Hardness in ‘Hard Times’

You gathered force out of the world-tree’s hardness.
If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.

Seamus Heaney

.1.

What is hard in Hard Times? That’s a leading question. Trying saying it in the voice of Kenneth Williams. Or Frankie Howerd.

On second thoughts: don’t do that.

‘Hard Times’ as a phrase usually refers to periods of economic depression and deprivation — as with the ‘Hungry Forties’, when a slump in trade and economic downturn lead to real misery and starvation to many in the UK. But by 1854, when Dickens serialized Hard Times in Household Words, the economic situation in Britain had materially improved (the same was not true of Ireland, where successive failures of the potato harvest in 1845 and 1846 had built upon the economic depression to catastrophic effects, leading to terrible poverty and deprivation, and mass emigration. But Dickens’s novel is not set in Ireland). Which is to say, the situation in Hard Times is not one of economic deprivation. It is worth stressing this, because the wider associations of the phrase, and the bracketing of this work as an ‘industrial novel’ with books like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) — written when the Hungry Forties were still biting, and very much a novel about that economic climate — has led some to consider this to be a novel about economic hard times. That’s not right, though: Coketown is, in purely economic terms, flourishing. Those in work earn a reasonable salary. the disaffection of certain workers is shown, always, to be a function of personal and moral concerns, as Stephen Blackpool’s wife is an alcoholic, a personal rather than a social delinquency. This is why Dickens satirizes, rather than endorses, the rabble-rousing trades union man, Slackbridge (ch 20). If the workers of Coketown work, they earn, and can get on with their lives: raise families, buy houses and so on. In the very last chapter, we get a pen-portrait of Rachael, whose possible relationship with Stephen Blackpool was thwarted by the fact that Blackpool was married, and who, after Stephen’s death, selflessly nurses drunken Mrs Blackpool. She is:

A working woman … once again appearing at the ringing of the Factory bell, and passing to and fro at the set hours, among the Coketown Hands; a woman of pensive beauty, always dressed in black, but sweet-tempered and serene, and even cheerful; who, of all the people in the place, alone appeared to have compassion on a degraded, drunken wretch of her own sex, who was sometimes seen in the town secretly begging of her, and crying to her; a woman working, ever working, but content to do it, and preferring to do it as her natural lot, until she should be too old to labour any more. [Hard Times, 3:9]

‘A woman working, ever working, but content to do it’ is not a figure from economic recession, from Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl or Gissing’s later novels. The work is hard, but Dickens is never opposed to the idea of hard work. It’s also true that the work is also potentially dangerous, and in the first draft of the novel Dickens includes a horrifying account of a girl — Rachael’s younger sister — whose arm is ripped off by the mechanical loom at which she is working. But Dickens cut this passage (as perhaps too gruesome) from the first edition. Though there are intimations of physical danger in the labour upon which the novel is constructed (as when Bounderby’s bullying complacency is satirized: ‘“You have heard a lot of talk about the work in our mills, no doubt,” said Bounderby. “You have? Very good. I’ll state the fact of it to you. It’s the pleasantest work there is, and it’s the lightest work there is, and it’s the best-paid work there is. More than that, we couldn’t improve the mills themselves, unless we laid down Turkey carpets on the floors. Which we’re not a-going to do.”’ [2:2]) — although there is a sense of the work as hard and sometimes dangerous, this is not a novel about economic and social deprivation.

It’s worth noting that in Sleary’s Circus, positioned in the novel as the ‘soft’ alternative to the titular hard times — Sleary’s softened slurring pronunciation appropriate to this — the work is also hard and dangerous. Hard on the body, and fraught with physical danger: it’s why Sissy Jupe’s father gives up the work and runs away, he’s too broken-down and decrepit to manage it any more.

Dickens’s Hard Times are not economically hard, they are hard in a utilitarian sense. Facts are hard, and facts are the absolute logic of this novel: fancy, imagination, the softening emotional and affective aspects of human existence are proscribed. The novel’s celebrates opening paragraph drives this point home, with Gradgrind’s monologue, addressing the teacher and the school visitor before the class of children in his model school:

‘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 ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, — nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, — all helped the emphasis.

‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’ The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

Dickens is much more interested in this ‘hard’, crushing philosophy of life, and its saving counterpart, the life of fancy, of imagination, or play and love, than he is in economic or industrial questions. Gradgrind has a hard name, a hard face, a hard philosophy; he lives in a house called ‘Stone Lodge’, and he works like a grindstone — his name, again — upon the tender matter of his children. We are told he has five children, but the novel is only interested in two: Louisa, in a sense the heroine of the novel, and her younger brother, the sullen, resentful, unhappy Tom. The way their ‘hard’, factual, utilitarian upbringing distorts these two, and the consequences of this distortion, is overwhelmingly the story of Hard Times. In sum: Gradgrind’s best friend, the ‘bully of humility’ Bounderby, the mill owner and wealthy braggart who is always boasting of his status a self-made-man, marries Louisa, who does not love him. She is miserable. Tom as an adult works for Bounderby, whom he despises. Stephen Blackpool, who works in one of Bounderby’s mills, is unhappy with his drunken, abusive wife, and wants to divorce her so he can marry the beautiful young Rachael (I’ve never been sure if Dickens intends this latter character as Jewish, as per her name, or not). He goes to Bounderby to ask about the possibility of legal separation: — a strange move in the story, this, I have always thought, for after all, why would a humble mill-worker think that the best remedy for being unhappily married is to go to the house of the mill-owner and quiz him? But here we are (Mrs Sparsit, a distressed gentlewoman and widow, is Bounderby’s housekeeper, and her reaction here speaks to her moral orthodoxy):

‘I ha’ coom to ask yo, sir, how I am to be ridded o’ this woman.’ Stephen infused a yet deeper gravity into the mixed expression of his attentive face. Mrs. Sparsit uttered a gentle ejaculation, as having received a moral shock.

‘What do you mean?’ said Bounderby, getting up to lean his back against the chimney-piece. ‘What are you talking about? You took her for better for worse.’ [Hard Times, 1:9]

The scene is not within the usual remit of employer-worker relations, but Dickens — himself unhappily married, three years away from falling in love with Ellen Ternan, unable to divorce and feeling the trapped — is rehearsing his personal frustrations (Stephen recalls that he was married ‘Eas’r Monday nineteen year sin, long and dree. She were a young lass — pretty enow — wi’ good accounts of herseln. Well! She went bad — soon. Not along of me. Gonnows I were not a unkind husband to her.’ 19 years before 1854, when Hard Times appeared, was 1835, in which year Dickens became engaged to young, then-pretty Catherine Hogarth. One wonders how she took it, reading this account: ‘“I have heard all this before,” said Mr. Bounderby. “She took to drinking, left off working, sold the furniture, pawned the clothes, and played old Gooseberry.”’). Stephen pleads:

‘If I do her any hurt, sir, there’s a law to punish me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘If I flee from her, there’s a law to punish me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘If I marry t’oother dear lass, there’s a law to punish me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘If I was to live wi’ her an’ not marry her — saying such a thing could be, which it never could or would, an’ her so good — there’s a law to punish me, in every innocent child belonging to me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘Now, a’ God’s name,’ said Stephen Blackpool, ‘show me the law to help me!’

‘Hem! There’s a sanctity in this relation of life,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘and — and — it must be kept up.’

There’s no way out for Stephen Blackpool: hard (marital) times for him. Worse follows: young Tom Gradgrind, immoralised by his upbringing, plans to rob Bounderby. To cover himself, he persuades Stephen to wait outside the bank. Stephen does so, expecting a meeting with Tom, and when one doesn’t materialize he leaves. Later, after the bank has been robbed, suspicion falls on Blackpool, and is increased when he doesn’t present himself. In fact, having left town, and heard of the robbery, Stephen had started walking directly to Coketown to clear his name when, infelicitously, he fell down an abandoned mineshaft. He is rescued after many days, but dies of his injuries.

Meanwhile Louisa, deeply unhappy in her marriage to the noisome Bounderby, encounters the handsome young aristo James Harthouse, who flirts with her. She plans to commit adultery with him, although in the event the novel cannot follow through on this sexual possibility. Mrs Sparsit, who sees through Louisa’s planning, and follows her, spying on her assignations, informs Bounderby of his wife’s delinquency — although in the event, Louisa, rather than running off with Harthouse, has taken the train back to her father’s house where she collapses. Her marriage is over. Dickens has played this scene out before in his writing: Edith Dombey, married to the chilly, unsexual Paul Dombey, is courted by the sexier Carker, and plans to run off with him, only to repudiate him at the last minute. Victorian sexual mores, or more precisely the codes of what can and cannot be represented in a respectable novel, aimed at a family audience, overrule the erotic logic of the story in both bases.

