In comparison with most of Dickens’s novels, Hard Times is contained within a narrow compass; and this, with the further necessity of securing to each successive small portion of the story a certain immediate degree of effectiveness, accounts, in some measure, for the peculiarity of the impression left by this story upon many of its readers. Short as the story relatively is, few of Dickens’s fictions were elaborated with so much care. He had not intended to write a new story for a twelvemonth, when, as he says, “the idea laid hold of him by the throat in a very violent manner,” and the labour, carried on under conditions of peculiar irksomeness, “used him up” after a quite unaccustomed fashion. The book thus acquired a precision of form and manner which commends it to the French school of criticism rather than to lovers of English humour in its ampler forms and more flowing moods. At the same time the work has its purpose so visibly imprinted on its front, as almost to forbid our regarding it in the first instance apart from the moral which avowedly it is intended to inculcate. This moral, by no means new with Dickens, has both a negative and a positive side. “Do not harden your hearts,” is the negative injunction, more especially do not harden them against the promptings of that human kindness which should draw together man and man, old and young, rich and poor; and keep your sympathies fresh by bringing nourishment to them through channels which prejudice or short-sightedness would fain narrow or stop up. This hortatory purpose assumes the form of invective and even of angry menace; and “utilitarian economists, skeletons of school-masters, commissioners of facts, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds,” are warned: “The poor you have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives, so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.”
No authority, however eminent, not even Mr. Ruskin’s, is required to teach reflecting minds the infinite importance of the principles which Hard Times was intended to illustrate. Nor is it of much moment whether the illustrations are always exact; whether the “commissioners of facts” have reason to protest that the unimaginative character of their processes does not necessarily imply an unimaginative purpose in their ends; whether there is any actual Coketown in existence within a hundred miles of Manchester; or whether it suffices that “everybody knew what was meant, but every cotton-spinning town said it was the other cotton-spinning town.” The chief personal grievance of Stephen Blackpool has been removed or abated, but the “muddle” is not yet altogether cleared up which prevents the nation and the “national dustmen,” its law-givers, from impartially and sympathetically furthering the interest of all classes. In a word, the moral of Hard Times has not yet lost its force, however imperfect or unfair the method may have been in which it is urged in the book.
Unfortunately, however, a work of art with a didactic purpose is only too often prone to exaggerate what seems of special importance for the purpose in question, and to heighten contrasts which seem likely to put it in the clearest light. “Thomas Gradgrind, sir”—who announces himself with something of the genuine Lancashire roll—and his system are a sound and a laughable piece of satire, to begin with, only here and there marred by the satirist’s imperfect knowledge of the details which he caricatures. The “Manchester School,” which the novel strives to expose, is in itself to a great extent a figment of the imagination, which to this day serves to round many a hollow period in oratory and journalism. Who, it may fairly be asked, were the parliamentary politicians satirized in the member for Coketown, deaf and blind to any consideration but the multiplication-table? But in any case the cause hardly warrants one of its consequences as depicted in the novel—the utter brutalization of a stolid nature like “the Whelp’s.” When Gradgrind’s son is about to be shipped abroad out of reach of the penalties of his crime, he reminds his father that he merely exemplifies the statistical law that “so many people out of so many will be dishonest.” When the virtuous Bitzer is indignantly asked whether he has a heart, he replies that he is physiologically assured of the fact; and to the further inquiry whether this heart of his is accessible to compassion, makes answer that “it is accessible to reason, and to nothing else.” These returnings of Mr. Gradgrind’s philosophy upon himself savour of the moral justice represented by Gratiano in the fourth act. So, again, Coketown, with its tall chimneys and black river, and its thirteen religious denominations, to which whoever else belonged the working-men did not, is no perverse contradiction of fact. But the influence of Coketown, or of a whole wilderness of Coketowns, cannot justly be charged with a tendency to ripen such a product as Josiah Bounderby, who is not only the “bully of humanity,” but proves to be a mean-spirited impostor in his pretensions to the glory of self-help. In short, Hard Times errs by its attempt to prove too much.
