Hard Times Again

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Amid the wreck of capitalism and socialism, Dickens is timelier than ever.
By Theodore Dalrymple | January 23, 2012

We live in hard times, and all the

indications are that they may get much, even very much, harder. No one, at any rate,
would take a bet that they wont.
The number of children in America claiming subsidized meals in school has shot up; the
homeless are increasing by the hour; the formerly prosperous are laid off without so
much as a thank you; the young struggle to find any work at all; beggars are making a
comeback on the streets of cities as if they had been hiding all these years, waiting for
the right moment to emerge from their subterranean lairs into the world above.
The February bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, then, could hardly come at a
more appropriate moment in economic history, for Dickens was the revealer, the
scourge, the prose poet, of urban destitutiona destitution that, in our waking
nightmares, we fear may yet return.
Dickens knew whereof he wrote. It was his habit to walk miles through the streets of
London, and no manexcept perhaps Henry Mayhewwas more observant than he.
Often accused by his detractors of exaggerating reality, he claimed in the preface to
Martin Chuzzlewit that he merely saw what others did not see, or chose not to see, and

put it into plain words. What was caricature to some was to him no more than the
unvarnished truth. He held up a mirror to his age.
The adjective Dickensian is more laden with connotation than the adjective that
pertains to any other writer: Jamesian, for example, or Joycean, even Shakespearian. We
think of workhouses, of shabby tenements with bedding of rags, of schools where
sadistic and exploitative schoolmasters beat absurdities into the heads of hungry
children, of heartless proponents of the cold charity, of crooked lawyers spinning out
their cases in dusty, clerk-ridden chambers. We think of Oliver Twist asking for more, of
Wackford Squeers exclaiming, Heres richness for you!, as he tastes the thin slops his
school doles out to his unfortunate pupils, of Mrs. Gamp looking at her patient and
saying, Hed make a lovely corpse!
If he had been only a social commentator, though, Dickens would have been forgotten
by all except specialist historians of his age. But he is not forgotten; he survives the
notorious defects of his bookstheir sometimes grotesque sentimentality, their
sprawling lack of construction, their frequent implausibilityto achieve whatever
immortality literature can confer. Over and over again, in passage after passage, the
sheer genius of his writing shines from the page and is the despair of all prose writers
after him.
When Dickens called himself the Inimitable, he was speaking no more than the truth;
he was the greatest comic writer in his, or perhaps in any other, language. And the
comedy runs deep: it is not trivial, for while it depicts absurdity, pomposity, and even
cruelty, it has the curious effect of reconciling us to life even as it lays human
weaknesses out for our inspection.
Sairey Gamp, for example, the drunken, slatternly nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, is as
undesirable a creature as it is possible to be. Who would want to be nursed by her? She
is, in effect, the exemplar of the need for the reform of an entire profession. Yet by a
peculiar kind of alchemy Dickens makes us glad that there is a world in which a Mrs.
Gamp can exist. A world without characters such as she would be the poorer for their
absence.
When, gloriously, she says of the gin in the teapot, Dont ask me to take none, but put
it on the chimbley piece, and let me put my lips to it when I feel so dispoged, our
hearts leap with an indefinable joy. The verbal genius of the simple replacement of the s
in disposed by the g delights us. (Though no doubt Dickens would have told us that he
actually had heard such a transposition rather than invented it, so that his genius was in
noticing and remembering, not in inventing, which is a reproach to our own lack of
observation.) The slatterns ridiculous pretension to gentility and refinement, while
maintaining her slovenliness, incites us to reflect upon our own pretensionspretense
being the permanent condition of mankind.
And while our love of Mrs. Gamp, tinged as it no doubt is by guilt that we can feel any
affection for so disgraceful a being, does not prevent us from recognizing the obvious
need for nursing to be placed on a more respectable footing, it also performs the
function of restraining our wish for soulless perfection. A perfect world, or rather an
attempted perfect world, in which there were no Dickensian characters would be a
living hell.

I think this is what a student of English at the North Korean Foreign Languages Institute
was driving at when he sidled up to me in Pyongyang and said, quickly and sotto voce
(for unscripted communication with foreigners was dangerous for North Koreans),
Reading Shakespeare and Dickens is the greatest, the only, joy of my life. I was, of
course, in great admiration of the feat of his having learned English of such proficiency
that he could appreciate the two authors while never having left his hermetic native hell
and communicate his enthusiasm for them so elegantly. No doubt Dickens had been
taught to him as a means of demonstrating the diabolical nature of capitalist society; but
the lesson he had drawn from Dickens was quite otherwise, that Mrs. Gamp (for
example), impoverished and degraded as she was, at least spoke in what was
unmistakably her own voice and not that compelled by any political master. She was
free as no North Korean was free.

