Hard Times

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts….Stick to Facts”.
What is a Fact, but the wrecked refuge of Fancy? What is the principle of Fact, but profit and inequality? Why stick to Facts, and shun fancies and sentiments?

Most of us condemn the materialism around us, leaving no space for human expressions and sentiments of love and empathy. Dickens’ Hard Times is also a didactic criticism of the system of education based on Facts and reasons that paved the way for profit-oriented capitalism and utilitarianism. He draws out a plot and characters that we can easily relate to in our own society today.

Capitalism is the new raging phenomena. Dickens exposes its harsh and demoralizing effect on humanity. He laments about the inequality and exploitation of workers. In the wave of Industrial Revolution, the factories got flooded with workers. Though, this brought prosperity to the owners, the ‘Hands’ producing comforts worked in extremely appalling conditions. While it carved out new cities, those humans-turned-robots only breathed denser smoke under the rusted chimneys, engulfed by the ‘serpents of smoke’.

He laments that the owners remained oblivious to the sufferings of the workers and the perils in factories. As we learn that when Louisa went down into Coketown, she was baffled by the ghastly scene it presented. Paradoxically, the utilitarian economists make a never ending list of calculations, trying to maximize profits, through any means possible. They can shrewdly tell ‘how many hands in the mill or how many steam power horses are needed for hundred units of production’. But, these vertigo causing calculations of National Treasury are impotent of measuring the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, or for the corrosion of virtue into vice in these oppressed souls.

This is the ruthlessly selfish side of market-spurred capitalism.

However, the owners and the bourgeois have turned a blind eye to the injustices and disharmony of the system. They zealously pursue the education system which promotes it thus, perpetuating the vicious cycle of ever-growing inequalities and reinforcing the status quo. The ‘ologies’ they study day in and out strictly focus on the statistics that leave their minds enervated of affections and sentiments.

Thomas Gradgrind is the founder of education of reason and Facts. He is described as ‘eminently practical’ and he sees things by way of practicality. Sentiments and Imagination are considered delinquency. Dickens has shown this education system to be dehumanizing and bound to collapse. It is against the grain of fanciful nature of mankind. His children are strictly raised under the same system. Gradgrind reproaches Sissy for indulging in fairytales. He proceeds in life with the formula that two by two is four. He tells his students to ‘settle everything by addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and never wonder!’

He considers things statistically and value by how much profit they can reap. Thus, he statistically makes viable the marriage of his daughter to his friend who is thirty years senior and whom she is incapable of loving. Human nature is a mixture of different sentiments and desires. The happiness of the soul is not only in the material, but in the intangible expressions of sincerity and love. However, this was obscure to Gradgrind who taught complex calculations only and converting them into money.

He formed a mind of rules and lines. But, the heart devoid of humanity! He envisaged a society, where things are ‘settled by the law of supply and demand, where wheat is pinched when it becomes dear’, where fortunes are made at the plight of weak. Thus, the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. This is what happens in the pursuit of statistics, of seeing progress in terms of only rates and percentages.

This education made Louisa rebellious while Tom became wayward. Both are extremely dissatisfied with their lives. Tom makes sense of things in a mathematical way. He indulged in gambling and squandered his life away.

However, Louisa is always in search of the one with whom she could share her fancies. While she is at her father’s place, she gazed at fire for long hours morbidly. She was forbidden to yearn for any kind of amusements. Her father makes the marriage proposal of Josiah Bounderby, whom she loathes. When she questions him if she could love Bounderby, Gradgrind draws out all the utilitarian aspects of the marriage. He never quite understands her soul desires. He is more inclined to abide by his devised system. This shows the barriers in Louisa-Gradgrind relationship. The people who had exhausted all their lives and energies cramming Facts could not learn the essences of human relationship. With his unbending utilitarian mind, he asserts the prospects of wealth, name and status, but forgets the imperative i.e. love.

Tom is portrayed as a mercenary. He is derisively named as ‘whelp’. He makes Louisa marry Bounderby so he can get his money through her not valuing the enduring love that she has for him. The feminist world will sue him or simply ram him up the wall when he says to Harthouse that a woman can be married off anywhere, regardless of her will. Her wishes can be sacrificed at the whims of man. When Louisa was no more able to embezzle money from him, he irately disowned her.

Harthouse manages to gain trust of Louisa. She finds him tender and someone who has a luscious heart of feelings. The relationship reaches a near tryst. However, she refrains from going further down the ‘moral staircase’. Here, she cries in distress to her father and blames his system. At last, Gradgrind saw ‘the pride of his heart and the triumph of his system lying, an insensible heap at his feet.’

Conversely, we are filled with sympathy and awed by Stephen and Rachel. In the midst of materialism and hypocrisy, we find these two utterly compassionate beings. Though, fortune is relentless with them. The reader is on the verge of tears at finding Stephen fallen in a mine. Yet, their lives were ornamented with true love, sincerity and sentiments. They stand in stark contrast from those whose souls are cold and impoverished of romance.

In the end, the triumph is of Fancy i.e. Sissy Jupe, who absurdly remarked that she would carpet her room with flowers. The world is not to be ruled by digits and rates. Let’s color it with beautiful emotions and fancies. Let’s wonder and learn about human nature, passions, hopes and fears, struggles, triumphs and defeats, joys and love. Let not the humanity turn into the serpents of smoke!