Apart, however, from the didactic purposes which overburden it, the pathos and humour of particular portions of this tale appear to me to have been in no wise overrated. The domestic tragedy of Stephen and Rachael has a subdued intensity of tenderness and melancholy of a kind rare with Dickens, upon whom the example of Mrs. Gaskell in this instance may not have been without its influence. Nor is there anything more delicately and at the same time more appropriately conceived in any of his works than poor Rachael’s dominion over the imagination as well as over the affections of her noble-minded and unfortunate lover: “As the shining stars were to the heavy candle in the window, so was Rachael, in the rugged fancy of this man, to the common experiences of his life.” The love-story of poor Louisa is of a different kind, and more wordy in the telling; yet here also the feelings painted are natural and true. The humorous interest is almost entirely concentrated upon the company of horse-riders; and never has Dickens’s extraordinary power of humorous observation more genially asserted itself. From Mr. Sleary—“thtout man, game-eye”—and his protagonist, Mr. E. W. B. Childers, who, when he shook his long hair, caused it to “shake all at once,” down to Master Kidderminster, who used to form the apex of the human pyramids, and “in whose young nature there was an original flavour of the misanthrope,” these honest equestrians are more than worthy to stand by the side of Mr. Vincent Crummles and his company of actors; and the fun has here, in addition to the grotesqueness of the earlier picture, a mellowness of its own. Dickens’s comic genius was never so much at its ease and so inexhaustible in ludicrous fancies as in the depiction of such groups as this; and the horse-riders, skilfully introduced to illustrate a truth, wholesome if not novel, would have insured popularity to a far less interesting and to a far less powerful fiction.
The year after that which saw the publication of Hard Times was one in which the thoughts of most Englishmen were turned away from the problems approached in that story. But if the military glories of 1854 had not aroused in him any very exuberant enthusiasm, the reports from the Crimea in the ensuing winter were more likely to appeal to his patriotism as well as to his innate impatience of disorder and incompetence. In the first instance, however, he contented himself with those grumblings to which, as a sworn foe of red tape and a declared disbeliever in our parliamentary system, he might claim to have a special right; and he seems to have been too restless in and about himself to have entered very closely into the progress of public affairs. The Christmas had been a merry one at Tavistock House; and the amateur theatricals of its juvenile company had passed through a most successful season. Their history has been written by one of the performers—himself not the least distinguished of the company, since it was he who, in Dickens’s house, caused Thackeray to roll off his seat in a fit of laughter. Dickens, who with Mark Lemon disported himself among these precocious minnows, was, as our chronicler relates, like Triplet, “author, manager, and actor too,” organiser, deviser, and harmoniser of all the incongruous assembled elements; it was he “who improvised costumes, painted and corked our innocent cheeks, and suggested all the most effective business of the scene.” But, as was usual with him, the transition was rapid from play to something very like earnest; and already, in June, 1855, the Tavistock House theatre produced Mr. Wilkie Collins’s melodrama of The Light-house, which afterwards found its way to the public stage. To Dickens, who performed in it with the author, it afforded “scope for a piece of acting of great power,” the old sailor Aaron Gurnock, which by its savage picturesqueness earned a tribute of recognition from Carlyle. No less a hand than Stanfield painted the scenery, and Dickens himself, besides writing the prologue, introduced into the piece a ballad called The Story of the Wreck, a not unsuccessful effort in Cowper’s manner. At Christmas, 1856-’57, there followed The Frozen Deep, another melodrama by the same author; and by this time the management of his private theatricals had become to Dickens a serious business, to be carried on seriously for its own sake. “It was to him,” he wrote, “like writing a book in company;” and his young people might learn from it “that kind of humility which is got from the earned knowledge that whatever the right hand finds to do must be done with the heart in it, and in a desperate earnest.” The Frozen Deep was several times repeated, on one occasion for the benefit of the daughter of the recently deceased Douglas Jerrold; but by the end of January the little theatre was finally broken up; and though Dickens spent one more winter season at Tavistock House, the shadow was then already falling upon his cheerful home.
In the midst of his children’s Christmas gaieties of the year 1855 Dickens had given two or three public readings to “wonderful audiences” in various parts of the country. A trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins had followed, during which, as he wrote home, he was wandering about Paris all day, dining at all manner of places, and frequenting the theatres at the rate of two or three a night. “I suppose,” he adds, with pleasant self-irony, “as an old farmer said of Scott, I am ‘makin’ mysel’’ all the time; but I seem to be rather a free-and-easy sort of superior vagabond.” And in truth a roving, restless spirit was strong upon him in these years. Already, in April, he speaks of himself as “going off; I don’t know where or how far, to ponder about I don’t know what.” France, Switzerland, Spain, Constantinople, in Mr. Layard’s company, had been successively in his thoughts, and, for aught he knew, Greenland and the North Pole might occur to him next. At the same time he foresaw that the end of it all would be his shutting himself up in some out-of-the-way place of which he had not yet thought, and going desperately to work there.
