The Industrial Social Novel: Fiction from Fact
Laura Thompson
Tesoro High School
Las Flores, CA
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like
industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying
examples, is likewise conditioned by the questions of how, when and for what class it is
made use of.” Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), “The Popular and the Realistic”
During the nineteenth century poets, essayists, journalists and novelists attempted to depict the
multitude of facets of the ever-changing political, social and economic conditions found in
England during the Industrial Revolution. Early industrial novels not only described the
conditions of the working classes’ living and working situations but also offered solutions to the
spiraling problems of urbanization and industrialization in some parts of the country. In his novel
Sybil, Benjamin Disraeli created his theory of “Two Nations”:
Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no symphony; who are as
ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in
different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding,
are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the
same laws. “
“You speak of-” said Egremont, hesitatingly. “THE RICH AND THE POOR.”
Charles Dickens in his novel, Hard Times, and Elizabeth Gaskell in her novel, North and South,
developed their own reconciliation with the “Two Nations”, the theory about the growing
tensions between the rich and the poor. Dickens and Gaskell also described other tensions, those
between men and women and those between the public and private spheres of society and family.
Using various writing techniques, both novelists wrote their fictional treatises to inform and
educate social realities within a fictional narrative, and subsequently sometimes both authors’
authencity of voice and purpose can in the words of Dickens’ character, Stephen Blackpool, the
martyred weaver, ‘ be in a muddle’. Such may be the inevitability of the industrial novel’s
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inability to create both plausible plots and realistic social solutions (David 4). It can leave the
reader somewhat perplexed and dissatisfied with the resolution of both the narrative and the
social experiment, but still the discussion of the social problems in both Hard Times and North
and South were novel experiments whether or not they were completely successful.
After reading just a few chapters from Hard Times, one cannot escape the heavy-handed use of
metaphors to explain the plight of the worker as compared to the conditions the children faced on
a daily basis in the Gradgrind school of education. Dickens’ proposed paternalistic social
solution for the working class reverberated throughout the novel. Many early and contemporary
critics of the novel complained of Dickens’ overuse of the metaphor to explain his tale, whether
seen as a fairy or morality tale; or the critics instead expounded its birth as one of the first novels
to finally discuss such important issues as strikes and unions legalized in England by 1824 but
seldom called into action until later decades. Contemporary scholar Nicholas Cole has called the
novel one of and against social reform (149).
In the opening lines of the novel, Thomas Gradgrind, headmaster of the M’Choakumchild
school, explained:
‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts
alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can
only form the minds or reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of
any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and
this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts, sir!’
(Dickens 1)
Thomas Gradgrind’s constant plunging of facts, not fancy nor imagination, into the minds of his
students continued to be reinforced into the daily life patterns of the workers at Mr. Bounderby’s
factories in Coketown. Mr. Bounderby, Thomas Gradgrind’s friend and future son-in-law and
Coketown’s leading ‘self-made’ industrialist, needed the workers to accept his knowledge and
guidance if his factory system was going to work just like the pupils and the children of Thomas
Gradgrind needed to accept the complete dominance of just the Facts (Gallagher 149). “Is it
possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the case of Coketown population and the
case of the little Gradgrinds?” teasingly proposed Dickens to his readers (67).
The physical similarities between the school and the town of Coketown continued
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Dickens’ use of extended metaphor (Ingraham 79-80). Both men, Gradgrind and Bounderby,
relished that their respective domains were devoid of all forms of Fancy. One street in Coketown,
or one church, or one house of the laboring looked exactly the same as the next and the one next
to the other-full of fact. “You saw nothing in Coketown but what was everly workful...The jail
might have been the infirmary that might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been
either, or both, or anything else, for anything appeared to the contrary in the graces of their
construction” (Dickens 66). The classroom of Gradgrind school was “a plain, bare, monotonous
vault of a schoolroom..” (Dickens 47). The one place were Fancy ruled lived outside both the
confines of the Stone Lodge and Coketown; it was the circus, home of Sissy Jupes, the only
character Dickens wrote a happy ending for at the end of the novel.
By the end of the novel Dickens seemed to abandon the paternalistic solution showcased
by the metaphors. The paternalistic solution to ease the tensions between the worker/pupil and
the employer/teacher ended tragically for both Stephen Blackpool with his death and for Thomas
Gradgrind who was forced to recant Fact’s supremacy at the expense of his children’s futures and
happiness. Louisa and Young Tom, both trained in the school of Facts, watched as their lives
unraveled as their father abandoned his previously held ideals of Facts for those of Fancy. In the
last chapters Louisa lamented the pivotal moment when she came to her father to ask for advice
about her proposed marriage to Bounderby. Prior to her acceptance of Bounderby’ s proposal
Louisa spoke words of fact, “You have been so careful of me, that I never had a child’s heart.
You trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child’s dream. You have dealt me so wisely with
me, father, from cradle to this hour, that I never had a child’s belief or a child’s fear” (Dickens
137). Gradgrind came to realize how his unquestioning adherence to his belief system had failed.
“I have supposed the Head to be all sufficient. It may not be all sufficient; how can I venture this
morning to say it is! If that other kind of wisdom should be what I have neglected, and should be
the instinct that is wanted, Louisa” (Dickens 246).
Stephen Blackpool looked to Mr. Bounderby for advice and assistance as Louisa did with
her father with much the same results. Dickens placed the theme of marriage as the initial
conflict between Stephen, one of Mr. Bounderby’s best Hands, and the industrialist. Stephen
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sought advice about what to do about his pitiful wife and marriage situation. Bounderby retorted
to Stephen: “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. You didn’t take your wife for fast and for loose; but
for better or for worse. If she has turned out worse-why, all we have got to say is, she might have
turned out better” (Dickens 113). Later the giant Bounderby called Stephen Blackpool into his
palatial home to ask him questions about the workings of the union meeting, and Stephen
Blackpool received a lashing and banishment for relating his honest thoughts to Bounderby.
Forced to look for new employment Stephen set out the next day only to return to Coketown to
clear his name of a crime he did not commit.
Although Dickens dedicated the novel to Thomas Carlyle, the philosopher who proposed
a meeting of the classes in conversations working towards a mediated process, the novelist
relinquished Carlyle’s solution as well. Dickens endeavored to demonstrate Carlyle’s solution in
section about the union meeting presided over by Slackbridge. Dickens described Slackbridge as
such: ”He was not honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humoured; he substituted
cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense”(Dickens 170). Dickens
definitely set up a contrast between the loyal, steady Hand in Stephen versus the dishonest, selfserving union organizer in Slackbridge. As Stephen explained to the crowd that he did not want
to join the union, the union organizer used the situation to his advantage to rally the crowd to
oust Stephen from the community. The conditions of the factory and grievances of the workers
were never given much detail or importance in the novel. This paucity of coverage may indicate
Dickens’ lack of faith in the meeting of the classes to discuss their differences; the union was
never really mentioned again in the novel. Dickens at the time had been reporting on the strikes
in Preston which occurred between October 1853 and April 1854.
Nicholas Coles in his article, “The Politics of Hard Times: Dickens the Novelist versus
Dickens the Reformer” believed that the Dickens’ reading public would have understood his use
of excessive metaphor as necessary for commentary and would have also read Dickens’ journal
articles where he wrote more specifically about solutions (146). So Dickens assumed that
contemporary readers would read two types of his writings and listen to his speeches to form a
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complete picture of his theories and ideas. Stephen Blackpool was as ambiguous about why he
would not join the union as Dickens was about representing the union in the novel. Dickens may
be proposing that the individual, Stephen Blackpool, was sacrificed by the current political
economy (Bounderby) as well as by the union (Slackbridge). Both sides caused Blackpool’s
death, and Dickens could be implying that both laissez-faire and trade unions would kill the
individual of society, not a solution he found satisfactory (Cole 169). Dickens’ ambivalence
could also reflect the dichotomous position the Victorians found themselves in, enjoying all the
wealth and technology of industrialization and at the same time sensing the growing plight of
those working at the exploitive mills and factories (Cole 173).
Dickens too commented on the family, the private sphere. The possibility of bringing the
ethics of the private sphere to the public was a solution offered at the beginning of the novel. But
at the end of Hard Times, the Gradgrind family retreated back further into the private sphere to
lick its wounds and heal. Thomas Gradgrind brought the remnants of what remained of his
family together, Louisa and Sissy, while his son barely escaped imprisonment through the help of
the circus hierarchy. The system of Facts failed miserably in both the public and private spheres.
The solution for which Dickens arrived at the end of the novel was quite a unique one, never to
be found in any of his other novels. Paternalism, social dialogue between classes and the merging
of the private and public spheres were discussed and rendered insufficient. “Dear reader! It rests
with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be.
We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and cold”
(Dickens 314). The two fields were still the separate two nations, but Dickens knew some type of
action needed to take place and soon (Cole 179). Dickens called his readers to action. What type
of action was not made to clear to the readers of the novel.
