Monday, February 21, 2005
JUST FINISHED: Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Yeah, I chose the odd one out in the Dickens catalog, not only his shortest major work, but one that wasn't particularly popular until relatively recent times.
Central to the story is the family of Thomas Gradgrind, a man who insists on "nothing but facts" in education and kills any flights of fancy in the cradle. Gradgrind is a Utilitarian, raising children in the concept that the precision of the balance sheet is good enough for the human mind, and making his two oldest children miserable in the process by practicing what he preaches.
While the theme of strangulation of imagination was what drew me in, that's not the only issue on the plate by far. They live in a forboding mill town in Northern England, where the dust and smoke hangs in the air like a funeral shroud. The man who runs things is "self-made" Josiah Bounderby, who shows a painful lack of humility when talking about his "humble" origins, and has a breathtaking lack of empathy for the people whose blood run his machines. The professional organzier trying to unionize the plant isn't much better at seeing the people in the mob, but we'll get to that in a moment.
Written at a gruelling installment-a-week pace, the story might've benefited from some leg-stretching room--the endnotes in my edition suggest that the limitation of dialogue has kept Hollywood (or Pinewood, if you prefer) from hauling this one out as often. Boz doesn't seem to care for the unions any more than he does the indifferent owners. Other contemporary writers were skeptical of outsiders inflicting themselves on what the outsider viewed as abstract situations; when you fight for The People, there's not much room for individuals, except as avatars. Dickens seems to be making an appeal for the factory owners to do the right thing of their own accord; taking recent years' corporate events in consideration, assuming that businessmen will choose doing good over doing well is a slice of optimism people can't afford.
Still, in spite of the slightly compressed nature of things, the author is passionate about the issues he's taken on, some of which still haunt us 150 years later. Of course, Dickens was an entertainer first and foremost, and even with space constraints he doesn't seem to be able to speak with anything less than full power. It's also a very brisk read, which doesn't hurt.
Stanford University's "Discovering Dickens" project is currently offering the book in its original magazine serial form. You can catch up with the story so far, then every Friday, a new installment (in PDF form from the original magazines) is posted, along with historical and literary notes. It's a nice way to read it if you can't sit still for the whole book at once.
Central to the story is the family of Thomas Gradgrind, a man who insists on "nothing but facts" in education and kills any flights of fancy in the cradle. Gradgrind is a Utilitarian, raising children in the concept that the precision of the balance sheet is good enough for the human mind, and making his two oldest children miserable in the process by practicing what he preaches.
While the theme of strangulation of imagination was what drew me in, that's not the only issue on the plate by far. They live in a forboding mill town in Northern England, where the dust and smoke hangs in the air like a funeral shroud. The man who runs things is "self-made" Josiah Bounderby, who shows a painful lack of humility when talking about his "humble" origins, and has a breathtaking lack of empathy for the people whose blood run his machines. The professional organzier trying to unionize the plant isn't much better at seeing the people in the mob, but we'll get to that in a moment.
Written at a gruelling installment-a-week pace, the story might've benefited from some leg-stretching room--the endnotes in my edition suggest that the limitation of dialogue has kept Hollywood (or Pinewood, if you prefer) from hauling this one out as often. Boz doesn't seem to care for the unions any more than he does the indifferent owners. Other contemporary writers were skeptical of outsiders inflicting themselves on what the outsider viewed as abstract situations; when you fight for The People, there's not much room for individuals, except as avatars. Dickens seems to be making an appeal for the factory owners to do the right thing of their own accord; taking recent years' corporate events in consideration, assuming that businessmen will choose doing good over doing well is a slice of optimism people can't afford.
Still, in spite of the slightly compressed nature of things, the author is passionate about the issues he's taken on, some of which still haunt us 150 years later. Of course, Dickens was an entertainer first and foremost, and even with space constraints he doesn't seem to be able to speak with anything less than full power. It's also a very brisk read, which doesn't hurt.
Stanford University's "Discovering Dickens" project is currently offering the book in its original magazine serial form. You can catch up with the story so far, then every Friday, a new installment (in PDF form from the original magazines) is posted, along with historical and literary notes. It's a nice way to read it if you can't sit still for the whole book at once.
|| Eric 11:45 PM#
