[In the following essay, Craig details Dickens's use of cultural and popular elements in Hard Times.]

Dickens's flair for expressing matters of common concern in their own style shows in the very title of the novel in which, for once, he dealt with the average life of his time. Most of the twenty-five possible titles for Hard Times and the fourteen he short-listed suggest, usually by a cliché or a pun, the theme of human life ground down by calculation and routine: for example, 'According to Cocker', 'Prove It', 'Hard Times', 'Hard Heads and Soft Hearts', 'A Mere Question of Figures'. 'Hard Times' stands out in that it was the phrase which came most naturally, when weariness or hardship had to be voiced, to the people with whom the novel is concerned: the men, women and children whose lives were being transformed by the industrial revolution. It is very much a vernacular phrase, common in folk songs especially between 1820 and 1865 but not in pamphlets, speeches, or the papers, however popular or radical. 'Hard times' (or 'tickle times', 'weary times', 'bad times') usually meant a period, often a slump, when scanty food and low wages or unemployment bore particularly hard. Much less often it could mean the more pervasive state in which people felt that the essential and permanent conditions of their lives hemmed them in inflexibly, as in the refrain of a song from the knitting mills of South Carolina around 1890:

Every morning just at five,
Gotta get up, dead or alive.
It's hard times in the mill, my love,
Hard times in the mill.

Every morning just at six,
Don't that old bell make you sick?
It's hard times in the mill, my love,
Hard times in the mill. . . .

Ain't it enough to break your heart?
Have to work all day and at night it's dark.
It's hard times in the mill, my love,
Hard times in the mill.

The lightness of Dickens's judgement lay in his seizing on the popular phrase and using it for a novel which is not about a time of special neediness but rather about a kind of bondage to routine and calculation so integral to the culture of industrial societies that much of it is still with us.

Both theme and title, then, are typical at once of Dickens's fellow-feeling for the mass of people and of his flair for sharpening the topical to a pitch of memorable art. His novels in general, and Hard Times more than any other, are so saturated in the habits, social forms, and events of his own age, and enter so directly into its struggles, that we can best understand why such works appeared at just that juncture if we consider the trends in his own development and in English literature as a whole that had led up to the situation at mid-century. Dickens himself was notable for not drawing much on the art-literature that came before him. He delighted in and owed much to the hearty comedians among eighteenth-century novelists, especially Smollett, but it is at least as relevant to note that he began his career as a reporter, writing against time on breathless journeys around the country from one political meeting to another; that he was famous among the journalists in the gallery of the House of Commons, where he reported for seven years, for the extraordinary speed and fullness of his reports; that his first wish artistically was to act at Covent Garden because 'I believed I had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others'; and that his first novel, Pickwick Papers, began as the letterpress for a series of 'cockney sporting-prints' issued in monthly parts. He thus differs in kind from Jane Austen, who carried on from Johnson and Sheridan, and George Eliot, who carried on from Jane Austen and Dickens. Dickens raised an established form, the novel, to new levels by fusing all manner of popular elements and new cultural media, and this is typical of how an art grows at a time of rapid, drastic social change, when artists must take in and digest the startling new experiences, assailing them from all sides, which the conventional art of the time finds it hard to cope with.

Dickens also arrives after a prolonged lull or barren phase in British writing. By 1824 Shelley, Keats, and Byron are dead, and Wordsworth's powers have failed him; Jane Austen dies in 1817, Maria Edgeworth publishes nothing of interest after 1812, and Scott's best vein is quite done by 1824. The Twenties and Thirties are thus, in literature, a flat calm, stirred only by the faint ripples of Tennyson's first books; and when energy returns to literature it is in the form of an urgent concern with what came to be called the 'Condition-of-England question'. From about 1838 Dickens is brusquely modernising the novel, driven by his sense of the topical, his consuming fascination with his own times. His modernity is extraordinary: how many people faced with these words—'plain to the dark eyes of her mind, as the electric wires which ruled a colossal strip of music-paper out of the evening sky were plain to the dark eyes of her body'—would place it in the 1850s? Yet it is from Hard Times. Clearly the 'accident' of Dickens's individual genius is crucial in modernising fiction at that juncture, just as the 'accidental' deaths of those leading Romantic poets were crucial in causing the lull. Yet the lull also corresponds with what contemporaries called the Thirty Years' Peace (from 1815 to 1848), and what ends the lull is the upheaval that includes the outcry against the New Poor Law of 1834 (an ingredient in Oliver Twist), the Chartist campaign from 1838 onwards (an ingredient in Disraeli's Sybil), and the Year of Revolutions, 1848 (an ingredient in the radicalism of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot). Altogether it is as though our [English] culture (including folk song, political parties, and trade unions as well as the main arts) had been cudgelling its brains for ways of dealing with the new life—life dominated by the industrial system—and had now found what was needed.

