The English Review
April 2013
Realistic fiction has always been regarded as a possible doorway into history. At the
simplest level, there is a direct overlap between the subject-matter of realist fiction –
actual, recognisable social life – and the historian’s subject-matter. The Victorian
novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, writing about the living conditions of Manchester’s
factory workers in Mary Barton (1848), was making first hand observations of
contemporary life in much the same way that Friedrich Engels did in The Condition of
the Working-Class in England: from Personal Observation and Authentic Sources
(1845), a text much used by historians studying Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
Realism and history
But it is not just through their subject-matter that we can identify links between the
writers of realist fiction and contemporary writers of non-fiction. There is more
common ground in the language and techniques they use to represent this subjectmatter. This will sometimes reveal shared assumptions and ways of looking at things.
When Charlotte Bronte has the young, orphaned Jane Eyre comparing her oppressed
condition to that of a ‘revolted slave’, the comparison is not simply an individual
flight of Bronte’s imagination. Slavery remained politically sensitive even after it
was outlawed in the British empire in 1834, but this theme also permeated public
debate about human freedom at a metaphorical level, as reformers compared the new
social relations produced by industrial capitalism to those that operated in a slavebased economy.
All literary texts, including ‘timeless’ classics, are rooted in the moment of their
production, and in the case of realist fiction this link is usually strongly apparent. For
one specific branch of nineteenth-century fiction, the so-called ‘industrial’ or ‘socialproblem’ novel of the 1840s and 50s, the connection between fiction and real life was
especially close. Thomas Carlyle, who was to become the dedicatee of Hard Times,
had raised the ‘Condition of England question’ in his 1839 pamphlet Chartism,
insisting that something ought to be done about the large scale problems besetting
English society in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
But since that society was now effectively divided into ‘two nations’, the rich and the
poor, as ignorant of each other as the inhabitants of different planets according to
Disraeli in his novel Sybil (1845), there needed to be some basic awareness-raising
before anything could be done.
In the hands of writers like Disraeli, Gaskell, Kingsley and Dickens, the novel became
a primary vehicle for demonstrating to the middle and upper-class reading public what
the real condition of England was. Unsurprisingly, these novels have become
reference points for studies of the social history of mid-Victorian Britain.
Realism and satire
Hard Times is often linked with Mary Barton, Sybil, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke
and other industrial novels, but it is quite different from those works of realist fiction.
The twenty-first-century reader seeking to discover more about the mid-Victorian
condition of England through a reading of Hard Times is likely to encounter two
major problems.
One problem is that, unlike the other novels just mentioned, Hard Times is a satire
and consequently many of its elements are exaggerated beyond the plausible limits of
realism. Coketown may be inspired by a real industrial town, but it is described in
fantastical terms far removed from the sober depiction of, say, Gaskell’s Manchester.
Similarly, Dickens characters are caricatures and the narrator who presents them to us,
almost a character in his own right, thrusts himself into the novel in a manner that
constantly reminds us we are reading a literary text rather than observing the social
realties of mid-Victorian Britain. The other problem is that, more than any other
industrial novel of the period, Hard Times depends on its original publication context
for some of it meaning, and that context is not readily available to the modern reader.
The combined effect of these different problems means that the twenty-first century
reader’s engagement with Hard Times as an industrial novel of the 1850s is not
straightforward.
Hard Times and Household Words
When Dickens wrote Hard Times in 1854 he had already established a reputation as a
forceful social critic, exposing the inequalities of British society and attacking corrupt
institutions in novels like Dombey and Son (1848) and Bleak House (1853). In 1850
he had revived that strand of his writing career linked to journalism by establishing a
cheap weekly magazine, Household Words. This publication aimed at a wide
readership, working-class as well as middle-class, and Dickens, the journal’s
‘conductor’, contributed a large number of non-fiction articles himself.
