Hard Times

Summary

Hard Times, subtitled For These Times, is Dickens's shortest and most concentrated novel, set in Coketown, a smoky northern mill town of red brick, black canals, and identical streets. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired hardware merchant and later a member of Parliament, runs a model school and his own household on a single principle: children must be taught Facts and nothing else. In the opening scene the schoolroom is asked to define a horse; Sissy Jupe, daughter of a circus clown, cannot, while the pale pupil Bitzer recites a perfect list of teeth and hooves. Gradgrind's children, Louisa and Tom, are forbidden to wonder or to enjoy fancy; when he catches them peeping at Sleary's horse-riding circus, he is appalled. Sissy's father abandons her, hoping she will have a better life, and Gradgrind takes her in. His friend Josiah Bounderby, a banker and mill-owner who boasts endlessly that he was born in a ditch and raised himself without help, wants Louisa as his wife. Urged by her father's statistics and by love for her selfish brother, who works in Bounderby's bank, Louisa marries a man thirty years older whom she does not love. In Book the Second the idle, charming politician James Harthouse arrives and sets out to seduce her, watched with spiteful pleasure by Bounderby's housekeeper Mrs. Sparsit. Stephen Blackpool, an honest power-loom weaver bound to a drunken wife whom the law will not let him divorce, refuses to join the union and is dismissed by Bounderby for speaking frankly; cast out by both sides, he leaves town. Tom robs the bank and arranges for suspicion to fall on Stephen. Louisa, nearly yielding to Harthouse, flees instead to her father and collapses at his feet, telling him that his system has left her empty. In Book the Third, Gradgrind's certainty breaks; Sissy sends Harthouse away; Rachael, the mill-hand who loves Stephen, searches for him, and he is found at the bottom of a disused mine shaft, the Old Hell Shaft, and dies after being brought up. Bounderby's mother, Mrs. Pegler, turns out to be a respectable woman who paid for his education, exposing his myth. Tom escapes with the help of Sleary's circus, though Bitzer tries to arrest him by the logic of self-interest, and he later dies abroad. Louisa never remarries, but Sissy's children love her. The novel ran weekly in Household Words from April to August 1854 and was dedicated to Thomas Carlyle.

Top Lessons

• Facts are not enough

  Gradgrind is not a villain; he loves his children and sincerely believes that reason alone will make them happy. His system produces a daughter who cannot name her own feelings and a son who robs his employer. Dickens argues that the heart and the imagination must be educated along with the mind.

• People are not numbers

  Gradgrind proposes Louisa's marriage by citing statistics about the ages of husbands and wives. Bitzer reasons that everything is a bargain. The novel shows that calculation cannot measure love, loyalty, or mercy.

• The worth of play

  Sleary's circus people are poor and unschooled, yet they are generous and loyal to one another. Sleary argues that people must be amused because they cannot always be learning or working. Dickens defends recreation and fancy as human needs, not luxuries.

• Integrity under pressure

  Stephen Blackpool refuses to join the union because of a promise he has made, and refuses to spy on his fellow workers for Bounderby. Both sides reject him. His story shows a man keeping his conscience when it costs him everything.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Hard Times is less a medical novel than a study of what an education without feeling does to the inner life, and that makes it interesting to psychiatry. Louisa's flatness, her inability to name her emotions, and her collapse in her father's study are presented as the fruit of a system, not as an illness; modern readers sometimes compare her to descriptions of emotional numbing or depression, but that is an interpretive reading. A close parallel outside fiction is John Stuart Mill's account, in his Autobiography (1873), of the mental crisis he suffered at twenty after an education in analysis and political economy, which he found relieved by poetry. Mrs. Gradgrind is a portrait of chronic invalidism in a woman who has given up claiming her own experience, and her deathbed answer about pain is one of the most quoted lines in the book. Elsewhere the novel touches on alcoholism in Stephen's wife, a bottle of poison at her bedside that Rachael removes, the smoke and dyed river of Coketown that later readers connect with industrial public health, and Stephen's fatal fall into an unfenced disused mine shaft.

• Book the First, Chapter XIII

  Rachael nurses Stephen's drunken wife through the night; Stephen watches in a half-dream as his wife reaches toward the bottle marked poison, and Rachael wakes and takes it from her.

• Book the First, Chapter V

  Description of Coketown's smoke, black canal, and river running purple with dye.

• Book the Second, Chapter IX

  The death of Mrs. Gradgrind, too vague to say whether she is in pain.

• Book the Second, Chapter XII

  Louisa's confession to her father of an empty inner life and her collapse at his feet.

• Book the Third, Chapter VI

  Stephen is drawn up from the Old Hell Shaft, badly injured, and dies after speaking of the many lives the old pits have taken.