The historical image of this period—the breakneck growth of the railways, the congested towns and great oblong mills swarming across Lancashire—is so familiar that we can't pretend to keep it out of our minds as we read Hard Times. Equally, it would be wrong—a failure to drink in what Dickens offers—if the novel were allowed to trail after that history, used merely to attach a few picturesque personifications and episodes to a body of material we think we already know. But it would be another kind of missed opportunity not to use the novel as a source of insights into a specific phase in that long train of social experience which has brought us to where we are. Dickens himself was writing with this purpose—to incite thought and help mould attitudes to burning problems; and Hard Times is 'about' a specific time, the Forties, whereas others even of his most social novels tend either to satirise types that could have been found at many a time (e.g. the stony-hearted businessman in Dombey and Son) or else to draw historical elements freely from several different times (as in Bleak House). In Hard Times Dickens was striving to articulate the parts of a civilization, with a minimum of flights down fanciful by-ways, and with an insistence on the typical and even the average which suited the industrial and mass aspects of that age. It was the age in which cities like the original of Coketown multiplied by three within a lifetime and Britain 'changed over from a rural to an urban civilization' inside two generations. It happened fast enough to cause actual bewilderment. We can read in the diary of a man who must have been very much like Stephen Blackpool how when he set out on Good Friday 1860 to walk through his native parts of twenty-eight years before—the industrial villages around the eastern side of Manchester—he found that 'everything was changed':

Villages have grown into large towns, and country places where there was nothing but fields are now covered with streets, and villages and large factories and workshops everywhere. I made enquiries [at] many a place after people who had lived there, but they were either dead or gone to America or gone somewhere else. I only saw one woman whom I knew, but she did not know me and would not believe me when I told her I was very tired.

Again, from the Black Country comes a song with the refrain 'I can't find Brummagem'. Once, this sense of being literally lost in the new surroundings would have been confined to London with its uniquely fast development in the eighteenth century. Now it was widespread. According to the Census taken three years before Hard Times was written, of the 3,336,000 adults living in London and 61 other English and Welsh towns, little over one-third had been born in the town where they now lived.

Of course many things could be made of such material. But one broad approach that we can now see, from its frequent occurrence, to have been positively enjoined upon artists by the life of those times is a radical or humane concern with hard conditions, a vehement desire to bring home to public opinion, in terms both compassionate and warning, that it was not tolerable that the ordinary conditions of living for so many should be damaging to physical and psychological well-being or that rich and poor, employers and working people, should live at such different standards and be arrayed against each other in class struggle. This is the 'Condition-of-England question', so named by Carlyle in his essay 'Chartism' of 1839—Carlyle to whom Hard Times was dedicated and a quotation from whom was printed on the balance-sheet of the fund collected for unemployed workers during week fourteen of the Preston lock-out which Dickens went to report when gathering copy for the novel.

Dickens had thus found his way to a subject from the heart of industrial civilization quite early in his artistic maturity. It is surely the novels in which social institutions are turned into rich and ramifying dramatic symbols that are in Dickens's oeuvre what the tragedies are in Shakespeare's, and the series of these novels starts with Dombey and Son in 1846-8. It is a measure of the urgency and directness of Dickens's concern in Hard Times that whereas in Dombey the business that dominates Dombey's life is scarcely typical of English commercial activity at that stage, and is vaguely specified into the bargain, for Hard Times Dickens was so bent on 'getting it right' that he went to Preston (in January 1854) for material. Much of what he saw there he turned straight into fiction: for example, the 'coldly and bitingly emphatic' master or owner on the train north, who extolled Political Economy and insisted on the total irrelevance of human sympathy to questions of labour or production; or the professional speaker whom Dickens heard at a Sunday meeting of locked-out cotton workers and whom in his article he dubbed 'Gruffshaw'. It must also be said that Dickens had to go and gather copy because he had never known the industrial heartlands at first hand (apart from an occasional visit to relatives in Manchester). Both aspects, his real concern and his comparative inexperience in this field, must be kept in mind when we are pondering the truth of the novel as an image of the life centred on the factory system.