As we live in hard times, it is worth considering Dickenss novel of that title, especially
as political economy is one of its most important themes. Has this book, published more
than a century and a half ago, anything to say to us about our present predicament,
beyond young Tom Gradgrinds exclamation, For Gods sake, dont talk about
bankers?
Dickens is often reproached for his absence of firm and unequivocal moral, political,
and philosophical outlook. He veers crazily between the ferociously reactionary and the
mushily liberal. He lampoons the disinterested philanthropy of Mrs. Jellyby (in Bleak
House) with the same gusto or ferocity as he excoriates the egotism of Mr. Veneering (in
Our Mutual Friend). He suggests that businessmen are heartless swine (Bounderby in
Hard Times) or disinterestedly charitable (the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby).
He satirizes temperance (in The Pickwick Papers) as much as he derides drunkenness
(in Martin Chuzzlewit). The evil Jew (in Oliver Twist) is matched by the saintly Jew (in
Our Mutual Friend). As Stephen Blackpool, the working-class hero of Hard Times says,
its aw a muddle.
George Orwell, in his famous essay on Dickens, saw in this philosophical and moral
muddle not a weakness but a strength, a generosity of spirit, an openness to the
irreducible complexity of mankinds moral situation, an immunity to what he called the
smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls. And indeed, the
principal target of Hard Times is such an orthodoxy, namely a hard-nosed utilitarianism
combined with an unbending liberalism. (Liberal in the economic, not cultural, sense.)
The principal bearers of the doctrine are Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby. Gradgrind
is a teacher whose statement of pedagogical philosophy is surely one of the greatest
opening passages of any novel ever written:
Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are
wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the
minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on
which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

By the end of the novel, Gradgrind has learned the insufficiency of facts for the conduct
of human life, as he might have done merely by a little self-examination or reflection on
the nature of moral and aesthetic judgment. It cannot be said that Gradgrind is a
caricature, a character so exaggerated that he never did or could exist: passage after
passage in Hard Times parallels almost exactly the account of John Stuart Mills
education in his Autobiography, published 19 years after the novel. Furthermore, the
minds of reasoning animals exactly captures the flavor of much recent scientistic
writing about the human condition. Like hope in the human breast, scientism springs
eternal in the human mind.
Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, the mill owner, claims to have come up in the world the
hard way:
My mother left me to my grandmother, and, according to the best of my remembrance,
my grandmother was the wickedest and the worst old woman that ever lived. If I got a
little pair of shoes by any chance, she would take em off and sell em for drink . She
kept me in an egg-box. As soon as I was big enough to run away, of course I ran away.
Then I became a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about
and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me.
This turns out to be quite untrue. In fact, his parents made sacrifices on his behalf, but
the lie justifies his philosophy, that workers who ask for higher pay want turtle soup to
be fed them from a golden spoon, that the slightest regulation of child labor will drive
employers into bankruptcy and force them to abandon their factories, that the smoke
belching from the mills not only cannot be reduced but is actually healthful for the
lungs, that any form of collective action by the hands is the first stage of violent
revolution, that any form of charity is the encouragement of idleness. In short: What
you couldnt show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and salable in the dearest,
was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

Again, this is scarcely caricature. During the Irish famine,

liberals like Charles Trevelyanat the time to the left of the political spectrumargued
that to provide any form of relief to the starving was to encourage the very habits and
practices, to say nothing of the overpopulation, that caused the famine in the first place.
An abstract truth, as they believed it to be, overrode all considerations of humanity. True
compassion consisted of letting events take their course.

One might have supposed, then, that Dickens would be much in favor of the unions; but
in fact his depiction of the union leader, Slackbridge, in Hard Times is very unfavorable.
He realized that demagogic leaders were perfectly capable of ensnaring good men en
masse:
Slackbridge was not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humored [as
his audience]; he substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe solid
sense . Strange as it always is to consider any assembly in submissively resigning
itself to the dreariness of any complacent person it was even particularly affecting to
see this crowd of honest faces, whose honesty in the main no competent observer free
from bias could possibly doubt, agitated by such a leader.
Under the impact of todays economic crisis, the shrillness of opposing camps, of
diagnosers, prognosticators, and curers, has increased. Even the same financial page of
the same newspaper may have articles proposing diametrically opposed solutions, the
only thing in common between them being the certainty with which they are offered.
Each has a single simple principle, Gradgrindian or not, that is the supposed key to
happiness, prosperity, economic growth. But now more than ever it is necessary to
suppress our inherent tendency to seek the key to all questions, and reading Dickens
may help us to do it.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan
Institute.

