Beginning Hard Times
Jan. 5th, 2010 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloHard Times reads like it was hard work- for Dickens I mean. Its opening doesn't flow. It's laboured, contrived, more than usually intent on making a point. There's a whiff of the tract about it. The fact that Dickens is off his native heath- in a part of the world he doesn't know well- is part of the problem. Coketown is a stage set- an agglomeration of hastily constructed theatrical flats. His characters walk through it and we see and experience very little. It's not at all like Dickens' London- which he so intensely loved and detested.
Tom Gradgrind is a hard man- with a hard, utilitarian philosophy- but he adopts a little travelling girl on a whim, going clean against everything we've been told about him- and the little travelling girl- who had a perfectly secure future among her own kind- accepts without demur. All this counter-intuitive stuff happens simply to set up the plot and the moral. Dickens novels often end in grindingly implausible contrivance, but I can't think of another one that begins that way.
Still, this is Dickens- and he's brilliant. The people, when they're not behaving out of character, are delicious. Remember Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen- with their increasingly lurid tales of childhood deprivation? Well, they learned everything they ever knew from Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, sir!
Tom Gradgrind is a hard man- with a hard, utilitarian philosophy- but he adopts a little travelling girl on a whim, going clean against everything we've been told about him- and the little travelling girl- who had a perfectly secure future among her own kind- accepts without demur. All this counter-intuitive stuff happens simply to set up the plot and the moral. Dickens novels often end in grindingly implausible contrivance, but I can't think of another one that begins that way.
Still, this is Dickens- and he's brilliant. The people, when they're not behaving out of character, are delicious. Remember Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen- with their increasingly lurid tales of childhood deprivation? Well, they learned everything they ever knew from Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, sir!
