LibraryThing revisited: Hard Times review

Thomas Gradgrind Apprehends His Children Louisa and Tom at the Circus

In Hard Times Dickens shows the disturbing effects industrialization, human mechanization, and utilitarianism had on the lives of workers and children during the Victorian era. Obviously, great advancements were made during this time but, in keeping with our idea of what the term Dickensian implies, Dickens focuses on the daily miseries and scurf of city life in the fictitious industrial dump known as Coketown. This world is very bleak; the air is polluted with smoke and smog because the fires keeping the machines going are never extinguished, the imaginations of children are crushed in the name of progress, and there is no time for pleasure or leisure. While the tone of the book can be very dark, there are also truly hilarious moments—especially the scene about the horses on the wallpaper, in which schoolchildren are told that a wallpaper covered in horses is unrealistic because horses can't live on wallpaper.

Not possible

I once took a class on Dickens and this was the best book I read for the class. I actually wrote a paper about it called "Fire and the Absence of Fancy", an analysis of the character Louisa Gradgrind, who spends a great deal of her time gazing longingly into fires (because there's a fire burning deep within her, a spark of life that her father has tried to extinguish, but still it rages on, duh). Should I ever come across this paper again, I shall post it but, for the time being, it is lost. What you need to know about Louisa is that she is the heart of this story and these lines, spoken to her father, serve as the thesis statement for the novel:

‘How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!’

I think this book contains some of the most fascinating characters Dickens ever wrote (except for Miss Havisham) and some of the most scathing economic and social commentary to be found in any of his books. Many of my fellow students in the Dickens class disagreed with me and said that Hard Times couldn't possibly be as good as Bleak House because Bleak House was a very longggg book and Hard Times is too short to be considered amongst his best work. Huh? It didn’t seem like a legitimate argument to me but they used it just the same. I once read that Dickens was paid a penny for each word he penned, which, in my opinion, is the only rational explanation for why Bleak House is as long as it is.