Charles Dickens was born on
February 7, 1812,
and spent the first nine years of his life in Kent, a marshy region
by the sea in the southeast of England. Dickens’s father, John, was a
kind and likable man, but he was incompetent with money and piled
up tremendous debts throughout his life. When Dickens was nine,
his family moved to London, and later, when he was twelve, his father
was arrested and taken to debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother moved
his seven brothers and sisters into prison with their father but
arranged for Charles to live alone outside the prison, working with
other children at a nightmarish job in a blacking warehouse, pasting
labels on bottles. The three months he spent apart from his family
were highly traumatic for Dickens, and his job was miserable—he
considered himself too good for it, earning the contempt of the
other children.
After his father was released from prison, Dickens returned
to school. He tried his hand professionally as a law clerk and then
a court reporter before becoming a novelist. His first novel, The
Pickwick Papers, became a huge popular success when Dickens
was only twenty-five; he was a literary celebrity throughout England
for the remainder of his life. At about this time, he fell in love
with Mary Beadnell, the daughter of a banker. In spite of his ambition
and literary success, Dickens was considered her social inferior
in terms of wealth and family background, and Mary’s father prohibited
the marriage. Several years later, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth. Although
they had ten children, Dickens was never completely happy in this
marriage, and he and Catherine eventually separated.
Though the young blacking factory employee had considered himself
too good for his job, the older novelist retained a deep interest
in and concern for the plight of the poor, particularly poor children.
The Victorian England in which Dickens lived was fraught with massive
economic turmoil, as the Industrial Revolution sent shockwaves through
the established order. The disparity between the rich and poor,
or the middle and working classes, grew even greater as factory
owners exploited their employees in order to increase their own
profits. Workers, referred to as “the Hands” in Hard Times, were
forced to work long hours for low pay in cramped, sooty, loud, and
dangerous factories. Because they lacked education and job skills,
these workers had few options for improving their terrible living
and working conditions. With the empathy he gained through his own
experience of poverty, Dickens became involved with a number of
organizations that worked to alleviate the horrible living conditions
of the London poor. For instance, he was a speaker for the Metropolitan
Sanitary Organization, and, with his wealthy friend Angela Burdett-Coutts,
he organized projects to clear up the slums and build clean, safe,
cheap housing for the poor.
Though he was far too great a novelist to become a propagandist, Dickens
several times used his art as a lens to focus attention on the plight
of the poor and to attempt to awaken the conscience of the reader. Hard
Times is just such a novel: set amid the industrial smokestacks
and factories of Coketown, England, the novel uses its characters
and stories to expose the massive gulf between the nation’s rich
and poor and to criticize what Dickens perceived as the unfeeling
self-interest of the middle and upper classes. Indeed, Hard Times suggests
that nineteenth-century England itself is turning into a factory
machine: the middle class is concerned only with making a profit
in the most efficient and practical way possible. Hard Times is not
a delicate book: Dickens hammers home his point with vicious, often
hilarious satire and sentimental melodrama. It is also not a difficult
book: Dickens wanted all his readers to catch his point exactly, and
the moral theme of the novel is very explicitly articulated time and
again. There are no hidden meanings in Hard Times, and
the book is an interesting case of a great writer subordinating
his art to a moral and social purpose. Even if it is not Dickens’s
most popular novel, it is still an important expression of the values
he thought were fundamental to human existence.