Before, however, these phantasmagoric schemes had subsided into the quiet plan of an autumn visit to Folkestone, followed during the winter and spring by a residence at Paris, he had at least found a subject to ponder on, which was to suggest an altogether novel element in his next work of fiction. I have said that though, like the majority of his fellow-countrymen, Dickens regarded our war with Russia as inevitable, yet his hatred of all war, and his impatience of the exaggerations of passion and sentiment which all war produces, had preserved him from himself falling a victim to their contagion. On the other hand, when in the winter of 1854-’55 the note of exultation in the bravery of our soldiers in the Crimea began to be intermingled with complaints against the grievously defective arrangements for their comfort and health, and when these complaints, stimulated by the loud-voiced energy of the press, and extending into censures upon the whole antiquated and perverse system of our army administration, speedily swelled into a roar of popular indignation, sincere conviction ranged him on the side of the most uncompromising malcontents. He was at all times ready to give vent to that antipathy against officialism which is shared by so large a number of Englishmen. Though the son of a dock-yard official, he is found roundly asserting that “more obstruction of good things and patronage of bad things has been committed in the dock-yards—as in everything connected with the misdirection of the navy—than in every other branch of the public service put together, including”—the particularisation is hard—“even the Woods and Forests.” He had listened, we may be sure, to the scornful denunciations launched by the prophet of the Latter-Day Pamphlets against Downing Street and all its works, and to the proclamation of the great though rather vague truth that “reform in that Downing Street department of affairs is precisely the reform which were worth all others.” And now the heart-rending sufferings of multitudes of brave men had brought to light, in one department of the public administration, a series of complications and perversities which in the end became so patent to the Government itself that they had to be roughly remedied in the very midst of the struggle. The cry for administrative reform, which arose in the year 1855, however crude the form it frequently took, was in itself a logical enough result of the situation; and there is no doubt that the angriness of the complaint was intensified by the attitude taken up in the House of Commons by the head of the Government towards the pertinacious politician who made himself the mouthpiece of the extreme demands of the feeling outside. Mr. Layard was Dickens’s valued friend; and the share is thus easily explained which—against his otherwise uniform practice of abstaining from public meetings—the most popular writer of the day took in the Administrative Reform meetings, held in Drury Lane Theatre, on June 27, 1855. The speech which he delivered on this occasion, and which was intended to aid in forcing the “whole question” of Administrative Reform upon the attention of an unwilling Government, possesses no value whatever in connexion with its theme, though of course it is not devoid of some smart and telling hits. Not on the platform, but at his desk as an author, was Dickens to do real service to the cause of administrative efficiency. For whilst invective of a general kind runs off like water from the rock of usage, even Circumlocution Offices are not insensible to the acetous force of satire.
Dickens’s caricature of British officialism formed the most generally attractive element in the story of Little Dorrit—originally intended to be called Nobody’s Fault—which he published in monthly numbers, from December, 1855, that year, to June, 1857. He was solemnly taken to task for his audacity by the Edinburgh Review, which reproached him for his persistent ridicule of “the institutions of the country, the laws, the administration, in a word, the government under which we live.” His “charges” were treated as hardly seriously meant, but as worthy of severe reprobation, because likely to be seriously taken by the poor, the uneducated, and the young. And the caricaturist, besides being reminded of the names of several eminent public servants, was specially requested to look, as upon a picture contrasting with his imaginary Circumlocution Office, upon the Post Office, or—for the choice offered was not more extensive—upon the London police, so liberally praised by himself in his own journal. The delighted author of Little Dorrit replied to this not very skilful diatribe in a short and spirited rejoinder in Household Words. In this he judiciously confined himself to refuting an unfounded incidental accusation in the Edinburgh article, and to dwelling, as upon a “Curious Misprint,” upon the indignant query: “How does he account for the career of Mr. Rowland Hill?” whose name, as an example of the ready intelligence of the Circumlocution Office, was certainly an odd erratum. Had he, however, cared to make a more general reply to the main article of the indictment, he might have pointed out that, as a matter of fact, our official administrative machinery had recently broken down in one of its most important branches, and that circumlocution in the literal sense of the word—circumlocution between department and department, or office and office—had been one of the principal causes of the collapse. The general drift of the satire was, therefore, in accordance with fact, and the satire itself salutary in its character. To quarrel with it for not taking into consideration what might be said on the other side, was to quarrel with the method of treatment which satire has at all times considered itself entitled to adopt; while to stigmatise a popular book as likely to mislead the ill-informed, was to suggest a restraint which would have deprived wit and humour of most of their opportunities of rendering service to either a good or an evil cause.