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14 Responses to Hard Times Again

1. Bill_R, on January 23rd, 2012 at 11:24 am Said:
Nice work.
2. David Green, on January 24th, 2012 at 10:59 am Said:
Worth keeping and rereading from time to time.
3. David Lindsay, on January 24th, 2012 at 5:08 pm Said:
In The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, Fr Ian Ker identifies
Charles Dickens (1906) both as Chestertons best work and as the key to
understanding his Catholicism. It is a typically Chestertonian paradox that
while Dickens was nothing if not ignorant of and prejudiced against Catholicism
as well as the Middle Ages, it is his unconsciously Catholic and Mediaeval ethos
that is the heart of Chestertons critical study.
First, Chestertons Dickens celebrated the ordinary, and rejoiced in sheer living
and even sheer being. He was originally a higher optimist whose joy is in

inverse proportion to the grounds for so rejoicing, because he simply falls in

love with the universe, and those love her with most intensity who love her
with least cause. Hence the exaggeration of Dickenss caricatures, expressing
both the heights of the highs and the depths of the lows in the life of one who
looks at the world in this way.
For, secondly, Dickens created holy fools: Toots in Dombey and Son, Miss
Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, the Misses Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, to
name but a few. Dickens also created a personal devil in every one of his
books, figures with the atrocious hilarity of gargoyles. In either case, since
the everyday world is so utterly extraordinary and extraordinary things so much
a part of the everyday, so the absurd is utterly real and the real is utterly absurd.
Postmodern, or what? Read Dickens, then read Chesterton on Dickens, and then
re-read Dickens: who needs wilful French obscurantism in the name of irony?
And thirdly, then, Dickens was the true successor of Merry England, unlike his
pallid contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites and Gothicists, whose subtlety
and sadness was in fact the spirit of the present day after all. It was Dickens
who had the things of Chaucer: the love of large jokes and long stories and
brown ale and all the white roads of England; story within story, every man
telling a tale; and something openly comic in mens motley trades.
Dickenss defence of Christmas was therefore a fight for the old European
festival, Pagan and Christian, i.e., for that trinity of eating, drinking and
praying that to moderns appears irreverent, unused as the modern mind is to
the holy day which is really a holiday. Dickenss defence of Christmas was
therefore a fight for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian, i.e., for
that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent,
unused as the modern mind is to the holy day which is really a holiday.
Fr Ker traces these themes in Orthodox and The Everlasting Man. The former
presents Catholicism, in profoundly Dickensian terms, as that mixture of the
familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly termed romance,
which meets the need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and
an idea of welcome. Yet so to view the world is precisely to realise that there
is something the matter, which is why pagans have always been conscious of
the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else, since (and this is obviously
much more controversial) Original Sin in the only part of Christian theology
which can be proved, so that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or
sensible condition, but rather the normal itself is an abnormality. Once again,
this is like Postmodernism, only older, wiser, better.
Better not least because, for Chesterton, it was this view of the worlds flawed
goodness that made Dickens a social reformer, since he recognised peoples
degraded dignity. One is made by Christianity fond of this world, even in order
to change it, in contrast to simple (one might say, Whig or Marxist) optimism
or simple pessimism (such as that of much of the political Right), each of which
discourages reform. We have to hate [the world] enough to want to change it,
and yet love it enough to think it worth changing, for it is at once an ogres

castle, to be stormed, and yet our own cottage, to which we can return at
evening.
Such was the view of Dickens and of Chesterton; and such is the Christian view,
uniquely, as all of Christianitys critics unwittingly concede by simultaneously
accusing it both of excessive optimism and of excessive pessimism. Chesterton
presciently predicted that an age of unbelief would be an age of conservatism (in
the worst sense), whereas for the orthodox in the hearts of men, God has been
put under the feet of Satan, so that there can always be a revolution; for a
revolution is a restoration. Furthermore, A strict rule is not only necessary for
ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling, since a fixed and familiar ideal is
necessary to any sort of revolution.
4. Sean Gillhoolley, on January 25th, 2012 at 7:57 am Said:
Interesting, reading Dickens I was never overwhelmed by his descriptions of
poverty. Poverty is a fact of life, and will always be so. What I could not help
but noticing was how vile the job creators were when the government allowed
them to practice laissez-faire economics. Children were working for pennies,
and workplace injuries were commonplace. Injured workers were tossed aside to
figure out how to survive in their new condition, as there were always new
workers waiting to take their place. It was an abusive system that could only be
brought into check with government regulations. Many are calling for removing
the onerous regulations these days, but I think we need more regulations,
tougher ones. After all, no one was charged with a crime over the financial
collapse that has inflicted far more misery than any shoplifter ever has. We need
more regulations, and lots of them. We have to remove all the loopholes that
allow people like Romney to get away with paying under 15%. I pray that
Romney is the Republican choice, because it will be near impossible for him to
argue that taxes are too high for the rich.
5. Dalrymple Fan, on January 25th, 2012 at 9:51 am Said:
Thanks to The American Conservative for featuring an article from Theodore
Dalrymple. I know that hes written here in the past and I hope to see more of
him in the future.
6. Vanmind, on January 25th, 2012 at 12:28 pm Said:
Also Lao Tzi is good. The point is resisting temptations to become selfrighteously opinionated through any pretense of being more observant than
mere mortals (as demanded by Dickensian egotism and by positivists
everywhere). Just be (as Dickensian characters are).
7. peter connor, on January 25th, 2012 at 7:59 pm Said:
Dickens novels are secular in that they portray poverty and human degradation
as arising universally from the actions of mankind. Pure inexplicable evil does
not play a part, which makes the world of Dickens rather more comfortable for
me.

