‘Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy
between the case of the Coketown population and the case of the little
Gradgrinds?’
Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel Hard Times certainly leads us to the conclusion that there is some
point of connection between the Gradgrind children – treated to a soulless and
unimaginative education and upbringing - and the labourers in Bounderby’s
mill - workers toiling at the forefront of Britain’s industrial revolution.
For both groups – the Gradgrind (and other) children, and
the factory workers - Dickens’s promotion of imagination, as opposed to the
harsh reality of ‘fact’, is all-important to the book’s success. And in this
focus he effectively sidesteps the economic arguments surrounding the treatment
of factory workers, in favour of an argument which is much more philosophical
in bent. At an early stage in the novel we find the following description of
the factories:
‘The lights in the great factories…looked, when they were
illuminated, like Fairy palaces – or the travellers by express-train said so’
While this at first may seem critical of the unknowing train
passengers, unaware of the realities of hard labour, Dickens’s ‘solution’ is
not to confront his readers with graphic scenes of suffering, like Gaskell, or
the producers of The Mill. By way of
the most obvious example, Dickens chooses not even to mention child labourers in the factories themselves, despite his
ostensible interest in both childrearing and working conditions in the novel.
Children are used instead to illustrate Dickens’s imaginative preferences - for
him, the world would be a better place if everyone, including the workers,
could have, nurture and maintain the kind of childlike wonder which mistakes
mills for the castles of a fairytale.
The workers are compared with children not only in this
idealised glorification of the imaginative life but also in actuality –
something largely prompted by their relationship to their employers and
inability to speak. The hands are described specifically as ‘portentous
infants’, conjuring up the etymology of the word ‘infant’ from Latin ‘infans’ (‘unable to speak’). Stephen
Blackpool, the novel’s working class hero, is characterised by his laborious
expression - simplistic in its syntax, and (often) confused in its content – ‘Let
‘em be. Let everything be. Let all sorts alone. ’Tis a muddle, and that’s aw’.
Stephen needs Dickens – the articulate
novelist – to speak for him, just as Elizabeth Gaskell had described herself,
in the preface to Mary Barton (1848),
as ‘anxious…to give some utterance to the agony which, from time to time,
convulses the dumb people’ [emphasis mine].
While the speechless and suffering , like Stephen, can
become ‘portentous’ symbols for change in the novelists’ works, when the working
classes speak for themselves the
effect on middle class readers is less successful – even threatening. The
treatment of unions in Hard Times and
the emphasis on sound in the riot sequence of Gaskell’s North and South (1855) present the voice of the working classes as
an unequivocally dangerous one, and the wise labourer, such as Gaskell’s Bessy,
realises silence is the more sensible option:
‘folk would go with them if they saw them striving and
starving wi’ dumb patience; but if there was once any noise o’ fighting and
struggling…all was up’.
As workers are children, good masters do not treat them as
equals – instead good employers are depicted as firm but fair parents,
shepherding the moral development of their chargers. In North and South, Margaret is at first horrified by the scheme which
reduces hands to juveniles (‘my informant….spoke as if the masters would like
their hands to be merely tall, large children…with a blind unreasoning kind of
obedience’) and Thornton defensive about the role he plays in this (‘he
considers our people in the condition of children, while I deny that we, the
masters, have anything to do with keeping them so’).
Gaskell shows both Margaret and Thornton to be wrong. There
is nothing unsavoury, we are encouraged to believe, in the father/child
relationship between employer and employee if Thornton plays his part with
proper attention and care. The aim is not that the working classes find their
voice but that it will be unnecessary for
them to do so, via dangerous unions or, worse, rioting, thanks to the
efforts of the middle classes – be they novelists or factory owners. Dickens’s promotion of the imaginative life is part of
this same impulse.
What should be ‘J’ in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know
here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!
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