As a mentor for Elizabeth Gaskell, Dickens wrote to her explaining why he preferred the
title of North and South rather than the proposed title of Margaret Hale for her upcoming
industrial novel, which would be her last novel based in a city setting. He preferred the title
because it reinforced the possibility of opposing forces managing to come face to face, a glaring
criticism of his own attempt at social commentary found in Hard Times (Ingraham 85). Rather
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than using metaphor, Gaskell employed detailed descriptions of characters and of settings, both
the factory town of Milton, the North, and the forest village of Helstone, the South. As for the
themes of unions and strike, the author offered both reasons for a strike as well as possible
solutions. She abandoned the paternalistic solution and substituted the possibility of open
communication through unions and more probable though contact among the classes themselves.
In Chapter XV, Masters and Men, Gaskell prepared the stage for the unfolding of the
possible solutions for the worker/employer tension found in the northern industrial town of
Milton that Margaret Hale and her family found themselves transplanted. Because her father
refused to capitulate on his religious principles, he failed to retain a position he held for several
decades in the South. Her father was no longer a clergyman but the tutor for the town’s youngest
industrialist, John Thornton. A meeting of the three, Mr. Thornton, Margaret and her father early
in the novel presented several sides of the question from the viewpoints of the industrialist and a
middle class women. Just how should an employer treat his workers was one of the questions
brought up for discussion that night. John Thornton, a sounding a bit like Mr. Bounderby, saw
his role as of one of benevolent despot.
I maintain that despotism is the best kind of government for them; so that in the
hours in which I come in contact with them I must necessarily be an autocrat. I will use
my best discretion-from no humbug or philanthropic feeling, of which we have had
rather too much in the North-to make wise laws and come to just decisions in the
conduct. (Gaskell 120)
Margaret could not wait to refute his comparison with a story of an overprotecting father
in Numberberg; at the father’s death the son turned to evil as he was never given a chance to err
and grow up to be an adult; this refutation sounded quite similar to the conclusion of the morality
tale in Hard Times. Mr. Hale retorted that his paternal care covered only the working hours of his
factory. Mr. Hale state, “Because they labour ten hours a-day for us, I do not see that we have any
right to impose leading-strings upon them for the rest of the time” (Gaskell 121). To further the
debate, Margaret attempted to use a simile but her father responded, “Pray don’t go into similes,
Margaret; you have lead us off once already” (Gaskell 122). This line directly referenced her
mentor’s overuse of the metaphor about of the child/parent versus employee/master. Gaskell
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substituted in dialogue between the main protagonists of the novel rather than write with an
overabundance of metaphors (Ingraham 85).
As Thomas Gradgrind changed his theory on education from Fact to Fancy, John
Thornton slowly reworked his paternalistic position on his working relationship with his
employees to one of open communication. Gaskell interwove some of Carlyle’s ideas concerning
the Captains of Industry into the metamorphosis of Thornton’s new factory image. Carlyle
emphasized the importance of non-mechanization and interpersonal relationships that should
proceed on a slow and steady path to conflict resolution between the “Two Nations.” While
talking to Mr. Higgins, one of the strikers and friend of Miss Hale, Margaret wishes that “....
some of the kindest and wisest of masters would meet some of you men, and have good talk on
these things; it would, surely be the best way of getting over your difficulties..” (Gaskell 227). A
year and a half after the strike of Thornton’s Hands the young industrialists began to seek out the
more human side of his workers, engaging in conversations concerning work with the likes of
Mr. Higgins, whom he eventually hired despite a rough first interview. The new environment at
the mill did not solve the pressing economic concerns of Thornton’s extended bills and unfilled
orders but it did set up a dialogue for change.
And thence arose that intercourse, which though it might not have the effect of preventing
all future clash of opinion and action, when the occasion arose, would at any rate, enable
both master and the man to look upon each other with far more charity and sympathy, and
bear with each other more patiently and kindly. (Gaskell 410)
Dickens avoided the strike and the reasons why striking workers would risk their work or
their home or next meal, but Gaskell attempted to enlighten her readers about the possible causes
of a strike. When Margaret first arrived in Milton, she found the environment quite hostile and
alien compared to her subdued, sunny bucolic homeland. She despised the industrial middle class
and instead befriended a working class girl and her father, Betsy Higgins and Mr. Higgins. Betsy
had contracted tuberculosis from the loose cotton fibers in the carding room in one of the mills.
