Hard Times in 1854, Hard Times in 2010

Philip James de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801

I am teaching Charles Dickens’ Hard Times this week and it is disconcerting to see how applicable is still is to modern life.

To be sure, one needs to be careful with comparisons. Industrial England in 1854 is not America in 2010. Dickens was writing about a world in which there were no air quality control laws preventing factories from spewing “interminable serpents of smoke [that] trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.”

There were no workman’s compensation plans or retirement plans to take care of Jupe when he can no longer perform his vaults on galloping horses. There was no Occupation Safety and Health Administration to make sure that Sleary, his boss, takes better care of his riders.

OSHA would also be all over Bounderby and the way that his factories chew up his workers. Furthermore, today we have effective unions (unlike the one in the novel) that help determine that a greater percentage of profits return to the workers in terms of pay and benefits. These same unions, along with other worker protection laws, mean that Bounderby can’t fire Stephen Blackpool just because he thinks (wrongfully) that Stephen is a troublemaker.

We have liberal divorce laws that would enable Blackpool to separate from his alcohol-addicted wife (who sells all his furniture to buy booze) and to marry the angelic Rebecca instead. (Divorce, Bounderby explains to Stephen, is only available to rich people with money.) We have accountability measurements for our teacher education programs, helping us weed out the Professor M’Choakcumchilds, and we have No Child Left Behind so that special attention is paid to the needs of a Sissy Jupe, who proves incapable of defining a horse. (The proper definition, as we learn from Bitzer, the class’s ace student, is

“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.” Thus (and much more) Bitzer.)

Incidentally, so that you can enjoy a sampling of Dickens’ satire, here’s a description of the teacher (along with Dickens’ rage at the schools of his day):

Mr M’Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honorable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M’Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within — or sometimes only maim him and distort him!

So one reason to read Hard Times is to remind ourselves why we need the social protections that we have. For all the railing we hear against socialism and big government and overregulation and safety net programs, it’s useful to remember why we installed them in the first place.

And then, there are ways in which the book is still relevant. Maybe M’Choakumchild won’t lose his job.  After all, we still have a streak of utilitarianism in our school systems as we cut art and music courses (as “frills”) in favor of practical English and math. And M’Choakumchild appears as though he would be very good at administering the incessant tests which many teachers believe are choking their students.

Unions in the country could learn something from Hard Times, which depicts leadershp as unscrupulous and insensitive and the membership as easily swayed. (And it is not only union leaders today who use demagogic language to sway the large swathes of the American public.) We can recognize, in the figure of Bounderby, some of the sense of entitlement in our very wealthy, a feeling of privilege that is fostered by large income discrepancies. (You can read what I said about Bounderby last week here and how I discussed Jane Austen’s handling of the issue here.) And while the black smoke snakes may no longer be streaking with black our red brick apartment buildings (you now have to go to China to see them darkening the skies), there are millions of tiny snakes emerging from our auto emissions pipes to change the world’s climate.

In his novel, Dickens uses the world of the circus as a counterweight to the world of exploitation and colorless utility.  He would still have plenty of material for Hard Times if he were writing today.  We should be grateful to anyone who can cry out for justice in the imaginative ways that he does so and who shows the vital need to hold on to our sense of wonder.