Hard Times

Now this is an interesting one for Charlie Delta. A far cry from the mammoth undertakings of Bleak House etc, Hard Times cuts an incredibly slim volume. Stranger still, it's set not in London at all but in a fictional Industrial town called Coketown.

The story follows the Gradgrind family - Mr Thomas Gradgrind who believes that the only education that his children - and those who attend his school - need can be purely found in books. Gradgrind's and his close friend Josiah Bounderby discover that one of the girls at the school is from a travelling family, and has been abandoned by her father. Gradgrind adopts her. At the same time, we start a thread one of the workers, Stephen Blackpool. Stephen's wife is rarely on the scene, and when she is is drunk and asks for money, but he has a close friend in Rachel. He approaches Mr Bounderby to ask how he can get a divorce and marry Rachel, but is rebuffed by the latter.

This encompasses most of the first ‘part’ of the book, which is split into three. Later on, Mr Gradgrind's daughter Louisa marries the much older Mr Bounderby, starting her journey of suppressed feelings and obedience. Stephen flees after being accused of a great robbery, and the new politician on the scene James Harthouse seems to be causing trouble all over.

The book is satisfying in a lot of ways, its length being just one. It maintains some of the usual wit, and repeated character traits that end up becoming jokes. There's a bit of Shakespearean stuff here too, some love affairs, some secret parentage, and some overheard conversations, that sort of thing. And the mystery around the robbery just pokes a toe into the crime fiction we saw in the previous book, Bleak House.

But in some ways this book lacked the satisfaction of some of the longer novels. You don't feel the need to take a break from words after reading it, first of all. Second of all, Dickens is rarely afraid of writing in dialect, and does so especially with the workers and with Stephen Blackpool, and so with the lisping Mr Sleary. Some of the long passages of speech by these men can be hard going, owing to the need for interpretation. Perhaps for this one I might recommend an audiobook.