Household Words was a profitable enterprise for Dickens and his publishers, so when
the circulation figures began to fall in 1853 he quickly retrieved the situation by
taking over the journal’s fictions slot with a new novel of his own. Hard Times was
planned and written at short notice, the first instalment appearing on the front page of
Household Words on 1 April 1854.
Coketown and Preston
Dickens had gathered background material for Hard Times on a visit in January 1854
to Preston, one of the cotton manufacturing centres in Lancashire. Preston was not a
random choice: since the summer of 1853 the workers in its cotton mills had been on
strike, demanding that their wages be restored to the level they were at before an
earlier slump in trade had led to cuts. The employers responded by shutting down
their mills, and mass unemployment descended on the town. The ‘Preston lockout’
became a national issue, and news of the prolonged industrial struggle spread as far as
Italy, where Dickens, on holiday with friends in autumn 1853, read newspaper reports
of the dispute.
By the time Hard Times began to be serialised in Household Words, the magazine’s
readers were already familiar with reports of strikes: Dickens himself had published
an article on ‘Railway Strikes’ in January 1851, and another Household Words
contributor wrote an article called Locked Out for the 10 December 1853 issue.
Dickens returned to the same subject in a long piece titled ‘On Strike’ that appeared in
Household Words in February 1854, shortly after his visit to Preston.
In this article, Dickens is very much the reporter, quoting at length from placards in
the streets and describing a meeting at which voluntary contributions from workers in
other industrial towns were distributed among the destitute families of Preston. More
than a dozen years earlier, in The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens had depicted industrial
unrest as violent and threatening. In ‘On Strike’ he paints an entirely different
picture, devoting much space to George Cowell, the quietly-spoken chairman of the
strike committee. Faint echoes of Cowell, especially his dialect, can be heard in Hard
Times, through the characterisation of Stephen Blackpool, though the fictional
character is a martyr rather than a leader.
Another prominent character in the Preston dispute was the ranting orator Mortimer
Grimshaw, but he is presented in ‘On Strike’ as an exception to the general rule of
civility and good humour that prevailed among the strikers. There is no strike in Hard
Times, but Dickens takes the figure of Grimshaw and transforms him into the fictional
delegate of the United Aggregate Tribunal, an outsider who turns the Coketown
workers against Stephen Blackpool because he refused to join the union.
Stephen Blackpool and the union
For the modern reader, this is one of the most puzzling aspects of the plot of Hard
Times. Why won’t Stephen join the union? A possible answer lies elsewhere in the
22 April issue of Household Words, just a few weeks into the serialisation of Hard
Times. This issue contained an article by Henry Morley, which gave a graphic
account, drawn from factory inspectors’ reports, of industrial accidents that were
costing the lives and limbs of workers, especially child workers, because mill owners
would not go to the expense of fencing in machinery. This article marked the
beginning of a campaign in Household Words, pressing manufacturers to observe the
minimum standards of safety set out in the 1844 Factory Act.
Dickens originally included a reference to this kind of accident in Hard Times, the
victim being Rachel’s little sister.
The manuscript version of Book I Chapter XIII includes a passage in which Stephen
speaks passionately about the factory owners’ callous disregard for the safety of their
workers, but Rachel begs him to ‘Let such things be … They only lead to hurt.’
Stephen does promise to ‘let things be’, and so he stays away from the trade union,
which would certainly not let things be. In the proof version of this passage in the
novel, Dickens even added a note referring the reader to Morley’s essay, but by the
time the novel went into print he had deleted the passage and the footnote. Kate Flint
suggests that the deletion may have been motivated by Dickens’ wish not to have the
novel too easily categorised as an industrial novel - he did have numerous other
targets within his sights, and the factory safety campaign was already underway in the
pages of Household Words.
‘On Strike’ and Morley’s essay are just two of the articles which nineteenth-century
readers could have read alongside Hard Times. There were many others, on subjects
such as poor housing conditions, smoke pollution, popular entertainment and the
circus, as well as marriage laws, connecting with the novel’s themes. In brief, the
original reading context for Hard Times was not self-contained, but diverse, spreading
out into reportage and campaigning journalism.
