Hard Times

Rating:
Summary: Not Dickens' best book
Review: Hard Times feels like a book that Dickens did not polish nearly as much as the many classics associated with his name. It's the story of the unhappy lives of two children of a father who raised them to speak and appreciate only "facts." Imagination, fantasy, passion, and the like were all forbidden in their household.

Their lives are unhappy, as you'd expect. But they also lack much narrative interest. The usual twists and turns of fate that Dickens invests into his characters' lives are mostly absent. As a result the book drags on. Hard Times also lacks the humor found in other Dickens books, his pithy observations of different persona of his time. So, in reading the uninspiring narrative, you find yourself wishing for something, anything of the old Dickensian magic. Alas, it does not show up.

If you have other Dickens titles you're set on reading, read them first. You're likely to enjoy them more.

Rating:
Summary: Hardly a masterpiece, but brilliant at times
Review: "Hard Times" belongs to the second half of Dickens's writing career, in which his work becomes rather more somber and, by common critical assent, more mature and satisfying. Personally, I prefer his earlier work and his very first novel, "Pickwick Papers", is to my mind his greatest. Surprisingly, "Hard Times", despite its title and reputation, contains some brilliant flashes of Dickens humour, especially in the earlier part. The descriptions of Bounderby and Gradgrind, and the early dialogue with the circus folk, are genuinely hilarious.

This is Dickens's shortest novel, about a third of the length of each of his previous four. Themes, subplots and characters are introduced without being fully explored. The author was perhaps feeling the constraints of writing in installments for a periodical, although he was well used to doing that. This relative brevity, together with the youth of some of the central characters, make this book a good introduction to Dickens for young readers.

There are the large dollops of Victorian melodrama and the reliance on unlikely coincidences that mar much of Dickens's work. Also the usual tendency for characters to become caricatures and to have names that are a little too apt (a teacher called Mr. McChoakumchild?).

The respected critic F.R. Leavis considered "Hard Times" to be Dickens's masterpiece and "only serious work of art". This seems to me wildly wrong, but such an extreme opinion may prompt you to read the book, just so that you can form your own opinion.

I read it because I had just finished "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, which deals with the plight of Chicago factory workers, and I wanted to compare the two. Sinclair's book has greater immediacy. It takes you much closer to the suffering of the workers. In the Dickens novel, the mill workers and their plight are distanced; they are relegated to being the background to a family drama, which is what really interests the author. A third, and still greater work, that examines the same themes, is Zola's "Germinal". I recommend all three. Together, they give real insight into the social conditions that led to the proletarian political and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Rating:
Summary: Time Were Hard--And Dickens Shows How & Why
Review: It is unfortunate that HARD TIMES by Charles Dickens is not usually read outside the classroom. It is an unforgettable glimpse of an age that did not prize the worth of the individual over a collective society--sort of like today's emphasis on the same. What stamps HARD TIMES as the classic that it is is Dickens' continual focus on the rights of the individual and his championing of anti-child labor laws. In an age that routinely crushed individuals in the grinding gears of a society that was hell-bent on automating the factory system, it was only lone voices like Charles Dickens who, in his novels, cried out to stop the madness. In HARD TIMES, Dickens takes a savagely satirical poke at a then popular system of thought: utilitarianism, a philosophy which saw men and children as interchangeable cogs in a machine that demanded that all facets of life and output be reduced to facts, numbers, and quantifiable data. Thomas Gradgrind opens the novel by insisting that the students in his school be just like Officer Joe Friday from "Dragnet" fame: give me the facts, and only the facts. Those who can deliver advance. Those who cannot get routinely squashed flat. Josiah Bounderby is the villain as he represents the ultimate in a selfishness and fact-centeredness way of life. As typical of Dickens, there is a vast assortment of subplots that he manages to tie neatly together by the closing pages. What stamps HARD TIMES as relevant in this or any future age is Dickens' insistance that, regardless of technological advances, the individual will always matter. HARD TIMES says this as well as any other book.

