It’s a Cold, Hard World Out There

When examining Hard Times for evidence of beauty, it is conspicuously absent from basically all aspects of the book, especially in the first half of the novel,. Darkness, ugliness, and cold, hard facts are the only things clearly evident. The description of Coketownon depicts this perfectly:

“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like on another.” (p.26)

This quote summarizes the feel of the book very well. Looking at the language here, Dickens uses words like “melancholy,” “unnatural,” “smoke and ashes,” “machinery,” “ill-smelling dye,” and “monotonously.” This place he describes then is an industrial town, composed of machinery and the nasty byproducts of the industrial work. It is a place where the work, the town itself, and the people who live there are all repetitive and dull. It is an “unnatural” place, to use Dickens own word. It is challenging, nigh impossible, to dig out any sort of beauty from this picture he paints for us. Yet, we said in our manifesto that there is always some form of beauty present in literature even if it is not found on the surface. The question arises, then, of where the beauty is present in this novel. When it comes to beauty, we have to remember that it doesn’t come in only a pure visual aesthetic form. There are many types of beauty: beauty in nature, yes, but also beauty of imagination and fancy, beauty of childhood and innocence, and beauty of fun, and more. All of these forms of beauty are sorely lacking from the factual and industrial Coketown, (with the one exception of the circus which is meant to provide juxtaposition for this), and this lack turns the inhabitants’ lives into something exactly like how the town is described: cold, hard, dark, and monotonous. The characters hardly even live. They simply endure and carry on, and not much more. They are not happy and do not enjoy the ride that is life.

The character Stephen Blackpool embodies these characteristics. As he describes it in the novel, all lives consist of both roses and thorns, but his life seemed to both lack the roses and have someone else’s thorns. He is always, in his words, in a muddle. His life is hard. He lives in a tiny apartment with a “tainted atmosphere” (p.67), he has a miserable wife who treats him poorly and no one can or will help him be rid of her, and all he does day in and day out is work in the factory without adequate compensation or recognition. And yet, he also barely asks for a thing, not expecting much in return, and simply endures his unhappy condition. All the poor man gets in return for his dedication is undeserved accusations, slander upon his honorable name, and eventually death. There is no beauty in Blackpool’s life and he suffers immensely for it.

All these points seem to further prove there is no beauty in this novel. But I think that is exactly the atmosphere Dickens wanted to create in order to prove a point about beauty itself. His intention with Hard Times seems a direct statement that people need beauty, in all it’s wonderful and various forms, in their lives to make it a full life that they can enjoy. Without beauty, life lacks the essential parts that make it worth living. As Louisa says in replying to Bounderby’s proposal, “What does it matter?” (p.97). She is apathetic even to a decision as seemingly important as marrying someone, because it doesn’t seem to matter. Life as a whole doesn’t seem to matter. Nothing seems to matter without those beautiful components of nature, innocence, fun, and imagination that are missing. Tom Gradgrind realizes this as he sees how miserable Louisa is as a result of his cold, factual, and intentionally non-beautiful upbringing of his children, which is what Dickens wants his public to realize too when reading this novel.

I see this novel as Dickens’ protest to the industrialization of the world that seems to be both taking people further and further away from all those forms of beauty that are essential to life, and replacing that beauty of the world with machines and facts. Hard Times gradually incorporates more beauty as it nears the end, because Tom realizes the truth of these ideas and, hopefully, the readership does also. Although much of this novel is obviously not beautiful, it still contains an important message about it: beauty in Hard Times comes in the form of shining a spotlight on the importance of beauty in the world.