Hard Times

Hard Times by Charles Dickens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Louisa Gradgrind's hard-nosed education, driven by her factory owner father's ideals, fails her and those around her in one of Dicken's shortest works.

Louisa Gradgrind was brought up in the industrial grime of Coketown, trained in nothing but facts. To Mr. Gradgrind and his friends, "wonder" is a dirty word. Alienated from everyone around her, Louisa's education takes a spiritual toll, leaving her world-weary and nihilistic.

Louisa makes a terrible marriage to a man 30 years her senior; she then finds herself the intended prey of a bored aristocrat and the focus of a malicious widow's spying. Her worthless brother, Thomas "The Whelp" Gradgrind, sponges off of her, taking advantage of her love for him.

The innocent around the malformed Gradgrinds suffer, too - innocents like "Hard Times" himself Stephen Blackpool, an honest factory worker: "It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen's case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else's thorns in addition to his own."

It may be hard times all around, but Dickens' comic touches and tear-jerking moments make this a virtuoso performance by the master of character and observation. Good may not entirely win out, but bad certainly gets its comeuppance. It's especially gratifying to see the fruit reaped by Mrs. Sparsit's nosiness and Mr. Bounderby's constant boasting. The story isn't as rewarding or as exciting as Great Expectations or A Christmas Carol, but fans of Dickens should definitely read it. (I wouldn't recommend it as a starting point for his works, though.)

Most Dickens characters easily lend themselves to being nicknamed, they are so distinct and often outrageous, so here's my list:
Thomas "The Whelp" Gradgrind - "It was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom."
Josiah "Blowhard" Bounderby - A self-made man with "a moral infection of clap-trap in him": he's the original humblebragger as he boasts about his beginnings in a gutter
Mrs. Sparsit the Sneak - A dependent widow, the proud possessor of a Roman nose that she likes to stick in everyone else's business
Stephen "Hard Luck" Blackpool - Perpetually down on his luck, but honest and good-hearted
Sissy "Saintly" Jupe - A young woman the Gradgrinds take in after she is abandoned by her father, who is a circus performer
James "Superfluous Man" Harthouse - a Byron wannabe who tries to gain the married Louisa's affections

Dickens uses the lives of these characters to illustrate his own ideas about hot-button issues of his day: education, laissez-faire capitalism (there were almost no protections for workers, who were often children), divorce (so expensive it was only achievable for upper-classes, and almost impossible for women to gain), the rise of labor unions (considered criminal organizations until 1867), rapid industrialization, industrial pollution, and the cold-blooded political philosophy of Utilitarianism. Anyone who dismisses the Victorian era in Britain as uninteresting and prudish only has to read through that list to realize that their problems are our problems.

You can download a digital copy of Hard Times for free at Project Gutenberg, along with the rest of Dickens' works. A great next choice for those looking for another perspective on the mill towns of the north of England (with much more romance), try Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (free here). For more background on the man and his writings, try Claire Tomalin's excellent biography, Charles Dickens: A Life.

Quotable:
“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!” - 1

"He had not much hair. One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness." - 56

Villette

Villette by Charlotte Brontë
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Englishwoman Lucy Snow strikes out for France and becomes a teacher at a boarding school; but her lonely life is soon interrupted by friendships with a handsome doctor and a mercurial professor.

It took me ages to get through Villette, and even as I rounded the final turn I worried that Charlotte Brontë was planning on breaking my heart. Lucy Snow reminds me of the Little Matchgirl, always looking in at the warmth of other lives with barely anything to keep herself going. It's a compelling character study, not only of Lucy but of the people around her.

One character tells Lucy, cruelly and with mixed accuracy: "I suppose you are nobody's daughter, since you took care of little children when you first came to Villette: you have no relations; you can't call yourself young at twenty-three; you have no attractive accomplishments - no beauty. As to admirers, you hardly know what they are; you can't even talk on the subject [...] I believe you never were in love, and never will be: you don't know the feeling, and so much the better, for though you might have your own heart broken, no living heart will you ever break."