To put it in this way is not to beg the question of whether or not Hard Times really is an 'industrial novel'. My opening discussion of its title should already have shown that Dickens's concern entailed his dealing in the same breath, continually, with both the immediate facts of mill-town life and the less direct, the all-pervading cultural effects of the new intensive production. The novel is about the ways in which iron conditions were felt to have closed round people's lives. I say 'felt' as though the matter were not clear-cut, for it is a fact that people were often making heavy weather of perfectly convenient new arrangements: for example, Dickens was fascinated by transport, and people tended to grumble about the sheer punctuality and orderliness of the railways compared with the old coaching. Yet many contemporaries were not being captious or just torpidly averse to change when they expressed concern at the condition of England and considered they were beset by unprecedented troubles. Dickens was writing towards the climax of a phase during which, it can now probably be said, the standard of living for large sections of the people fell, as the first manic onset of the industrial revolution took its toll and had not yet yielded its compensating benefits. We have also to remember that encroachments on freedom of behaviour aroused militancy quite as readily as evils like wage-cuts or the price of flour. The many petitions against the enclosing of common and waste ground were only the first of many protests against the process whereby the actual scope or room in which to live was curtailed. Dickens's lifetime saw the beginning of the end for the old cottage industry. The family which in the time of, say, Defoe had carded, spun, and woven, washed and bleached as a team was now scattered from home out into the mills, there to be knit together again as a class no longer based on bloodties—the Hands of Bounderby and Gradgrind. Instead of work following the rhythms of close personal relations—work until the piece was finished, a journey to sell it, and then perhaps a long week-end until the money was finished—now the men, women, and children must submit to a rigid time-table laid down by a management avid that every minute should be worked to the full. Experience narrowed. The surroundings of the work and the work itself were the same day in day out. Where once a man might have had several jobs—for example, the German iron miners who wore their furnace-skins of white calf s hide while haymaking in their own meadows, now each person was likely to work at one job only and his sole means of livelihood was the sale of his power to work at that job.

The point is not that the quality of life deteriorated in some absolute way: so general a matter is impossible to decide for or against, and even if one breaks it down into seemingly verifiable parts, it turns out that, for example, the notorious horrors of the early factories were parallelled by the physically vile conditions in which many handloom weavers worked at home. The point for Hard Times is that people had become less a law unto themselves, the stuff of their lives less variegated, and it is this sense of lives clamped under a grid that haunts Dickens throughout his work, whether he is writing about imprisonment itself or about the more impalpable sorts of bondage that are the theme of Hard Times. In such matters it is necessary to hear the testimony of the people who lived at the point of change: for example, the following verse from a song about the transition to powered weaving (staple industry of Coketown), written by the Gorton weaver John Grimshaw:

So, come all you cotton-weavers, you must rise up very soon,
For you must work in factories from morning until noon:
You mustn't walk in your gardens for two or three hours a-day.
For you must stand at their command, and keep your shuttles in play.

Grimshaw was a notable songster, but singing was precisely what the mill-owner felt obliged to forbid in case it interfered with production. The handloom weaver had either talked or sung while he worked: 'When not talking he would be humming or singing snatches of some old ballad.' And in a weaving-shop before steam came in, 'let only break forth the healthy and vigorous chorus "A man's a man for a' that", the fagged weaver brightens up. His very shuttle skytes boldly along, and clatters through in faithful time to the tune of his merrier shopmates!' By mid-century this was forbidden: in mill after mill placards were up with such rules as 'Any person leaving their work and found Talking with any other work-people shall be fined 2d. for each offence', and similarly for 'Talking with any one out of their own Ally', or 6d. (the equivalent of £1 today in terms of real wages) for 'talking to another, whistling, or singing'. Here is the policing and hemming-in of the human being that moved Dickens to his reiterated message, put into Sleary's mouth in Hard Times: "'People mutht be amuthed. They can't be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can't be alwayth a working, they an't made for it.'" In Hard Times the rigid system that cages people in is located squarely in or rather is seen actually to consist of the mill-town itself, especially in that passage from Chapter S that sets the keynote or fixes the image of the dominant scene:

It was a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it. . . . It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever. . . . It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye. . . . It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another . . .

In face of this insistence on a specific real location, it seems wilful to rarefy the novel's theme along metaphysical lines: 'Coketown with its troubles is merely the purgatory in which individuals suffer.' What Dickens is intent upon is a specific society which had become unbearable for historical (and therefore remediable) causes.

In stressing the directness of the links between the novel and mill-town life, one is not somehow missing or coarsening its thematic subtlety. Certainly Dickens did not intend an 'industrial novel' if by that one means a barely-fictive report on troubles in, say, Manchester or Sheffield: for example, he decided against depicting a strike. This led to disappointment among early reviewers who evidently assumed that he should have written a straight industrial piece and not made this aspect 'subordinate and incidental' to the educational aspect. But Dickens was shirking nothing. To be as trenchant as he was about the owners and their pet schools was itself to take sides and declare one's commitment in the matter of the condition of England. Dickens was writing at a time when the periodicals could smell radicalism a mile away, and in the most unlikely places. Jane Eyre had been censured for 'moral Jacobinism' and anti-Christian 'murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor', although I would have thought that Charlotte Bronte had leaned as far back to square with conventional taboos as a remarkable artist well could without sinking herself entirely. Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850) had just been given hostile reviews in The Times, Blackwood's, the Edinburgh Review, and the Quarterly for advocating socialism cunningly disguised as Christianity. Philanthropic cotton-masters were warning village institutes about the tendencies implicit in Mary Barton. Indeed the trenchancy of Dickens's social criticism now began to jeopardize his reputation, throughout the second half of his career, in the eyes of both the conservative and the go-ahead, from Macaulay with his objection to the 'sullen socialism' of Hard Times to an American, Whipple, who considered it childish to oppose 'the established laws of political economy', which he considered on a par with those of the physical universe. It took artistic determination to come as near the heart of the industrial matter as Dickens did, and equally it led to several swerves into evasion as the good-hearted radical novelist strove to come near the truth without committing himself too ruinously.