Hard Times as satire
In many respects, Hard Times is utterly topical, reflecting back to its mid-Victorian
reader the realities of their changing world. In other respects, realism seems to be in
retreat as the novel compresses its characters into two dimensions and its plot into
melodrama. Compression is not a typical feature of Dickens’ writing, and some of his
contemporary readers seemed to feel that in portraying an educational system reduced
to the bare bones of learning facts and figures, and an industrial system in which the
workers are merely ‘Hands’, Dickens’ own writing had been forced into a narrow,
uncongenial channel. Hard Times does indeed reflect the ugly face of a world
dominated by figures such as Gradgrind, Bounderby, and M’Choakumchild, but
Dickens is also engaging in a more direct form of satire than usual, and this is another
feature of Hard Times that sets it apart from other industrial novels.
‘Hands’
‘Hands’ is a case in point. In pre-industrial society, workers had been called, mostly,
‘men’ or ‘servants’. With the Industrial Revolution, the terms ‘operatives’ and
‘hands’ came to the fore instead. Official reports tabulated the size of the factory
workforce, and had columns headed ‘Hands’. Even a reformist cotton manufacturer
like John Fielden, whose 1836 pamphlet ‘The Curse of the Factory System’ protested
about the way technological improvements had meant ever-longer working hours,
uses ‘hands’ in this way.
Dickens examines the implications of such language. In Book 1 Chapter X of Hard
Times he refers to:
the multitude of Coketown, generically called ‘the Hands’, a race who would
have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make
them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and
stomachs.
He underlines the point a couple of paragraphs later by alluding to real-life examples
of factory workers who had established reputations in spheres outside their everyday
labour, ‘those remarkable “Hands”, who, piecing together their broken intervals of
leisure through many years, had mastered difficult sciences’ and ‘Hands who could
make speeches and carry out debates’.
This is telling, not simply because it exposes the gulf between hands and speechmaking faculties, but also because oratory is a significant feature of the novel. As
well as the rabble-rousing oratory of Mortimer Grimshaw, caricatured in the fictional
Slackbridge’s address to the ‘downtrodden operatives of Coketown’, Dickens later
parodies the flippancy of parliamentary speech-making in the character of James
Harthouse, MP, whose inappropriately facetious humour covers a collective failure of
responsibility on the part of politicians relating here to railway accidents.
Dickens’ original readers would have been used to reading as well as hearing public
speeches, whether originating from the political platform, the pulpit, or the debating
societies and Mechanics’ Institutes that flourished around the UK. A piece in The
Times in 1873 noted: ‘In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of
public speakers…We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary
people.’
Oral and literary cultures
The middle years of the nineteenth century marked a gradual shift from a
predominantly oral culture to one where a greater proportion of the population were
literate. During the period of transition there was considerable interplay between
orality (including oratory) and literacy (including novel-writing and reading). The
result was a public discourse in which different modes of expression blended and
overlapped in ways that the twenty-first century reader sometimes finds uneasy.
In Hard Times this unease gathers around the voice of the narrator, who slips to and
fro between the kind of omniscient detachment usually associated with fictional
realism; dramatic mimicry of the novel’s characters; rhetorical addresses to ‘utilitarian
economists’ and ‘commissioners of facts’; and fanciful riffs on an urban landscape
dominated by ‘fairy palaces’ and ‘melancholy-mad elephants’. This is a shapeshifting narrator who refuses to stay in the background, pressing home points in a
variety of voices, sometimes oratorical, sometimes directly satirical, sometimes
dramatic, and sometimes quietly intimate with the ‘Dear reader’.
With such a variable narrator, the novel sidesteps the relatively stable conventions of
nineteenth-century fictional realism. It is also through the character of this dominant
and often authoritative narrator that Dickens sets up his concentrated challenge to the
assumed power of the institutions and the social and economic structures that were
shaping England in the mid-nineteenth century.