But this is something remarkable the way Hard Times is constructed, and it’s strange that no critic talks about it. This is a novel that insists a merely factual, utilitarian logic of life is inadequate to the needs of human existence, squeezing out the imaginative, fanciful, affective, tender and human elements that make life worth living. This is presented, in the first instance, in a pedagogic setting: the, even by Dickens’s standards, ridiculously-named teacher M’Choakumchild who will throttle his children until all love, fancy and imagination is squeezed out of them. Then it is shown that this inadequate philosophy of life has permeated society more fully: family, workplace, government.

The remarkable thing is the way Hard Times, structurally, juxtaposes two things: on the one hand, lives distorted by the utilitarian ‘fact’-religion, such that imagination, fancy and love are driven out, or underground; and on the other hand unhappy marriages, where union is a merely contractual and legal status (an unbreakable status) from which love and sex is driven out, or driven underground. In the first instance the novel shows that the victims of this philosophy of life are bent out of shape into heartlessness, like Bitzer, crime, like Tom, or parental inadequacy and wilderness, like Gradgrind himself. But in the second instance the novel is articulating something simpler, and something we all recognise, although it can’t as a respectable Victorian novel, directly say this: in the case of a marriage in which there is no sex — a man married to a woman who despises him, and is interested only in drinking, a woman married to an ugly, braying hypocrite thirty years her senior (of course neither Stephen nor Louisa have children) — the deprived partner will look elsewhere for sex. A 21st century novel in which a young, lively, beautiful woman is married to a ghastly, ugly, old moneybags, whose sexual attention is unwanted or, perhaps, not present at all, meets a handsome young visitor in town who pays her attention and offers her what she needs, would present the affair as actually happening. A French novel from the 1850s might so the same. But Dickens cannot do this. My theory on Bounderby is that, though he acquires beautiful young Louisa as a trophy wife, and as the daughter of his best friend, his erotic attachment is actually to Mrs Sparsit. His kink is not female youth and pulchritude, but aristocracy, into which role he compulsively interpellates Sparsit — with, perhaps, a side-order of maternal fixation, as with the mother he rejected, Mrs Pegler (a pegler is someone who penetrates another sexually). It’s possible that Bounderby and Sparsit are lovers, although the novel cannot spell this out explicitly. Certainly Sparsit’s resentment at being ousted from Bounderby’s house by the arrival of Louisa (she has to move into a small apartment in the bank Bounderby owns in town when the new wife comes home) has an element of sexual jealousy, cathected into her envious joy in observing, spying-upon, the progression of Louisa’s affair with Harthouse. And the scene in Book 3 chapter 9 when, wounded by Sparsit’s revelation of his actual wife’s planned infidelity, Bounderby dismisses her from his service, is a de facto lover’s tiff, expertly inflected.

Nevertheless, there is a striking parallelism here. Dickens is saying: an unhappy society, without fancy, imagination and love, is like an unhappy marriage without sex. As the repressed elements in the former return, in twisted forms — heartlessness, criminality, the monstrosity of Coketown’s industrial productivity (‘a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage … machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’ [1:3]) — so the repressed element in marriage returns as adultery. The river is adulterated, Stephen and Louisa are both sexually adulterous, at least in their thoughts (though Jesus insists that committing adultery in your thoughts is the same thing as actually committing adultery). Louisa provides a phallic figure for the process of sexual repression when, in conversation with her father, she contemplates marriage, and its consummation, to Bounderby:

From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly … Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently towards the town, that he said, at length: ‘Are you consulting the chimneys of the Coketown works, Louisa?’

‘There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father!’ she answered, turning quickly.

‘Of course I know that, Louisa. I do not see the application of the remark.’ To do him justice he did not, at all. [3:1]

Dickens, surely, wasn’t thinking like a post-Freudian when he had Louisa instance the phallic chimneys of Coketown as figures both of the slumbering, monotonous oppressiveness of her actual married life, and the charged, ejaculatory sexual passion that has been repressed and neglected, and that she projects onto handsome, virile young Harthouse. Nonetheless, the novel is very much about the natural, joyous energies of life, and what happens when they are squeezed out, bottled-up, denied and repressed.