The stress on schooling is certainly no evasion. This linking of classroom and mill turns out to be one of Dickens's most telling ways of composing his sense of English civilization into a coherent, many-sided image. Both school and town were owned, or at least controlled, by the same men, the masters, some of whom were fanatically eager to try out on the populace the theoretical social systems which they had drawn up on strict Utilitarian principles. Some of the first efforts to redeem the hell of what Mumford calls the 'insensate industrial town' went into restoring the common land in the form of parks, beginning with Dickens's Coketown, Preston, in 1833-5. But the spirit of the movement was distinctly Gradgrind. The park at Derby, for instance, was 'tastefully laid out in grass intersected by broad gravel walks, and planted with a great variety of trees, shrubs, and flowers botanically arranged'—admission free on Sunday except during hours of church service, or 6d. (equivalent to £1 now) on weekdays. Here was what the Hands got in place of the two- and three-hundred acre commons on which townsfolk a generation before had run races, played at knur and spell, or courted among the bushes. Again and again the trouble with the 'utilitarian economists and Commissioners of Fact' satirized by Dickens is not so much their basic aims as the detailed arrangements they thought necessary to achieve them—the fanatical tidy-mindedness which had so little sense of the freedom, the room for free movement, that we need as organic, sentient beings. Under the Poor Law of 1834, which was engineered by Edwin Chadwick (former secretary to the founder of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham), a destitute man could get no poor-relief unless he entered a workhouse (and more than a quarter of a million had done so by the Forties). To discourage people of low moral fibre from succumbing to the lure of an easy life, Chadwick and company worked out 'a discipline so severe and repulsive as to make them a terror to the poor': 'minute and regular observance of routine', for example silence during meals; confiscation of all personal possessions; total separation of men and women; and separation of husbands and wives, if still fertile, partly to make easier 'the requisite classification' (my italics). And all this was grafted onto the economic system favoured by the Utilitarians—laissez-faire, which in its tendency to produce uncontrolled slumps might have been designed to turn able-bodied and industrious workmen into paupers. Dickens was never more surely in touch with rightful popular feeling then when, in this particular novel, he made rigid systematism the centre of his target rather than the more glaring sorts of material evil. In the words of a contemporary, the attempt to apply the New Poor Law 'did more to sour the hearts of the labouring population than did the privations consequent on all the actual poverty of the land'.

Why did Dickens dwell so much on the educational forms taken by the new fanaticism? Partly because it was there, among the young, that one could see most strikingly how the still plastic human being was forced into an iron mould; partly because the schooling systems favoured by go-ahead cotton masters were themselves like living satires on Utilitarianism in practice, even before Dickens had recreated them in the mode of satire. The Gradgrind model school with its regimen of pure fact is in no way an allegory or symbol of what a cult of fact would run to if carried to an extreme. It has been suggested that what Dickens is really getting at is the Victorian fascination with compendiums, encyclopedias, statistical accounts, etc., and that Bitzer's 'definition of a horse' owes something to what could be found in publications like Charles Knight's Store of Knowledge.

The fact is that the first two chapters of the novel are an almost straight copy of the teaching system in schools run by the two societies for educating the poor. In the Manchester Lancasterian School a thousand children were taught in one huge room, controlled by a kind of military drill with monitors and a monitor-general, and taught by methods derived from the Catechism. Groups of facts, mechanically classified, were drummed in by methods that might have been meant to squash forever the children's urge to find out or understand anything for themselves:

A lesson on natural history would be given thus. The boys would read: 'Ruminating Animals. Cud-chewing or ruminating animals form the eighth order. These, with the exception of the camel, have no cutting teeth in the upper jaw, but their place is supplied with a hard pad. In the lower jaw there are eight cutters; the tearers, in general, are absent, so that there is a vacant space between the cutters and grinders. The latter are very broad, and are kept rough and fît for grinding the vegetable food on which these animals live, by the enamel being disposed in crescent-shaped ridges

MONITOR. What have you been reading about?

BOY. Ruminating animals.

MONITOR. Another name for ruminating?

BOY. Cud-chewing.

MONITOR. What is the root of the word?

BOY. 'Rumen', the cud . . .

MONITOR. You read in the lesson the enamel is disposed in crescent shaped ridges. What is the enamel?

BOY. The hard, shining part of the tooth.

MONITOR. What part of our tooth is it?

BOY. The covering of that part that is out of the jawbone.

MONITOR. What do you mean by disposed?

BOY. Placed.

