the individual's rights, but
it is a score against a work so insistently typical in intention that it should
give the representative role to the agitator, Slackbridge, and make Trade
Unionism nothing better than the pardonable error of the misguided and
oppressed, and, as such, an agent in the martyrdom of the good working man.
3.2(e) Factory accidents
One of the features of the early stages
of the Industrial Revolution was the appalling hazards faced by the workers,
ranging from unguarded machines in factories to explosions in coal-mines.
Dickens touches on this in Hard Times in III,6. Not only is the manner of
Stephen's death- a disused mine-shaft that has been left as a menace to the
unwary passer-by - directly related to the negligence and indifference of the masters
who were unwilling to spend a small fraction of their profits on safeguarding
their workers; but Stephen includes a direct reference to the topic in his
dying speech, where he says that, while still being worked, the pit cost
'hundreds and hundreds o' men's lives', and is still claiming lives even after
it is worked no longer: ' "When it were in work, it killed wi'out need; when
'tis let alone, it kills without need."For Dickens, and for the reader,
the disused mine-shaft is not only a highly specific problem, which appropriate
legislation could deal with (as it eventually did) if public indifference
turned to concern, but a powerful emblem of man's
inhumanity to man.
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