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3 THEMES AND ISSUES

Some of Dickens's novels, such as Great Expectations, are partly or

wholly set in an earlier period; but Hard Times is very much a topical
novel- the full title of the first edition (1854), indeed, was Hard Times.
For These Times -and the issues it presents were in the air when it was
written. This chapter will explore major aspects of the most important
questions with which the novel is concerned.
The main plot of Hard Times raises the question: what kind of edu-
cation is best? ('education' in this context meaning the whole upbringing
of the child, the influences to which it is exposed and the vaues that are
inculcated, not merely what happens in school). Although we do not
see or hear much of the Gradgrind school after the opening chapters,
the initial setting in the school-room gives prominence to this theme;
and the educational theme looms large in the presentation of such
major characters as Gradgrind, Tom, Louisa, Sissy and Bitzer. The sub-
plot concerns the Coketown factories and their workers, and the main
representatives of what we may call the 'industrial' theme are Stephen
and Rachael.
With great skill, born of nearly twenty years' experience as a novelist,
Dickens links these two areas of the novel in numerous ways. Bounderby,
for instance, is a friend of Gradgrind and eventually husband of Louisa,
but is also a factory-owner and employer of Stephen, and is clearly a
ma:jor link. Tom robs the bank and tries to place the blame on Stephen;
Louisa shows her compassion for Stephen; and apart from these links
through character and event, the unified setting of Coketown helps to
bring the two themes closer together. (When Louisa talks to herfather
in 1,15, for instance, she looks out of the window and sees the factory
chimneys - a reminder that the two social worlds of the novel coexist
in close proximity.)

N. Page, Hard Times by Charles Dickens

© Norman Page 1985
 37

This chapter, then, will be mainly concerned with the way in which
Dickens expounds the 'educational' and 'industrial' themes of the
novel, and the convictions he expresses. It will also deal, more briefly,
with the minor theme of marriage and divorce which the novel touches
on.

3.1 EDUCATION: THE HEAD AND THE HEART

In the novels that preceded Hard Times, Dickens had often written-
usually critically and satirically -about schools and teachers: in
Nicholas Nickleby (1839), for instance, he had attacked the boarding-
schools run for profit by incompetent and sometimes brutal masters;
in Dombey and Son (1848), he had poked gentler fun at the arid pre-
tensions of an 'academy' for middle-class boys, with its irrelevant curri-
culum based on the dead languages; in David Copperfield (1850) he had
included an account of his hero's schooldays. In Hard Times, however,
the theme is more prominent, and more comprehensively dealt with,
than ever before; and Dickens's range extends from specific questions
such as teaching methods to be used in the classroom to fundamental
matters of educational philosophy.

3.l(a) Mr Gradgrind
According to Philip Collins, whose Dickens and Education (1963) is a
valuable study to which I am much indebted in this section, Gradgrind
is, unlike most of Dickens's heroes, 'a man of ideas -ideas which he
expresses through the school he has established'. The starting-point of
the novel, in its very first sentence, is Gradgrind's faith in 'facts' as the
sole basis of education and life; and a major strand of the novel is con-
cerned with the practical outcome of his doctrines as applied to two of
his children, Louisa and Tom. By the end of the novel, with his philo-
sophy exposed as pernicious, Gradgrind has undergone a process of re-
education and has rejected his former doctrines in favour of a more
human faith in the feelings and the imagination.
The opposing sets of ideas are often referred to in the novel as 'fact'
and 'fancy', though in III, I they are also summed up in two memorable
phrases: the 'wisdom of the Head' and tlie 'wisdom of the Heart'. The
former places sole emphasis on reason, on precise knowledge of a
scientific or factual kind, on the measurable and quantifiable, and on
self-interest as a motive for effort. This system of values, cold and