A far more legitimate exception has been taken to these Circumlocution Office episodes as defective in art by the very reason of their being exaggerations. Those best acquainted with the interiors of our government offices may be right in denying that the Barnacles can be regarded as an existing type. Indeed, it would at no time have been easy to point to any office quite as labyrinthine, or quite as bottomless, as that permanently presided over by Mr. Tite Barnacle; to any chief secretary or commissioner so absolutely wooden of fibre as he; or to any private secretary so completely absorbed in his eye-glass as Barnacle junior. But as satirical figures they one and all fulfil their purpose as thoroughly as the picture of the official sanctum itself, with its furniture “in the higher official manner,” and its “general bamboozling air of how not to do it.” The only question is, whether satire which, if it is to be effective, must be of a piece and in its way exaggerated, is not out of place in a pathetic and humorous fiction, where, like a patch of too diverse a thread, it interferes with the texture into which it is introduced. In themselves these passages of Little Dorrit deserve to remain unforgotten amongst the masterpieces of literary caricature; and there is, I do not hesitate to say, something of Swiftian force in their grotesque embodiment of a popular current of indignation. The mere name of the Circumlocution Office was a stroke of genius, one of those phrases of Dickens which Professor Masson justly describes as, whether exaggerated or not, “efficacious for social reform.” As usual, Dickens had made himself well acquainted with the formal or outside part of his subject; the very air of Whitehall seems to gather round us as Mr. Tite Barnacle, in answer to a persistent enquirer who “wants to know” the position of a particular matter, concedes that it “may have been, in the course of official business, referred to the Circumlocution Office for its consideration,” and that “the department may have either originated, or confirmed, a minute on the subject.” In the Household Words paper called A Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent (1850) will be found a sufficiently elaborate study for Mr. Doyce’s experiences of the government of his country, as wrathfully narrated by Mr. Meagles.
With the exception of the Circumlocution Office passages—adventitious as they are to the progress of the action—Little Dorrit exhibits a palpable falling-off in inventive power. Forster illustrates by a striking fac-simile the difference between the “labour and pains” of the author’s short notes for Little Dorrit and the “lightness and confidence of handling” in what hints he had jotted down for David Copperfield. Indeed, his “tablets” had about this time begun to be an essential part of his literary equipment. But in Little Dorrit there are enough internal signs of, possibly unconscious, lassitude. The earlier, no doubt, is, in every respect, the better part of the book; or, rather, the later part shows the author wearily at work upon a canvas too wide for him, and filling it up with a crowd of personages in whom it is difficult to take much interest. Even Mr. Merdle and his catastrophe produce the effect rather of a ghastly allegory than of an “extravagant conception,” as the author ironically called it in his preface, derived only too directly from real life. In the earlier part of the book, in so far as it is not once again concerned with enforcing the moral of Hard Times in a different way, by means of Mrs. Clennam and her son’s early history, the humour of Dickens plays freely over the figure of the Father of the Marshalsea. It is a psychological masterpiece in its way; but the revolting selfishness of Little Dorrit’s father is not redeemed artistically by her own long-suffering; for her pathos lacks the old irresistible ring. Doubtless much in this part of the story—the whole episode, for instance, of the honest turnkey—is in the author’s best manner. But, admirable as it is, this new picture of prison-life and prison-sentiment has an undercurrent of bitterness, indeed, almost of contemptuousness, foreign to the best part of Dickens’s genius. This is still more perceptible in a figure not less true to life than the Father of the Marshalsea himself—Flora, the overblown flower of Arthur Clennam’s boyish love. The humour of the conception is undeniable, but the whole effect is cruel; and, though greatly amused, the reader feels almost as if he were abetting a profanation. Dickens could not have become what he is to the great multitude of his readers had he, as a humourist, often indulged in this cynical mood.