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Hard Times North and South:
Industry and Morality in Carlyle, Gaskell and Dickens
David S. Wilson
Martha’s Vineyard regional High School
Oak Bluffs, MA
NEH Seminar 2006
When considering historical events, the work of the novelist can be at least as important as the work of the historian. Just as our understanding of the French Revolution would not be complete without Hugo’s Le Miserable or Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, our understanding of the Industrial Revolution would be lacking if not for the novels of Gaskell, Trollope and, of course, Dickens himself. In contrast to the numbing array of statistical models and interpretations served up by historians, the so- called “Industrial novels” of these writers give history a human face.
Dickens signature work in this genre, Hard Times, stands quite apart from the rest of his work. It is the only one of his novels to directly address the impact of the industrial revolution on the labouring classes and the only one of his novels not to be set- at least in part- in the city of London. As in his other works, however, the author is chiefly interested in the struggles of the common man, be they economic or moral. His sympathy for working people was visceral; Dickens own father was sent to debtor’s prison, and as a child, the author toiled in the factory of Warren’s Blackening, a manufacturer of stove polish.
Ironically, Hard Times appeared after Dickens had become personally wealthy by such works as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. It was produced rather quickly to bolster the sales of his magazine, Household Words, appearing serially in 20 issues during 1854. Not surprisingly, it succeeded more as a commercial enterprise than a literary one. It is sometimes euphemistically referred to as a “novel of ideas,” an epithet that, in the eyes of some critics at least, is code for lacking depth and colour. (Law 7). Dickens himself found the artistic constraints of writing for serialization “crushing.” (Perdu)
In spite of all this Hard Times is a powerful, often scorching indictment of unbridled utilitarianism. In fact, Dickens seems at times to have less interest in the development of his protagonist, the hapless power loom weaver Stephen Blackpool, than with Thomas Gradgrind, the philosophy’s mouthpiece in the novel who famously states in the opening, “You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts.” So convinced is the schoolmaster of the utility of utilitarianism, that he rears his own children according to its strictures and is able “to weigh and parcel any measure of human nature” by “a rule and a pair of squares and the multiplication tables.” His children, Louisa and Tom, are each in some way the victims of their father’s delusions, the one being almost incapable of aesthetic response, the other morally deformed by unbridled self interest. It is Gradgrind’s misfortune to be an essentially decent man; when his children discover all too late the folly of a utilitarian upbringing, he will suffer all the more for having inflicted it upon them out of love.
Gradgrind is portrayed as anything but an anomaly amongst the higher classes. Josiah Bounderby, Coketown merchant and manufacturer, is a fellow acolyte of the narrow religion and a much more dangerous one given his power. He is also obsessed with the idea of self-improvement, claiming to have been raised in a ditch by day and a pigsty by night. Having “made 60,000 pounds out of sixpence, [he] always professes to wonder why the 60,000 nearest hands didn’t teach make 60,000 pounds out of sixpence.” To men like him, the factory labourers are no more than an amorphous collection of Hands, “a race who would have found more favour. . . if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands.” Without any of Gradgrind’s redeeming decency, the mill owner embodies utilitarianism in its depraved extreme: his self interest allows no concern for the needs of others, particularly the workers, who he feels want only hegemony over their masters, “turtle soup and venison” as he calls it, rather than basic sustenance.
The muddled world of Stephen Blackpool collides with the iron-sure world of Bounderby when the mill owner summons the weaver to gain intelligence on the activities of Slackbridge, the cunning labour organizer who has ostracised Blackpool for refusing to combine with his fellow workers. It is in Blackpool’s self interest to play Bounderby’s game and tell what he knows, but the same stubborn integrity that crossed him with his fellow workers prevents him from capitalizing on it with Bounderby, who in frustration, sacks him as a troublemaker. “How ‘tis, ma’am,” Blackpool laments to Louisa, “That what is best in us folk, seems to turn us into trouble ‘an misfortune ‘an mistake?”
Thus by the fifth chapter of the novel is the basic plot laid out, along with the seeds of its denouement. Something about Stephen’s plight kindles a long suppressed sense of compassion in Louisa; by the novel’s conclusion it will undermine the foundations of her utilitarian upbringing and shock her father into the beginning of an understanding of his folly. The idea that utilitarianism is a barren philosophy is first given voice by Gradgrind’s long suffering wife, who worn out from a sterile life in a loveless marriage utters this apostasy on her deathbed: “There is something—not an Ology at all—that your father has missed or forgotten, Louisa. I may never get its name out now. But your father may.” In the meantime young Thomas Gradgrind, has capitalized on events to turn a looming disaster—his debts—into an advantage by framing Blackpool for a theft he personally committed. Thomas has had all the so- called advantages of a factual education, but it has left him unable to do more than calculate his self interest. Without conscience or compassion, he sows the seeds of his own destruction.