Rating:
Summary: Worth the time
Review: I hated reading Dickens in high school, and I was never able to get past the first chapter of any of his books, including this one. Now that I'm in my mid-30's, I want to re-visit a lot of the works that I had no patience for as a teenager, so I read Hard Times. Although there are many flaws to this book, I felt proud to have finally cleared the Dickens hurdle. Dickens is excellent at creating sympathetic (and evil) characters, even though they may be slightly cliche or wooden. The fact is, Dickens is able to hook you in with his plots and create a profound concern on behalf of the reader that the good guy (or girl) wins and the bad guy suffers. A lot of the twists in this book were a little "too convenient" and implausible to make it a crowining work of literature, but nevertheless it has motivated me to move on to Dickens' larger, more daunting works. If you are having any trepidation about tackling Dickens, Hard Times is a good place to start.

Rating:
Summary: More Than Facts
Review: I initially lamented the fact that Hard Times was assigned to me in my British lit. class. I had read some of Dickens's melodramas like A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist and enjoyed them, but everything I heard about Hard Times said this was nothing like those. This was supposedly just strictly social commentary. My interpretation of that: BORING.

But then I read it.

Hard Times isn't like Dickens's other novels, but I don't think that it has any less heart than those masterpieces. In fact, Dickens endured himself much further to me with this novel as he has his characters perform Thomas Carlyle's enduring philosophy.

The novel follows the Gradgrind family who is raised adhering to FACTS and living in a society which worships the manufacturing machine. As the novel progresses, connections are made and broken, and the characters come to the realization that there is much more to reality than the material facts.

Hard Times is told so compassionately. The reader cares for these people and their tragic lives. The story is also told with biting humor that still cuts at today's society (this novel feels really modern), and the underlying philosophy is one which is so needed in our post-modern world. I would certainly recommend this novel to fans of Dickens and to fans of the truly literary novel.

Rating:
Summary: Dickens message still relevant.
Review: Considered by 19th century critics to be one of Dickens' more artistic and literary triumphs, Hard Times can be viewed in present time as a blistering polemic against the rise of industrial society and the dominate philosophy that rose in tandem with the industrial age, utilitarianism

It is well known that Dickens was a chronicler of his times, and his mode of expression, the novel. An intensely emotional individual, Dickens was known to be a power walker, starting in the afternoon, covering miles, to return home just before sunrise. It was during these extensive walks that he witnessed the utter poverty and squalor scattered throughout the streets of London. These walks brought inspiration for many of his novels, particularly, Hard Times.

In this novel, Dickens explores the applications of utilitarianism in its highly rational, and in many ways, brutal forms. The novels general theme is that a philosophy that is only concerned with happiness and survival for the majority, will attempt to quash any and all individual thought and effort. Individual ideas, emotion, imagination and creativity must be ruthlessly rejected in order for the majority of people to think alike, work alike and behave alike to attain a status quo of happiness for all. Rationality must prevail because imagination promotes individuality, which is anathema to mob concerns.

This polemic against utilitarianism is expressed clearly and persuasively in the practice of education. In the opening chapter for example, 'The One Thing Needful", the reader is introduced to this dictatorial emphasis on the rational:

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will be of any service to them." (p. 47)

Romanticism was now on the wane and utilitarianism and the rise of rationalism infiltrated every aspect of 19th century industrial life - emotion has no place in capitalism - the masses are reduced to statistics.

Dickens main point in writing Hard Times, I believe, was to illustrate the brutality of the applications of the philosophy, utilitarianism, and the destructive results it entails when humaneness, the vital aspect of our nature, is ignored completely. Dickens was reporting, and speaking against a potentially destructive sway in society away from basic humanity and the importance of the individual, towards the highly mechanical and rational 'mob' philosophy of Utilitarianism during the Industrial revolution.

In our so-called modern times, Dickens message continues to be relevant. Our societies emphasis on rationalism and the exclusion of emotion, can only lead to destruction. A balance must be found.

Rating:
Summary: A Quite Good Book
Review: A most interesting book, and not the "downer" one might expect from the title. The story begins with the issue of what might happen to children raised in a setting where the non-logical human qualities are repressed. This is blended in with the relationship dynamics of those who own the factories and those who make the factories actually produce something to sell. Further, related issues are added. These various topics are intermingled in a moving story.