MONITOR. The root?

BOY. 'Pono', I place . . .

(Bleak Age)

This of course is precisely Bitzer's "'Quadruped, Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders'", and so on. It only remains to add that the inventor of this system, Joseph Lancaster (a Quaker), claimed to have 'invented, under the blessing of Divine Providence, a new and mechanical system of education', and that the inventor of a similar rival system, Andrew Bell (an Anglican), called his 'the STEAM ENGINE of the MORAL WORLD'. Given this kind of thing Dickens had no need to invent: the satire was already there in life, and not on some lunatic fringe but in a widespread, dominant, and much-admired system. (On grounds of authenticity alone, apart from deeper considerations, this aspect has not lost its relevance. I was present, as teacher, in a class in a Scottish city school in 1959 when one of Her Majesty's Inspectors spent twenty minutes trying to get the boys to define a table. As he was about to leave, he turned and asked them to repeat the hard-won definition. None of them could remember it.)

Dickens was not seizing on a very unusually glaring or ludicrous part of the culture and making more of it than it signified. There were the closest links between heartless schooling and worse than heartless factory discipline. One of the worst sides of the early factories was the hours and conditions of work for very young children. It turns out that some of the atrocious punishments added to the already draconic routine were copied from Lancaster:

Lancaster worked out an elaborate code of rewards and punishments among which was 'the log', a piece of wood weighing four to six pounds, which was fixed to the neck of the child guilty of his (or her) first talking offence. On the least motion one way or another the log operated as a dead weight on the neck. Needham [owner of a cotton mill in the Peak district of Derbyshire] clearly tried to copy this progressive idea of the age. More serious offences found their appropriate punishment in the Lancasterian code; handcuffs, the 'caravan', pillory and stocks, and 'the cage'. The latter was a sack or basket in which more serious offenders were suspended from the ceiling. Needham clearly borrowed this idea, too, though his children are alleged to have been suspended by their arms over the machines.

That will not surprise anyone aware of what the factory system was like in its early days. But few, I think have realized that schools too went in for that kind of inhuman forcing. Lancaster laid down that classroom offenders should walk backwards round the room with the yoke of wood on their necks, and a child who was kept in was tied to his desk to save the expense of keeping a teacher on to supervise him. 'What impressed the governing classes was the orderliness that prevailed.'

If Dickens had been topical only, instead of topical, farsighted, and profound, he might have concentrated on specific abuses: for example, physical hardships that could quite easily be remedied. The Nottingham spinners whose bones were deformed, joints inflamed, and limbs ulcerated with long hours standing at the machine were presently given chairs to sit on, the thousand children stupefied by the Lancasterian drill were curtained off in 'classrooms' of fifty each (on the advice of a Utilitarian). But hardship was not the only trouble and might not even be the case: in the Preston cotton mills themselves, according to the inspecting surgeon, health was generally better than among the other townsfolk. Dickens was concerned rather to question the intrinsic nature of industrial organisation in which the worker has nothing to do but mind a machine, with no variety of work or psychological outlet in the form of some say in the running of the concern, and in which productivity is pursued at the expense of the human satisfaction it is supposed to serve. The industrial image that haunts Hard Times is of machinery that runs itself, as though without the volition of the human beings it nevertheless compels to attend it:

Time went on in Coketown like its own machinery: so much material wrought up, so much fuel consumed, so many powers worn out, so much money made . . . the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness . . . all the melancholy-mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day's monotony, were at their heavy exercise again . . . no temperature made the melancholy-mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels.

The complement to the machines are the workers—whole humans reduced to Hands:

A race who would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs. . . . A special contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he laboured. . . . So many hundred Hands to this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power.

This compound insight is in the classic line of labour analysis: in literature, from Blake and Dickens through Robert Tressell to Alan Sillitoe; in discussion, from Cobbett and Hodgskin, Engels and Marx, Ruskin and Morris, through Kropotkin to the Workers' Control and Work Enlargement movements at the present time. Engels puts the thing with characteristic lucidity: factory work 'is, as the manufacturers say, very "light", and precisely by reason of its lightness, more enervating than any other. The operatives have little to do' (my italics). Marx rises to images of industrialism whose scalding force and richness of physical evocation draw, it seems to me, on Carlyle and Dickens as well as on his own genius. In 1829 Carlyle wrote in 'Signs of the Times': 'On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.' (Note the impersonal passive there.) We have seen what Dickens wrote in 1854. In 1867 Marx wrote in the first volume of Capital:

[Manufacture] seizes labour-power by its very roots. It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at me expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts; just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. Not only is the detail work distributed to the different individuals, but the individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation, and the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which makes a man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realized. . . . Here we have, in the place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motion of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.

This, in its sheer openness to the newly released energies, its sense of their mingled enormity and potency, is akin to passage after passage in Dickens where he evokes the pace, the swarming detail, and the potentiality for good and ill of his age.

