Dickens' Hard Times

September 03, 2026

This is not a book review or summary, just some scattered notes. I read this August 2026.

Some passages of the first few pages are laugh out loud funny, the way Gradgrine sees his pupils as vessels to be pumped as full of facts as possible.
I am partway through the novel, I fairly desperately want Bounderby to get his comeuppance, but doubt he will. Of course in the end he does, why did I doubt this at this point? Things looked bleak; there was nothing resembling a “hero”, there is barely a kernel of hope in the characters of Blackpool, Rachel, or Jupe.
When Mrs. Gradgrind dies, the “solemnity” of her passing is surprising, is this facetious? Whether sincere or not it is unexpected, how to fit this reverence into the moral world of the novel and the scorn it heaps upon disfavored characters. Perhaps I’ve been reading it wrong.
- I don’t understand Sparsit. At first I thought she had a benevolent interest in Louisa but now it seems quite the opposite. Nor do I understand her private enmity towards Bounderby, is it simply resentment for her being beneath this fool, socially? How are we to understand the pity she views Bounderby with? Eventually the pity seems to be malicious, but at first I didn’t necessarily see it so. After Nietzsche I am conditioned to view pity with suspicion, or at least am prepared to suspect that others suspect it, but it can’t be that that was a widespread view, at least amongst English novelists at Dickens’ time. Gradgrind does pity Jupe as well (iirc).
Gradgrind is all too easily convinced of the failings of his system by Louisa’s breakdown. His transition is not very believable.

G.K. Chesterton has an interesting little introduction to the book that my edition actually includes at the end.

“Dickens was capable of loving all men but he refused to love all opinions. The modern humanitarian can love all opinions but he cannot love all men; he seems sometimes in the ecstasy of his humanitarianism, even to hate them all” (287).
His love of men did not stop him from judging them, harshly sometimes. He was a lover and a fighter. “There was never a more didactic writer: hence there was never one more amusing” (287). What does this mean? How does being didactic necessarily imply being amusing? Chesterton gives no explanation. “He had no mean modern notion of keeping the moral doubtful. He would have regarded this as a mere piece of slovenliness, like leaving the last page illegible” (287-8). I reckon what Chesterton is saying here is that there is no ambiguity in Dickens’ moral universe; where drawing the shades of grey is a virtue in modern fiction Dickens would have none of that, and it seems Chesterton approves? I can’t really help but see this as a sign of Dickens’ immaturity.
“Dickens is always generous, he is generally kind-hearted, he is often sentimental, hne is sometimes intolerably maudilin; but you enver know when you will not come upon one of the convictions of Dickens; and when you do come upon it you do know it. It is as hard and as high as any precipice or peak of the mountaints. The highest and hardest of these peaks is Hard Times.
“Great Expectations is melancholy in a sense; but it is doubtful of everything, even of its own melancholy. The Tale of Two Cities is a great tragedy, but it is still a sentimental tragedy. It is a great drama, but it is still a melodrama. But this tale of Hard Times is in some way harsher than all these. For it is the expression of a righteous indignation which cannot condescend to humour and which cannot even condescend to pathos” (288).
Chesterton argues that basically Dickens was the only Englishman with his head politically screwed on right in the 19th century. The French Revolution did not introduce a new idea, those ideas had been around forever, it was “the practical fullfilment” of an old idea (289). For some reason (tongue in cheek?) Chesterton calls this “irritating” in various places, that the French actually did it rather than just talk about it like everyone else did.
The English were a “Romantic” people and so couldn’t be satisified with the “quality of cold and bald obviousnes about the republican formula… that the State must consist of its citizens ruling equally, however unequally they may do everything else… But the English soon began to be romantically restless about this eternal truism; they were perpetually trying to turn it into something else else, into something picaresque—progress perhaps, or anarchy. At least they turned it into the highly unsoudn system of politics which was known as the Mancehster School, adn which was express with a sort of logical flightiness, more exusable in literature, by Mr Herbert Spencer” (290). The English forgot about fraternity and equality and focused only on liberty.
Dickens “kept his head” (291), more than Ruskin or Carlyle who were “simply Tories making out a romantic case fo rthe return of Toryism. But Dickens was a real Liberal demanding the return of real Liberalism… In this book, Hard Times, he specially champions equality. In all his books he champions fraternity” (291).
Contra some opponents of his, Dickens “was not a Socialist, but an unspoilt Liberal; he was not sullen; neay rather he had remained strangely hopeful. They called him a sullen Socialist only to disguise their astonishment at finding still loose about the London streets a happy republican” (292).
“Dickens is the one living link btewseen the old kindness and the new, between the goodwill of the past and the good works of the future… He is a sort of solitary pipe down which pours to the twentieht century the original river of merry England” (292).
This is his “hardest” of works, less “abandon” and “bufoonery” than the others (292). Dickens “describes Bounderby and Gradgrind with a degre of grimness and sombre hatred very different from the half-affectionate derision which he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth century” (293).

I haven’t read much Chesterton. This little piece reminds me of Wilson’s insults on Chesterton in his essay in The Wound and the Bow.