The conclusion of the story leaves most of the major characters empty handed- some materially, some spiritually, some both. The latter circumstance falls upon young Gradgrind, who is eventually exposed as a dissolute thief. With Sissy’s help, flees abroad, where he will die poor and broken in spirit. Louisa is left disillusioned with the tenets of her upbringing, estranged from her husband, but partly to blame for entering willingly into a marriage of convenience; her father’s philosophy leaves no room for love. She has the beginnings of a better understanding of human nature, but only after disastrous experience:
. . if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat, in regard to them; I should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contented, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I have.
Yet all is not lost: Louisa is still young and shows courage by leaving Bounderby. She at least, has the hope of a better future. The same can not be said for her unfortunate father, to whom those devastating words were directed. His failure is not just as an educator (and we know his pedagogy has failed many others) but as father as well. Those he most treasured on the earth, his wife and his children, are the chief victims of his blockheadedness. Louisa’s declaration cuts all the deeper because underneath, he is an affectionate father. His life, both personal and professional, has come to ruin, and he has few years left to put the pieces back together. Still, even he is not beyond a certain kind of redemption. He vows to do everything he can to repair the damage he has done to Louisa’s soul and contemplates an alternate view of experience:
Some persons hold . . . that there is a wisdom of the Head and that there is a wisdom of the Heart. I have not supposed so; but, as I have said, I mistrust myself now. I have supposed the head to be all- sufficient. It may not be all-sufficient; how can I say it is this morning?
The last best words on utilitarianism in the novel are left to Mr. Sleary, the master of the pathetic circus troupe from which Sissy sprang. Ironically, the words come from a carnival operator who, though lacking the benefit a “factual education” possesses the wisdom of experience: “There ith a love in the world, not all the Thelf- interetht after all, but thomething very different.”
The concepts in Hard Times do not spring from a vacuum, but rather from Dickens’ own experience and the larger debate about industrialization that was raging in the author’s day. The novel, in fact, is dedicated to Thomas Carlyle, whose works include “Signs of the Times,” an article that appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1829. In it Carlyle disparages utilitarianism, or what he calls Mechanics, as a “little sect,” even as he acknowledges it as the means by which mankind has subdued nature. He goes on to condemn his contemporaries for slavishness to the philosophy, however, accusing them of having “grown mechanical in the head, and in heart as well as the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind.” (Carlyle 341) According to the author there is another equally vital force in nature he calls Dynamics, which consists of “. . . the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character . . . .”(342) After all, he opines, “The French Revolution had something higher in it than cheap bread and a Habeas-corpus act.” (343)
The two Thomas Gradgrinds and Bounderby, along with Bitzer, are the embodiment of Mechanism. Their world has no room for that which can’t be measured or quantified; in it there is no place for nursery rhymes, authentic religious experience, spontaneous affection, and ultimately, love. Only that which has value – utility- is worth human attention. Before the events of the novel unfold, the tenets of Mechanism would have seemed to serve them well, especially in regard to personal wealth (if Blitzer has but little, we know that he might become another “self made man” like Bounderby
Sleary, and later Louisa, represent Dynamism. The former’s is natural and fully formed, an example of “the freest and highest spirits of the world (who) often have been found under strange circumstances.” Louisa’s nascent Dynamism, suppressed by her utilitarian upbringing, is unleashed by the end of the novel. With it comes the prospect of real happiness.
Only Bounderby the mill owner remains unregenerate at the close of the novel:
Undue cultivation of the outward, again, though less immediately prejudicial, and even for the time productive of many palpable benefits, must, in the long run, by destroying Moral Force, which is the parent of all other Force, prove not less certainly, and perhaps still more hopelessly, pernicious.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South immediately followed Hard Times in Household Words. The author’s fifth novel, it appeared after Mary Barton (which also examined the human impact of industrialization) and Cranford, which established Gaskell’s popular and critical reputation. North and South relates one English family’s relocation from the rural South to the industrial North. The book “shocked readers with its revelations about the grim living conditions of Manchester factory workers” and “antagonized some influential critics because of its open sympathy with the workers.” (Wright).
Unlike Hard Times, which lacks a single protagonist, North and South is concerned primarily with the moral growth of Margaret Hale, daughter of an established church clergyman who serves the rural southern parish of Helstone. Owing to a crisis of faith, Reverend Hale must uproot his family and move to Milton, Darkshire, a fictional representation of the great industrial city of Manchester. There she meets John Thornton, the city’s leading manufacturer and personification of all that she loathes about her new region. Soon, however, her life becomes entangled not only with this influential family, but also with the Bessies, a family of poor labourers at the other end of the social spectrum.
