Better Times for Hard Times

Around some twenty-five years ago, I used to see the occasional student walking around campus carrying a copy of Hard Times. Some course at the U of Oklahoma – maybe in English, but more probably in history – required it, and I used to feel sorry for the members of this captive audience since they were, as I saw it, asked to become acquainted with my favorite author through my least favorite of his novels.

The book has its advantages for academia. It’s the shortest of the complete novels (the unfinished Edwin Drood might be a touch smaller), making it much easier to fit into a curriculum than, say, Bleak House. And it gives clear presentations of two important movements in nineteenth-century British history: utilitarianism and labor unions.

But it has its drawbacks, as well. For one thing, the language of the characters is unusually difficult to read, even for Dickens. Either they’re trying to speak philosophically, or they’re trying to outdo one another in piling up politenesses at the beginning of every simple sentence (I hope I do not show too much presumption when I say to one of your upbringing that, and so on), or they’re speaking in a mid-England dialect. Young people reading a novel look to quotation marks for relief; they won’t be happy when that punctuation introduces language actually more complex than that of the narration.

The problems with the language make it difficult for the average young reader of today. But not for me. The feature that bothers me most is that Hard Times is just so dreary! While others keep an eye out for quotation marks, I journey through the sad, bitter parts of a Dickens novel in anticipation of the happy home (Aunt Betsey’s, for instance) or the lovable clown (Captain Cuttle or Dick Swiveller). An element such as these serves as a pole star, centering the story as it whirls around in seeming chaos and providing the moral compass for the reader trying to find the way to rest and resolution. Hard Times has Sissy Jupe, but we hardly get to know her as we do Oliver or David or Pip or Nell in other novels. Sissy has a happy ending, but the narration only reports it rather than portraying it, and we don’t learn any of the important details. Dickens was just too focused in Hard Times, as perhaps the short form allowed him to be, on the villains and the conflicts and the social dysfunctions to give the reader a periodic haven of rest.

I will say, though, that, at least in the chapters before Stephen Blackpool shows up, I read the novel this time with a new enjoyment as I imagined the mind-above-heart father and the ludicrously utilitarian schoolmaster being played by Eric Idle and Graham Chapman. The first fifty pages or so, read in this way, struck me as darkly comic, and I actually laughed several times. I would declare these passages deliciously biting satire, except that the introduction in my Oxford edition assures me that many schools at the time were run in this very way and that Dickens is here doing more recounting than exaggerating.

I still feel sorry for any student who is required to read Hard Times, but at least I’ve found a strategy for myself.