In much the same way that Eliot’s Waste Land (a piece, as Eliot himself said, of personal if rhythmical grumbling) was au fond wasted by being stuck in an unhappy marriage, so Dickens’s hard times are what he is missing in his marital relationship. Hard means difficult, but it also means, as per the chimney-like phallus, hard. In a verbal parallel that Dickens, consciously, would surely have repudiated entirely, but which Freud could understand was paratactically operative in a subconscious sense, we could rewrite the novel’s opening sentence: ‘Now, what I want is, Fucks. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Fucks. Fucks alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else’ (root, as slang for ‘have sex’, seems to postdate the novel) ‘… Stick to Fucks, sir!’

There is a core truth to such a speech, however vulgarised it is. Without sex we would not be here, without sex the species would not continue, sex is the currency of evolution, of life, and, on a personal level, it is bound-in with love, partnership, self-esteem. It has, of course, it’s ugly side. Hard Times has its cohort of respectability prudes, whose business is to police the proper boundaries of sex: Mrs Sparsit, ‘Mrs Grundy’, Bounderby and Gradgrind. But though Dickens was limited in what he could say in a novel published for the general reader in 1854, he was not in himself a prude. During this period, before he started his relationship with Nelly Ternan in 1857, he would alleviate his sexual frustration by visiting prostitutes in Broadstairs, and likely other locations on the north Kent coast, often in company with his friend Wilkie Collins. He considered regular sex a necessity for a man. And Hard Times (hard, you see) is full of indicators that his imagination was running on these lines. Consider Bounderby, a sort of human phallus:

He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man … a man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man … A man who was the Bully of humility.

Big, coarse, inflated, puffed-up, veiny, strained skin, ‘ready to start’, obnoxious, full of himself. He’s a prick. Dickens’s coinage, ‘bully of humility’, means that he overbears and is cruel to those more humble than he is himself, but bully also means pimp. Bounderby’s protégé is the near-albino Bitzer, who — unlike the humane, caring Sissy Jupe — has internalised and embodies all the heartless utilitarian fact-based logic of Gradgrind’s schooling (at the novel’s end, Bounderby ‘makes a show of Bitzer to strangers, as the rising young man, so devoted to his master’s great merits, who had won young Tom’s place’). This is how Bitzer is introduced into the novel, in class, in a sunbeam:

Whereas the girl [Sissy Jupe] was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form … His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white. [1:2]

This is by way of emphasising his pallor, his bloodlessness, but it is worth noting that whilst human, cut, do bleed red, there is another emission of which human males are capable that comes out white.

On the other side of the novel’s symbolic divide from Gradgrind’s fancy-less, factual school is Sleary’s horse-riding show.

He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled, when his ears were invaded by the sound of music. The clashing and banging band attached to the horse-riding establishment, which had there set up its rest in a wooden pavilion, was in full bray. A flag, floating from the summit of the temple, proclaimed to mankind that it was ‘Sleary’s Horse-riding’ which claimed their suffrages. Sleary himself, a stout modern statue with a money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche of early Gothic architecture, took the money. Miss Josephine Sleary, as some very long and very narrow strips of printed bill announced, was then inaugurating the entertainments with her graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act. Among the other pleasing but always strictly moral wonders which must be seen to be believed, Signor Jupe was that afternoon to ‘elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing dog Merrylegs.’ He was also to exhibit ‘his astounding feat of throwing seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid succession backhanded over his head, thus forming a fountain of solid iron in mid-air, a feat never before attempted in this or any other country, and which having elicited such rapturous plaudits from enthusiastic throngs it cannot be withdrawn.’ The same Signor Jupe was to ‘enliven the varied performances at frequent intervals with his chaste Shaksperean quips and retorts.’ Lastly, he was to wind them up by appearing in his favourite character of Mr. William Button, of Tooley Street, in ‘the highly novel and laughable hippo-comedietta of The Tailor’s Journey to Brentford.’

Signor Jupe, the father of Sissy, recites chaste Shak[e]speare, because we all know that there’s quite a lot of bawdy Shakespeare, and the spirit of Bowdler moves over the face of these waters: lucus a non lucendo, referencing chaste Shakespeare of course brings sexual Shakespeare to mind. And how chaste is the drama of ‘William Button, of Tooley Street, in his hippo-comedietta of The Tailor’s Journey to Brentford’? Dickens scholars have identified ‘Billy Button, or the Ride to Brentford’, an actual performance originally devised by Philip Astley in 1768, as being behind this (Kate Flint: ‘featuring a tailor who rode his horse backwards, this was the single most frequently performed comic piece in the nineteenth-century circus repertoire’). Dickens has added ‘Tooley Street’, a Southwark road running east from London Bridge, although this wouldn’t take anyone in the direction of Brentford. That’s not the point: the point is that tooling is common 19th-century slang for fucking, just as ‘will’ (penis) and ‘button’ (clitoris) and ‘ride’ (have sex) are all double-entendres. That’s the idiom of comic musical hall songs, of course.

