Language

"So strange to turn from the chimneys to the birds. So strange to have the road-dust on his feet instead of the coal-grit. So strange to have lived to his time of life, and yet to be beginning like a boy this summer morning" (162).

Dickens uses the repetition of the phrase "so strange" to show that Stephen has hardly experienced anything working as a Hand. Coketown is such a dismal place and now that Stephen is leaving he is able to appreciate the finer things in life. This pleasantness is bizarre to him because he has never had the opportunity to enjoy himself working in the factory.

Megan Bogolia


"He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away" (10).

Dickens uses a perfectly crafted metaphor here to describe how the school system of Coketown works. The teachers stimulate the minds of young children (just as Luigi Galvani stimulated animals with electric currents) with facts, facts, facts in an effort to eradicate any sort of imagination. The imaginations of children are described as "tender" because the teacher easily stamp them out with their strict regiment of facts and figures.

Megan Bogolia

The Great Times

Louisa, unhappy with her marriage, meets James, a handsome young man with a carefree attitude.

Daisy, also dissatisfied with her husband's emotional absence, meets Jay (again), now a rich bachelor with a sweet ride. Both women are faced with a loveless marriage, meet a man who might make it all better, but decide against pursuance. 

Louisa is emotionally stunted by the ascetic upbringing of Facts of her upper class, while Daisy is emotionally stunted by the social norms and rampant alcoholism of hers. Both have husbands—also emotionally stunted—who are dedicated to their jobs and put their wives low on their list of priorities. Both shut down in times of emotional distress; Daisy cannot deal with Jay and Tom fighting over her, and Louisa cannot deal with James's advances. Both married for social mobility rather than affection, and when given a relationship that might actually have merit, they have no idea what to do. Both end up staying with what they're used to rather than going after love: Louisa to her father and Daisy with her husband. 

Likewise, James and Jay both have delusions of love but are actually drawn to these women for other reasons. James has always been charismatic, able to walk circles around any social situation. When he meets Louisa, so emotionally stunted as to be immune to his charisma, she becomes a challenge for him to conquer. Jay, on the other hand, was rejected by Daisy because of his social class. Thus, she becomes a challenge for him to become a rich man. James and Jay are attracted to the idea of these women, but not to the women themselves. They are in pursuit not of love but of an affirmation for themselves; Louisa and Daisy are merely placeholders. 

Paul Salamanca 

The Wisdom of Using Your Head Alongside Your Heart: Louisa Gradgrind-Bounderby v. Elizabeth Bennet

Pride and Prejudice was written by Jane Austin around 40 years before Dickens published Hard Times, but both books share a common thread; their heroine faces the frightening prospect of a loveless marriage.  While Elizabeth Bennet has been raised in an emotionally expressive household with an openly loving father, Louisa grew up in a world devoid of emotion dominated by a fact-driven patriarch.

            These girls, despite being separated by forty years, have very similar stories up until the pivotal moment in both of their lives, their proposals.  Both are young women who come from families of means who are between sixteen and twenty when they are proposed to. Their prospective husbands are wealthy men themselves, albeit a bit older than their two potential brides and they both consult their fathers about their decisions.  This is where the similarities end.  Elizabeth Bennet, led by both her Head and her Heart, rejected Mr. Collins’ proposal.  It would have made sense for her to marry Mr. Collins as he was a man of means, but as she did not love him she would not, much to the chagrin of her mother and the delight of her father, eliciting his famous line: “Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do”. Louisa Gradgrind, on the other hand, is led strictly by her Head.  She knows from the start that she does not love Mr. Bounderby, but because it makes sense for her to marry him because he too is a man of means, she does, and her father is delighted by this show of good sense. 

 This show of good sense ends up being both Louisa's downfall and the beginning of the end of her father's prized system.  Elizabeth's decision to let down her mother leads her to a happy, love filled marriage that is a financially lucrative one as well.  The saddest part of Hard Times, at least to me, is that Louisa could have had just as happy and fulfilling a life as Elizabeth did had she not been missing one crucial thing: "wisdom of the Heart".

Laura Bingham

 

 

Language of Dickens

 

"All the journey, immovable in the air though never left behind; plain to the dark eyes of her mind, as the electric wires which ruled a colossal strip of music-paper out of the evening sky, were plain to the dark eyes of her body”

p.203

Dickens flips the coin on the description of Ms. Sparsit demonizing her eyes just to dispel their darkness compared to her body -- perfectly driving home her devilish aurora.

Nicholas Gaudio

 

“And I so young.  In this condition, father—for I show you now, without fear or favour, the ordinary deadened state of my mind as I know it—you proposed my husband to me.  I took him.  I never made a pretence to him or you that I loved him.  I knew, and, father, you knew, and he knew, that I never did.  I was not wholly indifferent, for I had a hope of being pleasant and useful to Tom.  I made that wild escape into something visionary, and have slowly found out how wild it was.  But Tom had been the subject of all the little tenderness of my life; perhaps he became so because I knew so well how to pity him.  It matters little now, except as it may dispose you to think more leniently of his errors.”

p. 210

The emotion shown by Louisa in her passionate outcry to her oblivious father was brought to life through Dickens’ choice to repeat “I” to almost an obnoxious amount, showing that Louisa is expressing what she thinks, and not introverting her feeling so even her father, or husband, know how she truly feel about her marriage.

