Hard Times

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854.  (Pocket Books ed., Supplementary Material written by Kathleen Heal, 2007).

There was a library in Coketown to which general access was easy.  Mr. Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library — a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up sane. It was a disheartening circumstance but a melancholy fact that even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths, of common men and women! They sometimes after fifteen hours’ work, sat down to read mere fables about men and women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their own. They took Defore to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker. Mr. Gradrgrind was forever working in print and out of print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product. (Chapter VIII).

COMMENT

The "Enriched Classics" edition has a note to say that the British Parliament passed the Public Libraries Act in 1850 which created the British public library system. Dickens didn't think the public library was primarily a means of education or job training. Rather, he imagines it as a form of escapism, a way to improve the dreary lives of oppressed factory workers in the Industrial Revolution.  The hilarious opening chapters lampoon the notion of education based solely on facts and practicality. The aptly named teacher Mr. McChoakumchild instructs his pupils that it is illogical to use wallpaper with horses printed on it since they would never glue actual horses to their living room walls. Dickens indicates the high high moral character of certain working-class characters through their reading habits. Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus clown, reads Arabian Nights tales to her illiterate father. Stephen Blackpool, a scrupulously honest factory worker, has a room with little in it besides a bed and a few books. To Dickens the fiction writer, reading fiction develops what we might  these days call “emotional intelligence."  Evidence bears Dickens out. Researchers have found that reading literature actually does engender higher levels of empathy and tolerance. [1]

[1] Julianne Chiaet. "Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy," Scientific American, October 4, 2013.