I'm back in the reading and blogging groove and it feels great! Immediately after finishing "The Decameron" I picked up "Hard Times" and I'm about half way through the book already. Granted it's not so long a book (280 pages) but after reading and blogging for the past year at the rate of one book per year, I'll brag about it anyway. Too bad the book isn't as upbeat as my blogging mood. But with a title like "Hard Times" what do you expect? In "Good Times" we got Jimmie JJ Walker, and in "Hard Times' we get Mr. Bounderby and Mr. Gradgrind. Mr. Bounderby (a play on the derogatory term "bounder"?) owns the local bank, is very well-to-do, and is a self-made man, having worked himself up from poverty. This last fact he never fails to remind everyone of, every chance he gets. He is not a good or kind person. Mr. Gradgrind is the local schoolmaster, who believes children should only learn facts, and that imagination and fancy can only lead to no good, and should thus be rigorously discouraged in every possible instance. Needless to say, Mr. Gradgrind's (again with the suggestive names!) students are not very happy, and his own children even less so. His daughter has the imagination browbeaten out of her, and she is betrothed to Mr. Bounderby at a young age. Her father asks her if she wants to marry Mr. Bounderby after his proposal, and she says it makes no difference. "Like, whatever" would be her words if she were alive today. And Gradgrind's son grows up to be a n'er do well. Of course. Kids today, I swear...you try to help them by berating the imagination out of them and look what happens. Goddamn punks...
There's a lot going on in "Hard Times", despite its being a much shorter book than "Bleak House". Dickens really knows how to work plots with multiple characters and multiple threads. The characters drift in and out, but you know they'll come back because Dickens knows what he's doing. As an example, Mr. Gradgrind adopts a young girl named Sissy Jupe, whose father worked in the circus but who skipped town, abandoning his daughter, because he is physically unable to perform in the circus like he used to (he also takes with him their circus dog "Merrylegs", one of the best dog names I've ever heard). Sissy is good hearted but does not do well in school, most likely because she is too fanciful and cannot abide by just the cold, hard facts, as Mr. Gradgrind would like. Anyway, as of the middle of the book, the reader hasn't heard about Sissy in the last hundred pages or so, but knowing how Dickens is so adept at juggling his characters and plot threads, I have no doubt she'll turn up again.
"Hard Times" takes place in the town of Coketown (coke is the by-product of burning coal). The England depicted in the novel is that of the industrial revolution before the advent of effective labor unions...polluted, horrible working conditions, horrible poverty, people used up and spat out as broken shells by their factory jobs. One of the themes of the book seems to be this dehumanization of the poor factory workers, and Mr. Gradgrind's vision of teaching children cold, hard facts and killing any tendencies towards imagination, dreams, and fantasy fits right in with this. We can't have those factory workers daydreaming over their machines now can we? No, of course not. Reading this book makes me ponder that it's rather amazing that society actually came through the industrial revolution, but we did, and thankfully the working conditions of the factories in the 1800s would be completely unacceptable today. Well, unless the factories are in some third world country...
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