Hard Times

There is in Dickens.

The whole of Hard Times is the expression of just such a realization.

It is not true to say that Dickens was a socialist, but it is not absurd to say so, and it would be simply absurd to say it of any of the great individualist novelists of the Victorian time.

Dickens saw far enough ahead to know that the time was coming when the people would be imploring the state to save them from mere freedom as from some frightful foreign oppressor.

He belongs to Queen Victoria as much as Addison belongs to Queen Anne.

And it is not only Queen Anne who is dead, but Dickens in a dark prophetic kind of way belongs to the developments.

He belongs to the times since his death when hard times grew harder and when Veneering became not only a member of parliament but a cabinet minister.

The times when the very soul and spirit of Fledgeby carried war into Africa.

And that real ascent also applies to all knowledge.

It's like, uh, the great example at the beginning of Charles Dickens' Hard Times when the Dr. Gride- Gradgrind is quizzing the students, and one of the students stands up and he wants to know, "What is the definition of a horse?" And, um, Bitzer, I think, is the name of the student, gives this scientific definition, a quadruped with so many incisors, da, da, da, da, da.

And then he asks little Sissy Jupe, who was the son of a, of a horse trainer, and she didn't know anything about the definition of the horse, but she's ridden horses her whole life and trained them, and she knows a horse much better than this Bitzer.

And I think that, that, that is a great example of kind of the dilemma we're in now, and that's the fault of rationalism, that too much of our knowledge is rational.

but not all will be won over eighteen fifty four london the british economy is now the largest in the world thanks to its enormous industries of cotton shipbuilding steel and coal vast cities have chewed up the countryside of the midlands and northern england merchants and the newly rich capitalist class have triumphed But many are furious.

Charles Dickens, one of Victorian England's most passionate critics of unrestrained capitalism, publishes a novel, Hard Times.

Set in the fictional town of Coketown, a version of Manchester, it takes aim at heartless capitalists like Mr Gradgrind, who abuse their workers, exploit young children in mines and chimneys, and use their relentless capitalist logic to blind them to their desecration of nature and human life.

Here is Dickens' writing on Coke Town.

The consumerist change was, of course, to be expected by some and welcomed by many.

Mr. Gradgrind of Dickens' Hard Times, a strict, fanatically disciplined modern man, mercilessly attempted to eradicate human weakness, is a despicable figure and as such perfectly illustrates a negative perception of a classical capitalist by the humanist critics of a modern society.

Mr. Gradgrind is deaf to temptations, unresponsive to warm emotions and simple pleasures, motivated purely by new rationality and by nothing else.

His callousness seems almost inhuman.