The keynote of the novel is facts. Putting aside my lewd near-homophone, mentioned above, we can say that fact derives from the Latin facio, a word used both for simple doing and for sexual activity (something similar is true of English: think of Ben Jonson’s, ‘doing a filthy pleasure is, and short’)

‘Facio (‘do (it)’) is frequently substituted for indelicate verbs in Latin … In sexual senses facio was used very loosely. At Mart. 1.46.1 it expresses the active part in homosexual intercourse (‘propero, fac si facis’), whereas at Petron. 45.8 it seems to be used of the passive role.At Juv. 6.271 factum is used suggestively of a misdemeanour of a sexual kind … Later factum (of intercourse) enjoyed a literary vogue.’ [James Noel Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Duckworth 1982), 204]

Doing is hard, in the sense that it requires hardness; and it is machinic, in the sense that entails repetition over and over. We can read Dickens’s elaborate descriptions of the machinery of Coketown in these terms: the ‘buildings full of windows … where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down’ without cessation.

Harthouse’s first encounter with Louisa is also the moment when he resolves to seduce her:

Mr. Bounderby piloted the new acquaintance who so strongly contrasted with him, to the private red brick dwelling, with the black outside shutters, the green inside blinds, and the black street door up the two white steps. In the drawing-room of which mansion, there presently entered to them the most remarkable girl Mr. James Harthouse had ever seen. She was so constrained, and yet so careless; so reserved, and yet so watchful; so cold and proud, and yet so sensitively ashamed of her husband’s braggart humility — from which she shrunk as if every example of it were a cut or a blow; that it was quite a new sensation to observe her. In face she was no less remarkable than in manner. Her features were handsome; but their natural play was so locked up, that it seemed impossible to guess at their genuine expression. Utterly indifferent, perfectly self-reliant, never at a loss, and yet never at her ease, with her figure in company with them there, and her mind apparently quite alone — it was of no use ‘going in’ yet awhile to comprehend this girl, for she baffled all penetration. [2:2]

Penetration is Harthouse’s intention, of course. The latter half of the novel traces a kind of restrained Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It is clear that Louisa is susceptible to his advances, although at the last moment she runs back to her father rather than running away with him. Then follows a lengthy chapter [3:2] that is, clearly, the point of this plot-strand for Dickens. Harthouse is waiting for Louisa to come to him. Instead Sissy Jupe arrives, rebukes him for his attempted sexual impropriety, and overawes him with the sheer force of her purity and innocence.

‘Beg your pardon, sir. Young lady outside, sir, wishes to see you.’

‘Outside? Where?’

‘Outside this door, sir.’

A young woman whom he had never seen stood there. Plainly dressed, very quiet, very pretty. As he conducted her into the room and placed a chair for her, he observed, by the light of the candles, that she was even prettier than he had at first believed. Her face was innocent and youthful, and its expression remarkably pleasant. She was not afraid of him, or in any way disconcerted.

Sissy tells Harthouse two things: that he will never see Louisa again, and that he must leave town forever. In both particulars Harthouse is simply overpowered by the force of Sissy’s virgin potency.

Mr. Harthouse drew a long breath; and, if ever man found himself in the position of not knowing what to say, made the discovery beyond all question that he was so circumstanced. The child-like ingenuousness with which his visitor spoke, her modest fearlessness, her truthfulness which put all artifice aside, her entire forgetfulness of herself in her earnest quiet holding to the object with which she had come; all this, together with her reliance on his easily given promise — which in itself shamed him — presented something in which he was so inexperienced, and against which he knew any of his usual weapons would fall so powerless; that not a word could he rally to his relief.

At last he said:

‘So startling an announcement, so confidently made, and by such lips, is really disconcerting in the last degree.’

