Sometimes the books you don't read because they're the books everyone tells you that you have to read turn out to be the books you should read. So it was for me with Dickens (and George Eliot and others) but having started during Covid I'm now sorry to be nearing the end of his novels.
Hard Times is a short story by Dickens' standards, and very unusual in that it is set out of London in Coketown, a fictional northern mill town. It's the perfect setting of course for a Dickens polemic on the exploitation of the working man, as it partly is, as well as an exploration of the absurdities of the human condition, in this particular case the utilitarianism of Mr Gradgrind and the faux humility of Josiah Bounderby.
Dickens has fun at the expense of both men. Bounderby, the "bully of humility" who could have been the inspiration for Monty Python's famous Four Yorkshiremen sketch in which they play a game of competitive poverty. "I hadn't a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn't know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty," Bounderby lies, to anyone who will listen. Gradgrind, a character so sharply defined his name entered the dictionary as "one who values factual knowledge at the expense of imagination and feeling", is not quite so grotesque but is not a man you'd want to go for a pint with.
A sense of fun is not something I'd expected to find in Dickens, but it's on full display here. Character names are always an adventure - Tulkinghorn, Sweedlepipe, Uriah Heep - but here M'Choakumchild, a teacher in the Gradgrind school of reason, is the standout. It's clear Dickens was enjoying himself, and throughout this book, which is not always the cheeriest the playful, clever and often barbed language can be funny and entertaining.
And the more I read Dickens, the more convinced I am that nothing ever really changes. In December I read Oliver Twist, which was perhaps the most unsettling of the novels so far as its depictions of childhood poverty and deprivation as well as domestic violence, chime with modern narratives of the UK in 2024. There may no longer be workhouses or children sold into lives of slavery by unscrupulous parish officers, but they are learning in classrooms so cold they cannot hold pens, and more than ever face food poverty.
There is tremendous power in the arts and literature, as Dickens showed in his own time, and that we have seen recently in victims of the Post Office scandal finally receiving recognition for the injustices they faced, and hopefully reparation.
Dickens today would probably be written off by Tories and the right wing press as 'woke'. But that's because he tells important and inconvenient truths. And we should read his novels, not just because they are wonderful and entertaining, but because they are a powerful reminder that real change takes courage, determination and persistence.