8

2 SUMMARY AND CRITICAL

COMMENTARY

Th~ setting is Coketown, an industrial community in the north of

England, and the main plot concerns one of its leading Citizens, Mr
Thomas Gradgrind, and his family. Gradgrind is a convinced advocate
of the utilitarian philosophy of 'fact', and has brought up his children
on this principle as well as spreading it more widely through a school
that he has established. The story concerns the fates of his two eldest
children, Tom and Louisa, and, to a lesser extent, of two of the pupils
at the school. Sissy Jupe and Bitzer.
As a result of their imagination and sense of beauty being starved
throughout childhood, Tom and Louisa grow up to be bored and dis-
contented, and in different ways their lives come to disaster. Tom robs
the bank at which he works and has to flee the country; Louisa makes
an unhappy marriage with Josiah Bounder by, a prosperous local business
man, and after almost succumbing to the temptation offered by a
would-be seducer, the upper-class politician James Harthouse, she' leaves
her husband and returns home. Bitzer also illustrates the unfortunate
influence of the system of education he receives, and proves to be
thoroughly selfish and ungrateful; Sissy, on the other hand, has been
brought up in a circus and remains untouched by the influence of her
schooling, her natural goodness and instinctive wisdom enabling her to
help Louisa in her difficulties.
The sub-plot concerns a Coketown mill-worker, Stephen Blackpool,
who is unable to obtain a divorce from a drunken wife who causes him
much misery and to marry a good woman, Rachael, whom he loves.
Stephen is first ostracised by his fellow-workmen because he refuses to
join a trade union, then accused of the bank robbery of which Tom is

N. Page, Hard Times by Charles Dickens

© Norman Page 1985
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guilty. His name is eventually cleared, but only after he has met his
death by falling down a disused mine-shaft.
By the end of the novel, Mr Gradgrind, whose wife has died, whose
son is disgraced and exiled, and whose daughter's life is in ruins, has
been brought to see the error of his ways and is a much sadder but also
a much wiser man.
Each of the thirty-seven chapters of Hard Times is examined below
from two points of view: (1) the content of the chapter (i.e. a brief
summary of the main incidents and conversations that it contains and
of its contribution to the development of the action); and (2) matters
of interest in relation to interpretation and criticism, the most import-
ant of these being discussed more thoroughly in the next two chapters.
As already indicated, Hard Times appeared originally as a weekly
serial. When Dickens prepared it for volume-publication, he divided it
into three sections, to each of which he gave a title: 'Book the First:
Sowing' (sixteen chapters), 'Book the Second: Reaping' (twelve
chapters), 'Book the Third: Garnering' (nine chapters). Since this divi-
sion and these subtitles obviously had significance for Dickens, they are
preserved in modern editions; and throughout the present book all
references are given to both 'Book' and chapter. Thus, I,2 means the
second chapter of the first book.

Summary
I, 1. This very ~hort chapter sets the opening scene, 'a plain, bare,
monotonous vault of a schoolroom', and introduces a speaker as yet
unnamed. In a 'dictatorial' voice he is insisting that all that is needed in
education and in life is facts.

Commentary
By using the classroom setting, Dickens immediately launches into one
of the main themes of his novel: what kind of education is best? 'Facts',
which appears in the opening sentence, will turn out to be one of the
key-words of the novel; and the speaker's statement in the opening
paragraph that 'This is the principle on which I bring up my own
children' makes the reader wonder how this system will work out and
thus points forward to one of the major areas of plot-interest, the fate
of Louisa and Tom. In all these ways, Dickens gets his novel off to a
very brisk start - perhaps because he is mindful of the strictly limited