Nicholas Gaudio

 

“You have been so careful of me that I never had a child's heart.  You have trained me so well that I never dreamed a child's dream. You have dealt so wisely with me, Father, from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child's belief or a child's fear.”  Mr. Gradgrind was quite moved by his success, and by this testimony to it. " My dear Louisa," said he, you abundantly repay my care. Kiss me, my dear girl.”

Pg. 101

Dickens gives a clear example of how Mr. Gradgrind’s quest for purely factual living has blinded him to the reality of his actions.  Here his daughter, whom he does love, is telling him that her upbringing has deprived her of the chance to experience the happiness of childhood and he sees it as a success on his part. He rejoices as he views her lack of childish whimsy as repayment for the time and effort he put into her upbringing.

Laura Bingham

 

“Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.”

David Copperfield, Chapter XLII

When reading this statement, made by an adult David Copperfield towards the end of the book, one cannot help but feel that this man is  truly earnest, or has at least tried to be truly earnest, in everything that he does throughout his life.  Dickens filled Daid Copperfield with observations on how people should live their lives, and here we can see that he was a proponent of being devoted to your task and to try in everything that you do.

Laura Bingham

 

“It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen’s case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own.”

Pg. 66

Dickens paints a not-so-rosy picture of Stephen’s life by manipulating the common expression “Every life has its roses and thorns” to illustrate the inordinate amount of hardship he has faced in his lifetime.

Laura Bingham

Pg. 222

“Cursing these quick retorts of the young gentleman to whom he was so true a friend, Mr. Harthouse disembarrassed himself of that interview with the smallest conceivable amount of ceremony, and debated for the hundredth time what all this could mean?  He made only one thing clear.  It was, that whether she was in town or out of town, whether he had been premature with her who was so hard to comprehend, or she had lost courage, or they were discovered, or some mischance or mistake, at present incomprehensible, had occurred, he must remain to confront his fortune, whatever it was.  The hotel where he was known to live when condemned to that region of blackness, was the stake to which he was tied.  As to all the rest—What will be, will be.

Harthouse describes himself as ‘so true a friend,’ to young Thomas Gradgrind, which is not a true statement at all. Harthouse manipulates Thomas, telling him to meet at the train station so that Louisa would be alone and he could attempt to seduce her. This highlights Harthouse’s narcissism; he doesn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to please him. This is shown later in the passage, when he ruminates on Louisa blowing him off. It doesn’t even cross his mind that she isn’t interested. His explanations are only that she chickened out, they’d been found out, or that she just forgot.”

Paul Salamanca

“‘Now, you see, Tom,’ said Mr. Harthouse in conclusion, himself tossing over a rose or two, as if it wanted to become a part of the mainland; ‘every man is selfish in everything he does, and I am exactly like the rest of my fellow-creatures. I am desperately intent; the languor of his desperation"

One of James Harthouse’s most prominent characteristics is his selfish nature. He admits to Tom in this passage that, “every man is selfish in everything he does, and I am exactly like the rest of my fellow-creatures”. Harthouse’s interest in Louisa is not based off of  true feelings, he is only interested in himself and this challenge of having a married woman fall for him. In this passage it almost seems as if Harthouse does have Louisa’s best interests at heart because he is manipulating Tom to be kinder to Louisa. Harthouse knows that Tom is the only person Louisa cares for and it would make her unbelievably happy if Tom treated her with more respect and care. However, Harthouse’s motivation is not to make Louisa happy, it is to make her enamored with him. His actions are for his own self interest: “So much the less is the whelp the only creature that she cares for”. The relationship between Louisa and James Harthouse is doomed to spiral down Mrs. Sparsit’s staircase from the beginning because James and Louisa do not actually care for each other. Louisa cares only for her brother Tom, and Harthouse cares only for himself.

Megan Bogolia

pg. 225-226

He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been - in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of Heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away – by the fervor of this reproach.  “I am not a moral sort of fellow,” he said, “and I never make any pretensions to the character of a moral sort of fellow.  I am as immoral as need be.  At the same time, in bringing any distress upon the lady who is the subject of the present conversation, or in unfortunately compromising her in any way, or in committing myself by any expression of sentiments towards her… I beg to be allowed to assure you that I have had no particularly evil intentions, but have glided on from one step to another with a smoothness so perfectly diabolical, that I had not the slightest idea the catalogue was half so long until I began to turn it over…

James Harthouse lives his life as he wishes it to be, not as society dictates.  He can afford to, and as such he views politics as a pastime and seducing married women a sport.  Dickens conveys this message by expressing that Sissy’s plea for Harthouse to leave Coketown, and Louisa, behind “touched the cavity where his heart should have been”, not his heart.  Harthouse is so accomplished at leaving his own emotions out of his affairs that it seems he has forgotten that other people still can, and do, feel emotion. He is not a malicious person, merely one who is bored and has money, power, and nothing to do. He admits that he did not release the extent to which Louisa had buried her emotions, and how he sees that bringing them to the surface caused her distress. While Harthouse “glided” down Ms. Sparsit’s staircase unscathed, Louisa tumbled to the bottom and landed in “a senseless heap”.  It was not his intent to cause Louisa pain, but at the same time the only reason he feels any remorse and reflects on his actions is because of his shock at Sissy calling him out.

Laura Bingham