Hard Times: Are Facts Not Built Upon Imagination?

William Wordsworth once wrote:

Of Childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human Soul,
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. (The Prelude I, 406-14)

Wordsworth is self-reflecting on how his mind, body, and spirit grew as a child, and has concluded that it was through his interaction with nature. Thus, Wordsworth is alluding to the idea that if higher order internal perceptions, such as morals and ethics are going to manifest, they would do so through nature—through ones external environment. Which begs the question: what happens to a society when nature is stripped away and humankinds identity, their “elements of feeling and of thought,” their literal mind is formed for them?

In Charles Dicken’s novel Hard Times, Louisa Gradgrind’s internal perceptions, her mind, is delineated, commodified, and compartmentalized by her father Thomas Gradgrind’s external perceptions of truth, for in Dicken’s industrialized world of Coketown, a world where “Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in” (Dickens, 65), Gradgrind reduces his daughter to a non-questioning, factual machine, teaching her that imagination equals sin, for Thomas is proud, that “no little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon [or] had ever known wonder” (Dickens, 16). However, Thomas Gradgrind’s perception is problematic and Dicken’s cleverly opens the door to hypocrisy, for it will be this papers argument that facts rest on the foundation that is imagination. Thus, Hard Times’ overwhelming use of the word “fact” as a logical idea—becomes a fallacy, making it illogical.

Albert Einstein would have never developed his theory of relativity, if he never allowed wonder to enter his mind—if he didn’t let his mind roam free of the scientific conventions (facts) of the time. In Hard Times, we see the opposite of that perception within Thomas Gradgrind, for the age of definition dominates Gradgrind’s perceptions. In David Lodge’s essay “The Rhetoric of Hard Times,” Lodge asserts, “On every page Hard Times manifests its identity as a polemical work, a critique of mid-Victorian industrial society dominated by materialism, acquisitiveness, and ruthlessly competitive capitalist economics” (86). Dicken’s does this purposefully, for the novel opens with Thomas Gradgrind’s social perspective, with Gradgrind remarking, “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” (9).

Here, Dickens immediately reduces the individual, for in Gradgrind’s mind, the school children are unreasonable animals that possess no definition, and he (like a brick layer), will lay the path to righteousness. Lodge insists that Dickens use of the word “Facts,” relies on “repetition,” for Lodge writes, “In this [novel] the rhetoric works to establish a symbolic atmosphere; in Hard Times, to establish a thematic Idea—the despotism of Fact” (92). Further, Dicken’s uses nature as a metaphor (i.e. plant and root), and through Gradgrind, alters it as a mechanical tool to purge the mind of false or imaginative knowledge. We note two significant moments in the novel when the effects of this purging are noticeable, for in Gradgrind’s repeated attempts at solidifying factual knowledge upon his children—he unwittingly causes the reverse, for they begin to wonder.

The first moment occurs in Chapter 8, for when Tom and Louisa are looking at the fire, a loss of imagination, but more importantly, ones ability to think critically is evident:

“Except that it is a fire,” said Tom, “it looks to me as stupid and blank as everything else looks. What do you see in it? Not a circus?”

“I don’t see anything in it, Tom, particularly. But since I have been looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up.” (57)

The oral story tradition began around fire, and here, in Dicken’s industrialized world, the tradition, the imagination, the wonder—is lost. For while Louisa’s “independent” imagination gets lost in the flames, Mrs. Gradgrind enters angrily scolding Louisa’s “wonder slip,” all the while reducing the flames to scientific fact, for Mrs. Gradgrind spits, “After all the trouble that has been taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you have seen! [...] going on with your master about combustion, and calcinations, and calorification . . . to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes” (58). In Imagery and Theme in the Novels of Dickens, author Robert Barnard writes, “The book is aimed, in fact, at all the tendencies of the age to repress the free creative imagination of men, to stifle their individuality, to make them cogs in a machine—mere numbers in a classroom, or hands without bodies or minds” (82). As if programmed, the characters in Dickens story acknowledge only what’s within arm’s reach, for if they can’t “touch it” (i.e. wonder), than its not factual, or logical. Thus, Mrs. Gradgrind won’t put up with Louisa’s curiosity of the flames, for they’ve already been defined—they’ve already been factored.