Lips is a moment almost of lubriciousness, a sensual touch that speaks to Harthouse’s focus; but the encounter is disconcerting, removing the possibility of con-certitude, of joining together (concert, from the Latin con-, together, and certo, which means to agree, but also to fight, to wrestle, to copulate). He confesses his nature to her: ‘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 … 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.’ I am as immoral as need be means, presumably: I am as immoral as is required, in this sexually restrictive and prudish society of ours, to get sex. And we might find ourselves judging him as less wicked, actually, than Laclos’ Vicomte de Valmont. What is the worst that would have followed his successful seduction of Louisa? Her marriage to Bounderby would be broken-up; but that happens anyway. Polite Coketown society would disapprove; but Louisa cares nothing for polite society in any other context. On the upside, she might get some good sex. This, of course, is not how Dickens judges the situation: for Louisa to commit adultery would be wrong because it is wrong (a judgement his own personal circumstances, three years hence, would presumably complicate). But there’s another way of seeing this. This long chapter, Harthouse submitting to the sheer purity and virginal force of the beautiful Sissy, is a kind of quasi-sexual climax to the whole Les Liaisons Dangereuses plot-strand. It is at this point in the story that we understand why Dickens has called his character Sissy — Cecilia, that is:

According to the story, despite her vow of virginity, Saint Cecilia’s parents forced her to marry a pagan nobleman named Valerian. During the wedding, Cecilia sat apart singing to God in her heart, and for that, she was later declared the saint of musicians. When the time came for her marriage to be consummated, Cecilia told Valerian that watching over her was an angel of the Lord, who would punish him if he sexually violated her but would love him if he respected her virginity. When Valerian asked to see the angel, Cecilia replied that he could see the angel if he would go to the third milestone on the Via Appia and be baptized by Pope Urban I. After following Cecilia’s advice, he saw the angel standing beside her, crowning her with a chaplet of roses and lilies.

The virgin saint. Lilies for purity, but roses are more sensual. And here’s the thing: Sissy was Victorian slang (as it still is) for a homosexual man. [Sissy men in Society. — Powdered, painted and laced. They swarm at afternoon teas. Of late, says a London writer, a certain type of man has become protuberant — a languid, weak-kneed, vain, and lazy specimen of humanity who has literally no redeeming points that can be discovered, and who yet gives himself all the airs of one to whom the universe ought to do unquestioning homage. — N* Y. Mercury, May 1893: J. Redding Ware, Passing English of the Victorian Era, a Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase (London: Routledge, 1909), 224]. Jupe is the French for skirt — a piece of skirt, as the objectifying euphemism has for a sexually available woman.

The apparent contradiction is only apparent. In fact it speaks to a deeper, subconscious connection: the virgin woman is, precisely, the sexual figure, as men fantasise about the sex-lives of nuns. This whole, extended scene is the pay-off for Dickens in a more than just narrative sense. It’s the, as the phrase goes, money-shot After all, Sissy is the only character in the entire novel to marry and have children of her own: the very end of the last chapter records the death of Bounderby (of a fit, in the street) and of Tom, and the old-maid destiny of Louisa ‘never to be ‘a wife — a mother — [never] lovingly watchful of her children’: ‘But,’ Dickens adds, ‘happy Sissy’s happy children loving her’. Sissy produces the next generation (the only other person in the novel of whom this is true is the Mr. E. W. B. Childers and his unnamed wife, from Sleary’s circus)

.2.

There’s another aspect to hardness that’s worth mentioning. As Martha Nussbaum says:

When Louisa goes to visit Stephen Blackpool halfway through Hard Times, Dickens emphasizes the fact that she had never before known anything concrete about the lives of factory workers, having learned of their existence only as abstract statistics. Readers are invited to notice that their own experience as novel-readers has been very different from hers. [Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: the Literary Imagination and Public Life (Beacon Press 1995), 9]

Dickens spells this out. As MP for Coketown, Gradgrind ought to know the people he represents, but he doesn’t. He only knows statistics. We might think of facts as hard, and indeed the novel, in its earlier sections, styles them as such; but actually facts are soft, vague, imprecise. Because he sees the world only through statistics and tables, Gradgrind does not really see the world at all. When the scales fall from his eyes, and his daughter flees her unhappy marriage to upbraid him with the failures of his upbringing, he discovers that what he considered hard fact is not so: ‘The ground on which I stand has ceased to be solid under my feet,’ he tells her. ‘The only support on which I leaned, and the strength of which it seemed, and still does seem, impossible to question, has given way in an instant. I am stunned by these discoveries.’ [3:1] All that is solid melts into air. Softness, in the sense of tenderness, love, human contact, comes to him, and to Louisa (‘she softened with the quiet’). Sissy comes to Louisa and declares her love. It is remarkable that no critic has read this scene, and this relationship, in terms of Queer theory. Dickens means to foreground a loving feminine softness in opposition to the masculine utilitarian (we might say: phallic) hardness, but the communion strikes a modern reader as pretty erotic:

‘I thought it best myself that I should be sent away,’ [said Sissy] ‘for I felt very uncertain whether you would like to find me here.’