In Hard Times Dickens almost placed a description of one of Rachel’s sisters losing her arm in a
factory accident, but Dickens felt that his reading public may have been too upset by that image
(Ingraham 83). Gaskell wrote about Betsy’s illness despite its unpleasantness when she described
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Betsy’s slow demise during the course of the novel. Mill owners were cutting wages to keep up
with the cost of new machines, overseas cotton and the lowered prices from competing factories.
In order to circumvent the impending strike, Thornton imported the Irish whom he huddled in
mass away from his regular workers.
The strike symbolized many of Gaskell’s main themes in the novel. The earlier chapters
of the book focused on the differences between the North and the South and the class conflict.
Both Dickens and Gaskell noted the aggression and alienation often found by members
participating or refusing to participate in unions. In Hard Times, the union along with Bounderby
destroyed an honest, hard-working individual. In North and South, one of the collaborators,
Boucher, committed suicide, drowning in the dye of the cotton. But for Gaskell the positives
were also explored through the redemption of Thornton into a better master and through the
workers’ ability to be able to unionize. After this chapter though, the ideas of striking and unions
were rarely mentioned again by any of the characters (David 36). Mr. Higgins faired much better
in his working environment with the union than Stephen Blackpool did in Hard Times.
The strike and Margaret’s actions during the strike emphasized the themes of public and
private spheres. The personal ethics of the private sphere could solve societal woes and injustice
found in the public sphere. A women’s “influence” or ethics, like those of Margaret Hale, could
prevail and influence those she encountered in public, like Mr. Thornton. Margaret’s ethics and
ideas of workers as individual eventually trickled down to pragmatic actions taken by Mr.
Thornton with his workers. Gaskell’s novel definitely exhibited the female solution to society’s
ills; social reform relying on private ethics (Gallagher 168) Catherine Gallagher wrote in The
Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, Social Discourse and Narrative Form, that a single
standard of conduct in both spheres will guarantee the exemplary action upon which woman’s
influence rests. (172) For Gaskell this single standard of conduct was shown by Margaret Hale
when she defended the position of the workers to strike in public and at the same time protected
Mr. Thornton from harm during the strike by putting her body between the crowd and Thornton
between worker and employer (David 45). Through her self-sacrifice Margaret chastened the
crowd. At the end of Hard Times, the two spheres remained as separate as the Disraeli’s “Two
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Nations” and Dickens’ two fields. The public and private spheres merged in the middle of the
novel in the strike. In the conclusion Gaskell attempted with some contrivance to reconcile the
spheres through the marriage of Margaret and John Thornton, but her characterization and
dialogue came across as false. To a friend Gaskell wrote that she wanted them to ‘smash in a
moment’, the couple reconciling in freedom much more easily than the different classes could.
Still the smashing of Margaret’s personality into a subservient wife in the arms of Thornton did
not ring true.
In her book Fictions of the Revolution in Three Victorian Novels, Diedre David wrote,
“The industrial novel served a sociological function for it enabled people to know about things
far removed from their own experience“( 6). Both Dickens and Gaskell wrote for the middle
class audience in an attempt to explain the whirling mass of change that most of the public was
witnessing from such a distance. In an effort to explain the new relationships found in the
factories and mills between worker/master Dickens and Gaskell described as best they could,
based on their limited knowledge, what possible outcomes society could envision. Of the two
Dickens seemed less secure that there was a response or solution worthy of pursuing. Gaskell
better balanced her two themes of class conflict and the personal story of gender conflict between
Margaret Hale and John Thornton more adeptly through her use of description, dialogue, and
narration. She once wrote that in order to write a worthy piece of fiction full of strength and
vitality one must live an active and sympathetic life (Duthie 1) Elizabeth Gaskell must have lived
that life to write this novel
Works Cited
Campbell, Ian. “Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South and the Art of the Possible.” Dickens Studies
Annual Essays on Victorian Fiction Volume 8 (1980): 231-250.
Coles, Nicholas. “The Politics of Hard Times: Dickens the Novelist versus Dickens the
Reformer.” Dickens Studies Annual Essays on Victorian Fiction Volume 15 (1986):145-175.
David, Deidre. Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels, North and South, Our Mutual
Friend, Daniel Derona. New York: Columbia Press, 1981.
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Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. England: Penguin Books, 1969.
Duthie, Enid Lowry. The Themes of Elizabeth Gaskell. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1980.
Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, Social Discourse and
Narrative Form, 1837-1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. London: Penguin Books, 1995.
Ingham, Patricia. The Language of Gender and Class, Transformation in the Victorian Novel.
London: Routledge, 1996.