Given this deep and manifold rootedness of Hard Times in its age, it may seem less presumptuous to offer to assess the truth of its image of the life that centred on the factory system. This can be done, so long as we approach through the kind of art that is there in the novel; for presumably if there is a flaw in the truth of its image, this will show as failure or uncertainty in the art. I take it that something like the following would be generally acceptable as an account of how the novel works: By creating motifs and personae distinguished by a few bold, vivid, and repeated traits, far-flung and complex forces are organised into one homogeneous 'fable'. This simplifying mode is no doubt something that must be 'accepted', by which I really mean that we may well have to take it as a mixed blessing, something which, after all, is clearly a condition of the vitality—the trenchant social attack, the whole-hearted humour, and the graphic presentation—of Dickens's kind of art. It is surely a less repressible impatience that we feel with the outstanding weakness in the novel: that is, the Stephen Blackpool part, the mixture of sentimentality and melodrama in the giving of his life and his unacceptability as representative worker (the sole representative apart from Rachael, and she is only a female replica of him). The question is whether this element—which could be written off as the usual Victorian tear-jerking, obligatory and easy to disregard—flaws the truth of the total image of life centred on the factory system.

Presumably there is no need to show in detail that Stephen and Rachael are too good to be true and that their sufferings are exploited for maudlin purposes. It is the more insidious aspects of Stephen's role that call in question Dickens's managing of the political aspect. Saddling Stephen with a monstrous drunken spouse is in keeping with that Victorian way of martyring the hero or heroine (compare Janet's husband in George Eliot's 'Janet's Repentance' or Rochester's wife in Jane Eyre). But the special effect here is to isolate Stephen as much as possible from his work-fellows, and this is geared to the trade-union theme through a decision not to subscribe to the union regulations which is so flimsily motivated that no credible or even intelligible account of it ever comes out. Stephen's reasons are meant to be given in two speeches from Chapters 4 and 6 of Book II: "'I ha' my reasons—mine, yo see—for being hindered; not on'y now, but awlus—awlus—life long!'", and Louisa's statement and question to Rachael, which is never answered: "'He fell into suspicion with his fellow-weavers, because he had made a promise not to be one of them. . . . Might I ask you why he made it?'" This blur makes us begin to think that Dickens is not even implying an adverse judgement of trade-unionism but is sliding out of dealing with it at all. Stephen, by being singled out as a lonely martyr, has been made easy to pity; the well-to-do reader could take his part without being drawn for a moment into discomfiting thoughts of a whole martyred class. The figure of Slackbridge completes the unsatisfactoriness: his foaming rhetoric is done with splendid brio, but his extravagant denunciation of a highly personal decision is not credible, and his only other appearance is when he is trotted on (in Book III, Chapter 4) purely to abuse Stephen again, on the occasion of Bounderby's poster offering a reward for his arrest.

This part of the novel is thus peculiarly shaky; and its upshot is to imply that working-class militancy and working-class decency are mutually exclusive. On this [F.R.] Leavis comments [in his The Great Tradition, 1948] that 'when Dickens comes to the Trade Unions his understanding of the world he offers to deal with betrays a marked limitation. . . . Trade Unionism [is shown] as nothing better than the pardonable error of the misguided and oppressed, and, as such, an agent in the martyrdom of the good working man.' To leave it at that, however, and to insist that 'Dickens's understanding of Victorian civilisation is adequate for his purpose; the justice and penetration of his criticism are unaffected' is to postpone the disturbing question: how could Dickens have felt free to travesty so important a movement? That it is a travesty, a mere echo of popular and stubborn misconceptions, is easily proved: [Humphrey] House shows it in some useful pages of The Dickens World, and we know that much the commonest kinds of union meeting were not to hound individuals but to decide when and where to put in wage claims, to hear information and messages of support from other branches or unions, to hand out strike pay, and the like. Indeed what Dickens wrote from Preston makes it sound as though it was partly his disappointment at finding the town in so uninflamed a state that led him both to make little of the union aspect and to graft on some extraneous excitement when he did present it. But the damage done to the novel is, in my view, minimised if one sees it as a failure of sociological accuracy. For one tiling, does an artist have quite mis obligation to known facts? True, he will fail to arouse our deepest interest if he diverges wildly from, while plainly basing himself on, a familiar state of affairs. But may he not hit off a general type—for example, the huffing-and-puffing sort of demagogue—while colouring in only enough topical detail to make the persona come alive? The main problem is more subtle, and leads to deep-rooted factors in Dickens's view of social life. Let us rephrase the question already put and ask: why did Dickens pick that side of his theme for his exhibition of Virtue and Pathos? Or (to take the matter beyond guesswork and into the realm of verifiability): were there really no possibilities or makings, in the area from which Dickens got his material, for an image of industrial man as fully human though sore-pressed?