Lucy Snow's life is difficult and lonely, but she is a coolly self-possessed young woman and doesn't give in to self-pity. In an attempt to gain a better life and secure her independence after the death of her employer, she leaves her country behind and goes Villette, a town in the heart of Catholic France (she is a devout Protestant, doesn't speak French, and has no money or friends). Though she finds work teaching English, she is desperately isolated and falls into a deep spiral of depression that is only broken when she strikes up a friendship with a handsome English doctor.

Brontë shows off her knack for funny, insightful social commentary, skewering Victorian hypocrisy and weak art. Her description of a sensual painting of Cleopatra is priceless, and an amusing scene follows between Lucy and an acid-tongued Frenchman who commands her not to look. He directs her instead to a series of insipid paintings that supposedly depict the stages of a woman's life, while he himself is free to admire the Rubenesque queen at his leisure.

This tyrannical Frenchman is M. Paul Emmanuel - a fellow schoolteacher of mercurial temperament who may berate her (and everyone else, for that matter), but soon shows that he has depths of goodness that offset his Napoleonic failings. Lucy wonders at his contradictory nature: "Never was a better little man, in some points, than M. Paul: never, in others, a more waspish little despot." But Lucy and M. Paul are equally spirited, and their battles are funny and occasionally poignant as their friendship deepens.

Not to say it's a perfect novel, but it is more complex and sophisticated than Jane Eyre (while sharing similar Gothic elements). There are a few flaws: a long opening that seems utterly irrelevant and casts initial doubt on who the main character is, with a delayed payoff; our thoroughly English heroine is incredibly anti-Catholic and anti-French (many of her observations about the people around her echo old British propaganda); and you'll definitely need an annotated version or to have Google Translate at hand for a lot of the important exchanges between Lucy and M. Paul, which take place in French.

The ending is far too abrupt. I felt cheated after experiencing Lucy's suffering and only getting a tiny look at her joy. So Brontë did break my heart a little, but she could have done much worse, and the experience of this novel paid me back in full. Her genius and feminism is present throughout Villette even more than Jane Eyre (though it's easier to love the latter, I'll admit).

Brontë has a few other lesser-known works, but I think the best follow-up to Villette is Shirley, her most feminist novel. Or you could go on to Elizabeth Gaskell's romantic North and South.

Quotable:

• "Several very well executed and complacent-looking fat women struck me as by no means the goddesses they appeared to consider themselves."
• "Really that little man was dreadful: a mere sprite of caprice and ubiquity: one never knew either his whim or his whereabout."
• "No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure."
• "Of course I did not blame myself for suffering: I thank God I had a truer sense of justice than to fall into any imbecile extravagance of self-accusation; and as to blaming others for silence, in my reason I well knew them blameless, and in my heart acknowledged them so: but it was a rough and heavy road to travel, and I longed for better days."
• "If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed."
• "He was born victor, as some are born vanquished."

Three Free Books

Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments by Edmund Gosse (1907)
This is one of the books Nick Hornby writes about in The Polysyllabic Spree. This book is the story of Gosse's relationship with his marine biologist father, who was also a member of the Plymouth Brethren. Hornby writes that his "fierce, joyless evangelism crippled his son's childhood." Why am I so interested? I read Claire Tomalin's lovely biography of Jane Austen on Hornby's recommendation, and I hope he won't steer me wrong this time!

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (1855)
I read Gaskell in college, and recently watched a BBC adaptation that reminded me how romantic this book is. I recently did a booktalk on this novel, and the best way to describe Gaskell is this: she is Jane Austen with a social conscience, like Charles Dickens without the rambling. Plot: A genteel country woman is uprooted to a grimy industrial town, completely alien to everything she knows and loves. Her ideals of what it means to be a good neighbor clash with the ideals of a local factory owner, Mr. Thornton, a self-made man who is her equal intellectually but not socially. If you love Austen, the Brontës, and Dickens--or pretty much any great Victorian author--do yourself a favor and try Gaskell.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird (1879)
Isabella L. Bird was a well-known Victorian travel writer, and this book is probably the best-known of her works. I came across a description of this particular book in Barbara Hodgson's No Place for a Lady, a book about fearless female travelers. Bird was a woman who couldn't stay at home, and so of course I put this on my list!