Towards the end of the novel, we see how the factual mind labels, assumes, and commodifies itself about the virtuous intent of strangers. Dickens writes:

It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be bargain across a counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there. (276)

The “virtues” of man have been replaced by the pistons of manufacturing, and like morals, is subordinate to profit. George Orwell’s essay on Dickens says it best, for Orwell writes, “If one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter is the London commercial bourgeoisie [...] Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral” (31). Thus, Hard Times suggests that society must be grounded in virtues, grounded in knowing right from wrong. But, within the novel this is problematic, for there is only right, there is only fact.

The second moment occurs later (in chapter XV), for when Louisa asks her father for marital advisement concerning Mr. Bounderby’s intentions, Gradgrind remarks:

I would advise you (since you ask me) to consider this question, as you have been accustomed to consider every other question, simply as one of tangible Fact. The ignorant and the giddy may embarrass such subjects with irrelevant fancies, and other absurdities that have no existence, properly viewed . . . you know better. (98)

Again, we see Louisa’s loss of agency, her inability to think, and Thomas Gradgrind’s inability to imagine, for his humorless, monotone lines, fails to connect with his daughter. In Richard Fabrizio’s essay “Wonderful No-Meaning: Language and the Psychopathology of the Family in Hard Times,” Fabrizio correlates Gradgrind’s refusal to be acquainted with his daughter’s emotional needs as “a satiric portrait of industrialization” (219). Fabrizio comments, “Hard Times is more fundamentally a keen description of the psyche forged out of socioeconomic conditions [...] the language its characters rehearse . . . [for] the poses they strike result from the mind’s accommodation to a new familial environment, a by-product of the machine—the great loom” (219). Fabrizio’s comment coalesces well, for Gradgrind’s house acts as an extension to his “machine” personality, for his despotism of “Facts,” parallels his structurally flawless home, stilting his advantageous marital advisement. Dickens writes, “A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the principle windows, as its master’s heavy brows over-shadowed his eyes. A calculated, cast up, balanced and proved house [...] a lawn and a garden . . . all ruled straight like a botanical account-book” (17). Gradgrind is a mechanized man, a man of science and calculation, and Louisa is the variable—an individual who finds the circus wondrous and is growing “tired” of living in an era of definition, an era of facts.

In the end, Charles Dicken’s novel Hard Times, offers the reader a lens showing how humankind forms to the machines of the now: profit, industry, and fact is the new mantra in Dickens industrialized, mechanized society. In David Paroissien’s book Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, Paroissien writes, “The picture of the nineteenth-century society one can construct from Dickens’s later novels is a bleak one, showing little hope for the children . . . living in an atmosphere of evil and limited opportunity” (297). We see Louisa’s “limited opportunity,” but we also see her growth, for towards the novels conclusion, Dickens writes of Louisa’s awareness, inking, “Herself again a wife—a mother—lovingly watchful of her children, ever careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a childhood of the body, as knowing it to be even a more beautiful thing . . . the wisest” (285). Within Louisa’s refusal of the commodified, unquestioning mind, for fancy should never “be despised” (285), we see her rise.

To question is to use imagination; imagination leads to a hypothesis; a hypothesis leads to experimentation and facts follow. Thus, the underpinning of the industrial revolution, with its looms, iron, and presses, could never exist without imagination. For as Wordsworth alludes to in The Prelude, if the color of life, the very color of nature is removed from society — than the advancement of society is removed . . . and facts won’t have a leg to stand on.

Works Cited

Barnard, Robert. Imagery and Theme in the Novels of Dickens. New York: Humanities Press, 1974.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004.

Fabrizio, Richard. “Wonderful No-Meaning: Language and the Psychopathology of the Family in Hard Times.” New Casebooks: David Copperfield and Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Ed. John Peck. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 219-54.

Lodge, David. “The Rhetoric of Hard Times.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hard Times: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Paul Edward Gray. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969. 86-105.

Orwell, George. “Charles Dickens.” Discussions of Charles Dickens. Ed. William Ross Clark. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1961. 30-46.

Paroissien, David. Selected Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. David Paroissien. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985.

Wordsworth, William. “The Prelude.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Vol. 2A. 7th ed. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: Norton & Company, 2000. 305-383.