This area was Preston in the winter of 1853-4. The city was a heartland of radicalism: it so happened that all male townspeople had the vote and it therefore attracted one radical leader after another to fight the constituency. Great numbers had welcomed Cobbett when he fought an election there in 1826, and Henry Hunt, the 'matchless orator' was its M.P. (thus breaking a virtually feudal monopoly of the seat) from 1830-32. The Preston employers had long been known for their opposition to unions and as late as 1860 it was said that 'increases in wages are sometimes granted elsewhere, in Preston never'. Four strikers had been shot dead by troops in 1842. 1853 was, nationally, a year of intensive labour activity which won wage rises and shortened working hours, and in June there started what became 'by far the biggest industrial struggle in the cotton trade since the general "turn out" of 1842'. The power-loom weavers asked the employers to restore a 10 per cent wage cut enforced in 1847 on the weaving of all fabrics. Most of the masters refused even to meet the workers' representatives, and many of them were fired. To support these men and further the wage claim, unions were re-formed and at some mills strikes were started. The Masters' Association of Preston locked out their workers from September, declared they would not reemploy them unless they renounced trade-union membership, and launched prosecutions against the union leaders to help break the strike (the charges were then dropped). To help the workless, funds were raised in many places (including London) by specially-formed Trades' Committees, which are presumably what Dickens is getting at under the gratuitously pompous coinage 'United Aggregate Tribunal'. As late as April, three weeks after Hard Times began to run as a serial, strikes were still breaking out all over mid-Lancashire, at Wigan, Burnley, Bacup, Padiham.

The reader of Dickens (as of most well-known treatments of Victorian working-class life with the exception of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South) would imagine that the workers who were putting up this struggle and going through this ordeal were a wretched, sullen lot, cowed by factory and city life unless they were inflamed by trouble-makers from outside. The first-hand reports of behaviour and morale show that the prevailing tone was one of resilience, self-reliance, solidarity. In a town where between twenty and thirty thousand had been workless for twenty-three weeks, the spirit of meetings was good-humoured determination. When delegates from the (left-wing) Labour Parliament asked to be heard, the weaver chairman would say that money or constructive comment were welcome but not "'politics and differences among us when what we want is 'armony, brotherly love, and concord'". When a professional speaker got up and began in exactly Slackbridge's 'O my friends' vein to denounce plots involving a neighbouring town's alleged failure to contribute, 'the persuasive right hand of the chairman' fell gently on the man's shoulder and at once stopped him. Yet in his novel Dickens conveys that organised labour was so much self-deceiving agitation, which in passing squashed the rights of individuals, and that its platforms were hogged by mere politicoes. He knew that it was not so, for the above eye-witness account is his own, from his article 'On Strike'.

Notice that my point is not the question of simple truth to life but rather the question as to whether the essential springs of humanness were failing under industrial conditions. In that key Coketown passage early in the novel, Dickens writes that the 'many small streets still more like another' were 'inhabited by people equally like one another', and this, taken with his treatment of the Horse-riders, suggests that it is only among the travelling people, the rovers from outside settled and disciplined society, that the full humanness of spontaneity, togetherness, wholehearted fun, and tenderness can still thrive. It turns out (again from Dickens's own account and also from many other sources) that the Preston spinners and weavers had a whole culture, and a traditional and rooted culture, of fun and imagination and common effort, which they kept up in the heart of, and indeed adapted to, the industrial struggle. 'Behind the chairman,' at the Preston meeting, 'was a great crown on the top of a pole, made of parti-coloured calico, and strongly suggestive of Mayday.' Comic poems were written to drum up contributions to the unemployed fund, people contributed under playful nicknames ('The chirping blacksmith, six pence'), and humour was used especially to prod laggards into paying up. On the handbills we read:

If that fiddler at Uncle Tom's Cabin blowing room does not pay, Punch will set his legs straight.

If that drawer at card side and those two slubbers do not pay, Punch will say something about their bustles. . . .

If squinting Jack of Goodairs does not pay up in future, Punch will stand on his corns.

If those piecers at Dawson's new mill do not pay better, young Punch (old Punch's urchin) will come and break their ends . . .

If that young spark, Ben D., that works at Baxter's Mill does not pay to his trade, Punch will tell about him eating that rhubarb pudding that was boiled in a dirty night cap.

If Roger does not pay, Punch will tell about her robbing the donkey of its breakfast to stuff her bustle with.