And his emphasis on human dignity and virtue at all levels, as being primarily
kindness and tolerance, is uplifting.
But his novels also present the philosophical point that human dignity cannot be
prescribed and measured by economic or political nostrums: the French
revolution, for example, produces terror and inhuman behavior even worse than
the overthrown tyranny, which can be met only by individual human courage
and sacrifice. That is what makes him a great novelist rather than a mere
polemicist.
8. Elaine, on January 27th, 2012 at 11:47 pm Said:
This is Dalrymple at his best as he explains why some of us like Dickens the
best. Honesty without ridicule is rare. Combine that with stimulating writing
and that is why I admire both men.
9. sd goh, on January 31st, 2012 at 8:20 am Said:
Even though one may not agree with everything that Dr.Dalrymple says, one
thing is certain, his articles seldom fail to make one think and ponder deeply
about the profound issues which endure so long as humankind exists: politics,
moral & social behavior and so forth. He is, in my humble opinion, the Orwell
of our time, and if there is a George Orwell Pursuit of the Truth Award, he
surely, ought to be its first recipient.
10. richard wilson, on January 31st, 2012 at 12:58 pm Said:
Dalrymples The Real Poverty essay is the best. It may be called something
else but he explains poverty very well. I should know: Iam poor, was born in
worse conditions than I care to remember and very well may be poor when I die
yet my spirit is rich. I do not drag my knuckles nor do I breathe thru my mouth. I
have a degree and can explain European history with the adroitness of an actual
paid historian, I speak well and even dress above my means but Dickens knew
my lot .
11. George Balanchine, on February 6th, 2012 at 4:05 am Said:
Well, well. Theodore Dalrymple a Social-Democrat! Who would have thought
it?
Sincerely,
George Balanchine
12. Rita Larkin, on February 6th, 2012 at 5:30 am Said:
Can Chesterton have been accurate when he speaks of Dickens anticatholicism? He excoriates the Gordon rioters and anti-catholic bigots in
Barnaby Rudge. The Catholic characters are seen in a benign light in this novel.
13. Nergol, on February 6th, 2012 at 3:56 pm Said:

Dickens survives because his basic message is simple and eternal: Be good to
each other, and use some common sense.
Yes, Dickens was a social crusader, but he wasnt one who believed that simply
passing this or that law was going to do the job of making the world a better
place. If he had believed that, and if his novels reflected that, then, as Dalrymple
notes, his novels would today be historical curiosities on the level of Edward
Bellamys Looking Backward. Some would not even have had any relevance in
his own time by the time Bleak House was published in 1853, the Chancery
court system it excoriated had been largely reformed. And yet the experience of
dealing with an uncaring bureaucracy that consistently denies justice to the
people is a pretty universal one; one that we can certainly still relate to 150 years
later. And what is Oliver Twist other than the story of a boy without parents who
slips through the cracks of an badly-run and fundamentally uncaring social
welfare system, ends up homeless, and spends the rest of the novel trying to
keep out of the clutches of a gang? Change a few details and it could just as
easily take place in modern-day Chicago or Los Angeles. Notice too that Oliver
is not saved by that system, but by the kindness and charity of individuals
another thing that is just as relevant today as when it was written.
As long as selfishness, meanness, and stupidity are part of the human condition,
which is to say, forever (sorry Gene Roddenberry), and as long as kindness,
mercy, and common sense are things that people can be moved to employ,
Dickens will remain relevant.
14. Happy Birthday to our Mutual Friend First Thoughts | A First Things
Blog, on February 7th, 2012 at 9:36 am Said:
[...] times already, but Theodore Dalrymple did a particularly good job of it in
his essay for the American Conservative on the lessons of Hard Times: Dickens
is often reproached for his absence of firm and unequivocal [...]