Hard Times by Charles Dickens (ebooks that read to you txt) 📕
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Hard Times (originally Hard Times—For These Times) was published in 1854, and is the shortest novel Charles Dickens ever published. It’s set in Coketown, a fictional mill-town set in the north of England. One of the major themes of the book is the miserable treatment of workers in the mills, and the resistance to their unionization by the mill owners, typified by the character Josiah Bounderby, who absurdly asserts that the workers live a near-idyllic life but they all “expect to be set up in a coach and six, and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon.” The truth, of course, is far different.
The other major topic which Dickens tackles in this novel is the rationalist movement in schooling and the denigration of imagination and fantasy. It begins with the words “Now, what I want is, Facts,” spoken by the wealthy magnate Thomas Gradgrind, who is supervising a class at a model school he has opened. This indeed is Gradgrind’s entire philosophy. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” He is supported and encouraged in this approach by his friend Bounderby. Grandgrind raises his own children on these principles, and, as we discover, in doing so blights their lives.
The novel also follows the story of a particular mill-worker, Stephen Blackpool, who leads a tragic life. He is burdened with an alcoholic, slatternly wife, who is mostly absent from his life, but who returns at irregular intervals to trouble him. This existing marriage, and the near-impossibility of divorce for someone of his class, prevents him marrying Rachael, who is the light of his life. Dickens depicts Stephen as representing the nobility of honest work, and contrasts his character with that of the self-satisfied humbug Josiah Bounderby who represents the worst aspects of capitalism.
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- Author: Charles Dickens
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“But,” said Mr. Gradgrind, slowly, and with hesitation, as well as with a wretched sense of happiness, “if I see reason to mistrust myself for the past, Louisa, I should also mistrust myself for the present and the future. To speak unreservedly to you, I do. I am far from feeling convinced now, however differently I might have felt only this time yesterday, that I am fit for the trust you repose in me; that I know how to respond to the appeal you have come home to make to me; that I have the right instinct—supposing it for the moment to be some quality of that nature—how to help you, and to set you right, my child.”
She had turned upon her pillow, and lay with her face upon her arm, so that he could not see it. All her wildness and passion had subsided; but, though softened, she was not in tears. Her father was changed in nothing so much as in the respect that he would have been glad to see her in tears.
“Some persons hold,” he pursued, still hesitating, “that there is a wisdom of the head, and that there is a wisdom of the heart. I have not supposed so; but, as I have said, I mistrust myself now. I have supposed the head to be all-sufficient. It may not be all-sufficient; how can I venture this morning to say it is! If that other kind of wisdom should be what I have neglected, and should be the instinct that is wanted, Louisa—”
He suggested it very doubtfully, as if he were half unwilling to admit it even now. She made him no answer, lying before him on her bed, still half-dressed, much as he had seen her lying on the floor of his room last night.
“Louisa,” and his hand rested on her hair again, “I have been absent from here, my dear, a good deal of late; and though your sister’s training has been pursued according to—the system,” he appeared to come to that word with great reluctance always, “it has necessarily been modified by daily associations begun, in her case, at an early age. I ask you—ignorantly and humbly, my daughter—for the better, do you think?”
“Father,” she replied, without stirring, “if any harmony has been awakened in her young breast that was mute in mine until it turned to discord, let her thank Heaven for it, and go upon her happier way, taking it as her greatest blessing that she has avoided my way.”
“O my child, my child!” he said, in a forlorn manner, “I am an unhappy man to see you thus! What avails it to me that you do not reproach me, if I so bitterly reproach myself!” He bent his head, and spoke low to her. “Louisa, I have a misgiving that some change may have been slowly working about me in this house, by mere love and gratitude: that what the head had left undone and could not do, the heart may have been doing silently. Can it be so?”
She made him no reply.
“I am not too proud to believe it, Louisa. How could I be arrogant, and you before me! Can it be so? Is it so, my dear?” He looked upon her once more, lying cast away there; and without another word went out of the room. He had not been long gone, when she heard a light tread near the door, and knew that someone stood beside her.
She did not raise her head. A dull anger that she should be seen in her distress, and that the involuntary look she had so resented should come to this fulfilment, smouldered within her like an unwholesome fire. All closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy. The air that would be healthful to the earth, the water that would enrich it, the heat that would ripen it, tear it when caged up. So in her bosom even now; the strongest qualities she possessed, long turned upon themselves, became a heap of obduracy, that rose against a friend.
It was well that soft touch came upon her neck, and that she understood herself to be supposed to have fallen asleep. The sympathetic hand did not claim her resentment. Let it lie there, let it lie.
It lay there, warming into life a crowd of gentler thoughts; and she rested. As she softened with the quiet, and the consciousness of being so watched, some tears made their way into her eyes. The face touched hers, and she knew that there were tears upon it too, and she the cause of them.
As Louisa feigned to rouse herself, and sat up, Sissy retired, so that she stood placidly near the bedside.
“I hope I have not disturbed you. I have come to ask if you would let me stay with you?”
“Why should you stay with me? My sister will miss you. You are everything to her.”
“Am I?” returned Sissy, shaking her head. “I would be something to you, if I might.”
“What?” said Louisa, almost sternly.
“Whatever you want most, if I could be that. At all events, I would like to try to be as near it as I can. And however far off that may be, I will never tire of trying. Will you let me?”
“My father sent you to ask me.”
“No indeed,” replied Sissy. “He told me that I might come in now, but he sent me away from the room this morning—or at least—”
She hesitated and stopped.
“At least, what?” said Louisa, with her searching eyes upon her.
“I thought it best myself that I should be sent away, for I felt very uncertain whether you would like to find me here.”
“Have I always hated you so much?”
“I hope not, for I have always loved you, and have always wished that you should know it. But you changed to me a little, shortly before you left home.
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