Assignment- Hard Times

Q. Critically comment on: Sissy Jupe The reader is introduced to Sissy Jupe in the second chapter itself under circumstances calculated to win the readers sympathy- a stifling classroom with tyrannical teachers. Like all of Dickens vulnerable child protagonists, be it Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, Sissy is caught in a system she can neither accept nor comprehend. Hard Times explores, among other things, the theme of a utilitarian and fact based education which was in vogue in nineteenth century England and its effect on young minds. In the first few chapters, we see Thomas Gradgrind and the very aptly named M. Choakumchild ramming down their much beloved facts down the bewildered and overwhelmed childrens throats. There is absolutely no room for fancy, imagination or humanism in their method of education. As Mr Gradgrind puts it, Stick to facts, sir! He picks out Sissy from the class to define a horse. Sissy, as we come to know, belongs to a circus and has therefore spent a considerable amount of time around horses but her timidity renders her silent. Then, he asks another student, the very annoying Bitzer, to stand up and explain what a horse is. Bitzer promptly spews forth a definition loaded with scientific jargon like graminivorous quadruped and containing an enumeration of the various type and number of teeth a horse has. As the explanation is stripped of either cultural or personal connotation, to use critic Richard Fabrizios words, it will hardly make intelligible to a person the idea of a horse. This kind of machine like rattling of facts is exactly what Sissy is incapable of. She is a person portrayed as fanciful and humane. Her kind of wisdom is instinctual and practical, not the scientific and mechanical kind embraced and encouraged by the utilitarian system of education. Sissy, while dealing with statistics and arithmetic, cannot expel the human element, as is evident from her Q n A session with M. Choakumchild where she is asked to calculate the percentage of people burnt or drowned in a hypothetical sea voyage in relation to the total number of passengers. Sissy, in her typical fashion, replies that the percentage could possibly not matter to the relations and friends of the people who were killed. Sissy comes across as an

individualist, never regarding people as a mass or an arithmetic unit. She is compassionate and kind, able to sympathise even with the hypothetical bereaved family members who lose their loved ones in a sea voyage. Critic F.R. Leavis says, Sissys incapacity to acquire this kind of fact or formula, her ineptness for education, is manifested to us, on the other hand, as part and parcel of her sovereign and indefensible humanity; it is the virtue that makes it impossible for her to understand, or acquiesce in, an ethos for which she is girl number twenty, or to think of any other human being as a unit for arithmetic. Sissy, aside from the circus, is also the only person in the novel who seems capable of forming healthy, functional and loving relationship. Her relationship with her father is a direct antithesis of Louisa and Mr Gradgrinds relationship. Theirs is a bond of love, a concept quite foreign to both the Gradgrinds. She takes care of him, reads books to him, tends to his injuries etc. He, in return, shows his affection by relying a great deal on her and lovingly calling her Sissy, short for Cecilia, a gesture duly scorned by Thomas Gradgrind. When she moves to the Gradgrind house, she continues to be her same, loving, humane, emotional self. She tries to comfort and soothe Louisa in her gentle manner and is accepted even by the fluttery, insubstantial Mrs Grandgrind. By the end of the book, she is a true sister to Jane, the youngest of the Gradgrind family who attributes her beaming face to Sissy. Even Mr Gradgrind has to acknowledge that there was something in this girl which could hardly be set forth in a tabular form. Sissy, therefore, stands as the Romantic misfit in the Gradgrind utilitarian household and, as Terry Eagleton says, elevates impulse and intuition over cold-blooded analysis, and fantasy and imagination over reality.

Coketown Coketown is an allegorical place through which Dickens presents his view of nineteenth century Industrial England. Based on the industrial town of Manchester known for its cotton mills, Coketown is described in the novel as a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It is a place that is black with smock and ashes and is characterised by a certain sameness that pervades all of its aspects, even its inhabitants. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Britain witnessed the phenomenon of the Industrial town, a place devoted to manufacture by the way of enormous factories, and driven by a voracious profit motive of the capitalists who owned the factories. The ferocious ambition of the capitalists led to exploitation on an unprecedented scale. The land and resources were plundered, and the brunt of the exploitation fell on the lower strata of society, who were forced to abandon the countryside and to huddle in the city slums because the factories offered the only means of subsistence for them. It is precisely this kind of a society that Dickens criticises in his novel. There is a sense of suffocation in the description of the town. It is as if the smoke, soot and ashes have smothered all life out of its residents, leaving behind dazed and weary robots. It is a very grim comment not only on Industrialisation but also on the Utilitarian method of living that was the popular philosophy propounded by Jeremy Bentham. This philosophy, according to Dickens, is characterized by unabashed materialism, selfishness, and pure rationality. It is a biting satire of the kind of philosophy which laid stress on cold logic, statistics and facts and dismissed imagination and emotions. But, as Terry Eagleton says, there was a good deal more than soulless number-crunching to the Utilitarians, who won a number of vital reforms from the Victorian system. No project of social reform can dispense with hard data and hence the satire comes across as misguided and excessive. This point of view exaggerates the negative effects of Industrialisation and Utilitarianism, as is evident by the surrealist images and caricaturing of characters, and strips it of a claim to any positive effect. This is quite far from the truth and this is why the novel falls flat as an Industrial novel. Again in the words of Terry Eagleton, The less creditable aspect of Dickens Romantic humanism is unwittingly exposed by Hard Times itself, a novel which

recognises what is at stake is a whole industrial-capitalist system, yet which can find little to oppose it but the anarchic spontaneity of a circus. Coketown, therefore, far from representing accurately the Industrial town of Victorian society, comes across as a mass of surreal, exaggerated images with some characteristics of an Industrial town thrown in. To quote Eagleton, His (Dickens) only industrial novel, Hard Times, exposes him as pretty ignorant of industrialism; we never even get to know what is produced in Bounderbys factories, and the city of Coketown is portrayed in vaguely impressionistic terms, almost as though he was seeing it from a train.