Rating:
Summary: Hardly a masterpiece, but brilliant at times
Review: "Hard Times" belongs to the second half of Dickens's writing career, in which his work becomes rather more somber and, by common critical assent, more mature and satisfying. Personally, I prefer his earlier work and his very first novel, "Pickwick Papers", is to my mind his greatest. Surprisingly, "Hard Times", despite its title and reputation, contains some brilliant flashes of Dickens humour, especially in the earlier part. The descriptions of Bounderby and Gradgrind, and the early dialogue with the circus folk, are genuinely hilarious.

This is Dickens's shortest novel, about a third of the length of each of his previous four. Themes, subplots and characters are introduced without being fully explored. The author was perhaps feeling the constraints of writing in installments for a periodical, although he was well used to doing that. This relative brevity, together with the youth of some of the central characters, make this book a good introduction to Dickens for young readers.

There are the large dollops of Victorian melodrama and the reliance on unlikely coincidences that mar much of Dickens's work. Also the usual tendency for characters to become caricatures and to have names that are a little too apt (a teacher called Mr. McChoakumchild?).

The respected critic F.R. Leavis considered "Hard Times" to be Dickens's masterpiece and "only serious work of art". This seems to me wildly wrong, but such an extreme opinion may prompt you to read the book, just so that you can form your own opinion.

I read it because I had just finished "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, which deals with the plight of Chicago factory workers, and I wanted to compare the two. Sinclair's book has greater immediacy. It takes you much closer to the suffering of the workers. In the Dickens novel, the mill workers and their plight are distanced; they are relegated to being the background to a family drama, which is what really interests the author. A third, and still greater work, that examines the same themes, is Zola's "Germinal". I recommend all three. Together, they give real insight into the social conditions that led to the proletarian political and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Rating:
Summary: Outside his range.
Review: Dickens was a great rhetorician, but not a very deep social thinker. _Hard Times_ is the novel in which he tries to tell us that there are a Whole lot O' Things Wrong with Britain in the nineteenth century. You've got people living in wage slavery! You've got educators who can't raise their own children! You've got amoral, rakish aristocrats! You've got unprincipled politicians and businessmen! When Dickens is taking on each of these subjects individually in his other works, he's wonderful; when he sews up his complaints against them into one big bundle and convinces himself that it's a Social Theory, he's a tiresomely shrill satirist and all of his characters turn as flat as paper before one's very eyes.

This doesn't, of course, mean that the book isn't worth reading - after all, it's Dickens. There are some very sweet and descriptively rich passages about a traveling circus and although one finds it difficult to give a hoot about any of the characters aside from Mr. Gradgrind (who might have been developed much more richly if Dickens had cut down on the windy deploring a little and worked harder to make him seem like less of a cipher) the plot thunders along at the usual absorbingly breathless pace. But if you haven't read _David Copperfield_ or _A Tale of Two Cities_ yet, then for God's sake don't start out with this relatively second-rate effort.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Hard Times is first and foremost a burning indictment on industrialism and the total reliance on reason without consideration for emotions. It is also a great novel. I didn't get quite the same connection with the characters as in Great Expectations - I can't readily recall their names after a few months - but I know them and can remember vividly the scenes that he painted them in.

Again there are several sub plots which drive the point home and wrap the novel up in such a tight and well thought out way that only Dickens could have written this. The main character, for me, is Louisa, raised under conventional wisdom on only dry facts and reason. As such, she is completely unable to cope with real life. She is married to Bounderby, who owns the local bank while her brother, Tom, works for him. Bounderby claims to been raised in the gutter, abandoned by his parents, and to have raised himself up by his bootstraps. Each character has built for themselves a house of cards which are destined to come tumbling down revealing all the flaws, all the lies and the fundamental errors of their thinking. The only person left unscathed is the abandoned circus girl who, like Biddy in Great Expectations, reminds us that the people we overlook may just be the best ones out of the bunch.