‘Have I always hated you so much?’

‘I hope not, for I have always loved you, and have always wished that you should know it. But you changed to me a little, shortly before you left home. Not that I wondered at it. You knew so much, and I knew so little, and it was so natural in many ways, going as you were among other friends, that I had nothing to complain of, and was not at all hurt.’

Her colour rose as she said it modestly and hurriedly. Louisa understood the loving pretence, and her heart smote her.

‘May I try?’ said Sissy, emboldened to raise her hand to the neck that was insensibly drooping towards her.

Louisa, taking down the hand that would have embraced her in another moment, held it in one of hers, and answered:

‘First, Sissy, do you know what I am? I am so proud and so hardened, so confused and troubled, so resentful and unjust to every one and to myself, that everything is stormy, dark, and wicked to me. Does not that repel you?’

‘No!’

‘I am so unhappy, and all that should have made me otherwise is so laid waste, that if I had been bereft of sense to this hour, and instead of being as learned as you think me, had to begin to acquire the simplest truths, I could not want a guide to peace, contentment, honour, all the good of which I am quite devoid, more abjectly than I do. Does not that repel you?’

‘No!’

In the innocence of her brave affection, and the brimming up of her old devoted spirit, the once deserted girl shone like a beautiful light upon the darkness of the other.

Louisa raised the hand that it might clasp her neck and join its fellow there. She fell upon her knees, and clinging to this stroller’s child looked up at her almost with veneration.

‘Forgive me, pity me, help me! Have compassion on my great need, and let me lay this head of mine upon a loving heart!’

‘O lay it here!’ cried Sissy. ‘Lay it here, my dear.’

Louisa doesn’t supply her sexual needs with Harthouse, but perhaps here she gets something better.

Hard times as opposed to soft spaces. The topography of the novel works certain patterns and images. The immense chimneys of the novel’s opening are contrasted with the immense mineshaft, ‘the old Hell shaft’, into which Stephen Blackpool stumbles, hurrying back to Coketown to clear his name of suspicion in the bank robbery. These topographic opposites might tempt us to a vulgar Freudian symbolism — from the phallic chimneys spewing serpentine matter, to the hellish monstrous-feminine cavity that consumes Blackpool. He is coming home to insist that he is not guilty, but he is guilty — not of bank robbery, but of adulterous desire for Rachael, and so the ground opens up and swallows him. But they are also indicative of Dickens’s imaginative formalism. Another example: at the beginning of the novel Coketown is described as ‘a town of red brick’ but the redness is smeared over by ‘the smoke and ashes’ leaving it ‘a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage’, just as the canal is not blue but ‘black’ with pollution. At the end of the novel, Tom is exposed as the thief, and runs away; her is hidden by Sleary’s circus, literally disguised in blackface — blackamoors in black greasepaint were a feature of popular entertainment throughout the century, and indeed into the next: The BBC’s Black and White Minstrel Show was a TV fixture of my youth. Gradgrind comes to retrieve his son, and give him the money to flee the country on a steamer:

In a preposterous coat, like a beadle’s, with cuffs and flaps exaggerated to an unspeakable extent; in an immense waistcoat, knee-breeches, buckled shoes, and a mad cocked hat; with nothing fitting him, and everything of coarse material, moth-eaten and full of holes; with seams in his black face, where fear and heat had started through the greasy composition daubed all over it; anything so grimly, detestably, ridiculously shameful as the whelp in his comic livery, Mr. Gradgrind never could by any other means have believed in, weighable and measurable fact though it was. And one of his model children had come to this! [3:7]

The blackness is shame, wickedness, pollution, but it is also comic. Young Tom is not a genuinely evil person; he is shallow and selfish, and the product of an inadequate upbringing.