Like Dickens, Gaskell exposes the social shortcomings of a society- in this case the manufacturing city of Milton-North- that operates primarily by utilitarian principles. Gaskell deftly juxtaposes John Thornton’s unabashed Mechanism with Margaret’s ingénue Dynamism. Like Bounderby, Thornton is a self made man, having risen from draper’s assistant to owner of the town’s largest mill, but he differs by not having completely divorced himself from the wellsprings of human impulse, specifically “literature or high mental cultivation.” He becomes Mr. Hale’s pupil because he is aware of his “own deficiencies, which is more than many a man at Oxford is,” according to his new master. This flies in the face of some of the “well founded notions of Milton” that hold that the best education for a tradesman is “to be caught young and acclimated to the life the mill, or office, or warehouse,” and that a university education leaves a man “unsettled for commercial pursuits.”
This, of course, brings him into contact with Margaret, whose own deficiency lies in her rejection of all that is mechanistic:
I call mine a very comprehensive taste. I like all people whose occupations have to do with the land; I like soldiers and sailors, and the three learned professions, as they call them. I’m sure you don’t want me to admire butchers and bakers, and candlestick makers. . . .
For her there is no difference between “a respectable coach builder” and “shoppy people” in general: they are tradesmen all the same. Yet if Milton North is dirty, brash and materialistic, Helstone, for all the beauty of its natural surroundings, is provincial and biased; its people are ignorant of many of the changes going on in the world beyond. Thornton boldly states, “I would rather be a man toiling, suffering- nay, falling and successless- here, than lead a dull prosperous life in the old worn grooves of what you call more aristocratic society down South.”
Thus the central conflict in the novel is between these two strong characters who represent the opposing forces of Mechanism and Dynamism, Old England and New, North and South. Their romantic conflict is a familiar one in literature; opposites attract, and combining as lovers offers the possibility of the restoring the missing portions of their nature. Part of Gaskell’s genius is to suggest that neither will find happiness among their kind, as “Each mode of life produces its own trials and its own temptations.”
Given her provincial attitudes and tendency to haughtiness, it comes as no surprise that Margaret has the longer road to travel toward a more balanced view of the world. Thornton is portrayed as merely ignorant of southern ways and a bit defensive about his home and work. Margaret, on the other hand, has “almost a detestation for all she ever heard of the North of England, the manufacturers, the people, the wild and bleak country.” It does not help that her move there is a forced one, brought about by her father’s rejection of the Anglican church.
Almost as soon as gets to Milton North, however, the evolution of her feelings begins. First and foremost she learns from her contact with the Bessie family that the workers of Darkshire, though coarse and hard up, have a disarming directness in discourse and disarming openness to strangers. She has never seen real economic hardship before, and the plight of the workers revives her Christian sense of compassion. “Oh Mama,” she cries after one meeting with the Bessies, “ how am I to dress up in my finery and go off to smart parties, after all the suffering I have seen today?” She mistrusts both the masters and the union, but seems to accept that combination is the only hope for the labourers, given the crushing utilitarianism of the factory owners.
Then there is John Thornton himself. He all but admits to being a hard man, albeit one who sincerely believes that the protection of his business is also in the best interests of the workers. He is neither a hypocrite nor a crass materialist. He lives next door to his own factory and has denied himself many comforts, including romantic entanglements in his devotion to his business. For much of the book Margaret can’t quite fathom the man; according to her own values she should hate him, but his deference toward her and her family is disarming. Her father, the educated southerner, makes no secret of his own affection for his most dedicated pupil, and the kindness Thornton shows to the family during Mrs. Hale’s slow death, even after Margaret callously rejects his marriage proposal, is impossible to ignore. By Chapter 21 she is forced to admit Thornton is “the first specimen of a manufacturer- of a person engaged in trade- that I had ever the opportunity of studying . . . He is my first olive: let me make a face while I swallow it.”
The turning point in her attitude begins not at the high point of the novel’s action, her “saving” of Thornton during the strikers assault, but when Thornton and Mr. Bell, who has “a kind of Oxonian medieval bigotry” against Milton-North, first meet. They take an instant dislike to each other and begin argue along mechanist-dynamist lines. “I wonder when you Milton men intend to live,” Bell challenges. “All your times seem to be spent gathering together the materials for life.” Thornton parries, “. . . we do not look upon life as a time for enjoyment, but as a time for action and exertion.” When Bell tries to enlist Margaret in his arguments she, quite uncharacteristically, offers a nuanced opinion: “. . . there is a difference between being the representative of a city and the representative man of its inhabitants.” Soon after, she will defend her Milton lodgings before her aunt, who disparages them as below those of her butler’s wife. “It is sometimes very pretty- in summer; you can’t judge by what it is now. I have been very happy here.”