When we come upon the first bits of circus slang in Chapters 5 and 6 of Hard Times, we quicken at once, after the bullying formalities and dry precisian assertions of the Gradgrind set. Plainly the author himself is enjoying the quirky idiom of Sleary's troupe (and we also notice that Bounderby is affronted by its outlandishness). The perspective of the novel would have been transformed, and brought still nearer to the real currents of life under industrial conditions, if Dickens had been able to allow that there were kindred things to enjoy and an unquenched capacity for enjoyment at the heart of Coketown. The more we find out what actually happened at that time, the more we realise that militancy was a lifeline—a well-spring of hope, a channel for popular energies, as well as an indispensable lever—amidst the direst conditions. Preston at Hunt's election in December 1830: the radicals, "in a high state of exaltation', paraded the streets with 'music, flambeaux, a lighted tar-barrel and three flags, one of mem tri-coloured'. Glasgow during the Reform campaign of 1831 : "The whole people in that place and in the adjoining towns walked in procession into the Green, divided into their crafts, societies, villages, and parishes, with colours and emblems . . . with about 500 flags and 200 bands of music.' Leeds at the start of Chartism in 1838: 'At the demonstrations the Moor [Hartshead Moor, then called Peep Green] was like a fair, with huts erected for the sale of food and drink, and wives and families accompanying their menfolk. From Bradford, Huddersfield, Halifax, Dewsbury, and other towns in the West Riding the delegates marched in formation—often several thousands strong—with banners flying and bands playing.' But the Preston high spirits in 1854 are all the more impressive for bubbling up, after that long workless winter, on occasions that were not special or stirring.

The relevance for Hard Times can be put in two ways. We may say that Dickens excelled when satirising the employers' habit of discrediting every rightful demand of the Hands (as in that ludicrous recurring image of Bounderby's about 'turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon') but tended to waver into the sentimental or unconvincing when obliged to focus on the Hands either as private people or as a class liable to take social initiatives. Or we may go further and say that it was not possible to write well when taking the line that militancy was a kind of aberration. On this crucial issue he repeatedly veils radical indecision under a kind of fair-mindedness typical of the gentleman of his time (or the liberal today) who sees much too clearly to deny clamant injustice but cannot commit himself to any course of action that might end it. When Dickens assures us that 'these men [the Coketown workers], through their very delusions, showed great qualities' even when they 'went astray' by combining, or that 'every man felt his only hope to be in his allying himself to the comrades by whom he was surrounded; and that in this belief, right or wrong (unhappily wrong then), the whole of that crowd were gravely, deeply, faithfully in earnest', he is speaking with a usual voice of the middle class. It is the voice of Elizabeth Gaskell in chapter 3 of Mary Barton, blaming John Barton's bitterness at the death of his starving child partly on 'those who, either in speech or in print, find it their interest to cherish such feelings in the working class', and of The Times leader on Peterloo which generously condoled with those massacred in spite of the folly of the 'half employed and half starved' in letting themselves get 'puffed up by prodigious notions of their strength, and inflamed by artful pictures of their grievances'. Indeed it turns out that the notion of politics as an imported disease, with its implication that, left to themselves, masters and men would live in harmony, was precisely the line of the Bounderbys—the Preston cotton masters. In their manifesto of 15 September 1853 they deplored the 'designing and irresponsible body' who were interfering 'with the relation between master and servant' and creating 'where it does not exist . . . a feeling of dissatisfaction and estrangement'.

Dickens, it seems, repeatedly leans to the mass of the people, men draws back, because to commit himself would have been to wake up from the dream of harmony between classes. His criticism of a desperately harsh and unequal society is weakened to make it less uncomfortable, whether to himself or to the reader, and Stephen's latent function turns out to be to suggest that the right way to take the inevitable suffering is with dignified restraint, and alone. His dying words about the murderous condition of the mines are at once given the cast of something to be wished or prayed for rather than struggled about by his still later plea (clearly a message from the author) that "'aw th' world may on'y coom together more'". In specific situations this could only mean that the mill workers should give up their struggle, with its hard-won momentum and solidarity, in favour of arbitration (the suggestion that ends 'On Strike'), or that they should give up politics—the 'froth' and 'unsound counsel called the People's Charter'—in favour of agitation on practical matters like clean streets and cholera epidemics, all of which would somehow give rise to good government and 'a better understanding between the two great divisions of society'. Do not the first-hand records of militant activity—the songs, memoirs, and union documents—show that so much spirit, so rich a human nature, flowed into struggle that to pooh-pooh it or opt out of it by setting up some ideal above the battle was to risk one's art going soft and blurred? In taking for his subject the very core of industrial civilisation—its consequences for people's upbringing, feelings and relationships, and life's work—Dickens had set himself the most exacting test of ability to see truly. In the struggle to live humanly, the working people were exerting every kind of intelligence, courage, and elasticity, the masters were blocking, curbing and denying their humanness at point after point. In such a situation all are stultified, and Dickens embodies this most memorably in Louisa and her relationship—the lack of it—with her father. But more was needed, and if one tried to imagine the great industrial novel that never did get written, one might suggest that the masters cried out to be satirised, the mass of the people to be presented with clear-eyed realism. In so far as Dickens fails in the latter, his novel sags; in so far as he excels in the former, it succeeds, and thereby earns the currency which has made 'Coketown' the classic name for the early industrial city.