Hard times, to repeat myself, and soft spaces. Sleary’s circus is first located in the liminal space that is both and neither town and country, ‘the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled’. Chimneys invert into mineshafts. Nature outside Coketown is striatred and hollowed-into by Coketown’s industry. Rachael and Sissy go for a walk, late in the novel: Coketown itself dissolves into a black mist, coal is dislocated from its place underground and heaped above, and — as the women discover — Stephen Blackpool has been taken from his place aboveground and plunged below. The land deforms, collapses underfoot, items in the landscape are confusedly heaped together.

Though the green landscape was blotted here and there with heaps of coal, it was green elsewhere, and there were trees to see, and there were larks singing (though it was Sunday), and there were pleasant scents in the air, and all was over-arched by a bright blue sky. In the distance one way, Coketown showed as a black mist; in another distance hills began to rise; in a third, there was a faint change in the light of the horizon where it shone upon the far-off sea. …

They walked on across the fields and down the shady lanes, sometimes getting over a fragment of a fence so rotten that it dropped at a touch of the foot, sometimes passing near a wreck of bricks and beams overgrown with grass, marking the site of deserted works. They followed paths and tracks, however slight. Mounds where the grass was rank and high, and where brambles, dock-weed, and such-like vegetation, were confusedly heaped together, they always avoided; for dismal stories were told in that country of the old pits hidden beneath such indications.

Something similar, though less spelled-out, is true of the topography of Coketown itself. It is difficult for the reader to orient herself with respect to the elements of the place. There is a bank somewhere in the centre; a railway station; a school; large houses belonging to Bounderby and Gradgrind, themselves described as

Beyond that Coketown is not laid-out for the reader, not mapped. Rather it is described as repetitively monotonous and static (‘it contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next’) — and simultaneously as continuously in motion, serpent smoke coiling, elephant heads nodding, every windows shaking and moving (‘vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’). It is petrified, solid, unmoving, a wilderness of sameness and, simultaneously, constantly and exhaustingly in motion, a parodic circus of snaked and elephants and red-black-painted savages, endlessly circling the ring, riding their horses of instruction round and round. Which, of course, is another kind of monotony, of stasis. There are eighteen different churches in Coketown, established by eighteen different religious persuasions, and all look exactly alike, utilitarian boxes. There are no priests as characters: no bishops, no church services, no Sunday communicants. Religion is there as a cloned monotony and, in the materialist Utilitarian world of the novel, not there at all.

This novel of (in part) northern working-class life looks forward to D H Lawrence’s fiction, a connection I make because Lawrence was a writer who construed his vision via a dialectic of hardness and softness, in his case focused via gender. In a sense Hard Times is a proto-Modernist novel, in that it situates a mode of factual ‘objectivity’ against a mode of soft humanity and culture. Here’s Paul Delany, on Tony Pinkney’s D.H. Lawrence (Harvester 1990):

Pinkney’s main theme is the cunning persistence within Modernism of ‘classicism’: that is, ‘a culture that defines “reason”, “truth” or the “essentially human” as situated in a transcendental realm beyond history, beyond what it regards as the superficial distractions of local custom, class, gender, race, sexuality’. Modernism feeds on the welling up of disorderly mass culture as traditional beliefs disintegrate: yet it also contains ‘motifs of impersonality, hardness, objectivity’ which are relied on to raise art above the viscosity of ordinary life. These motifs are often associated with the male: as Wyndham Lewis put it in Tarr, ‘God was man: the woman was a lower form of life. Everything started female and so continued: a jellyfish diffuseness spread itself and gaped upon all the beds and bas-fonds of everything.’

Even if we agree with Pinkney that ‘female sexuality is always a, perhaps the, threat for classicism,’ how can this be squared with the exaltation of femininity in Lawrence? Pinkney brings out in Lawrence’s career the counterposing of squishy female generativity to male hardness: Paul Morel’s hatred of ‘femaleness as such’ in Miriam; Birkin’s maxim, ‘a dry soul is best’; the campaign against active female sexuality in Lawrence’s leadership phase. Pinkney applies Fredric Jameson’s concept of the ‘male pseudo-couple’ to Lawrence’s heroes, and he assumes that Birkin makes sodomy the climax of his relation with Ursula in order to avert (literally) face-to-face intimacy and ‘the very biological basis of our humanity’. So Birkin, even as he proclaims himself an ‘arch-organicist’, rejects the feminised marshy fecundity of The Rainbow’s English setting and launches himself and Ursula into a rootless existence of ‘pure trajectory’.

What is hard in Hard Times? This durability. This trajectory.