Hard Times

“In Hard Times Dickens suggests that it is through compassionate individuals rather
than institutions that people that people can be helped” Discuss.

In the novel Hard Times Charles Dickens criticizes England’s social past. George Benard

Shaw, a 19th century peace prize winner in literature called Hard Times a “passionate

revolt against the whole social order of things”. The conflict between the powerful as to

whether institutional or individual compassion can best relied upon to help people forms

the backbone of debate between the moderate left and moderate right wings of politics.

This was a debate that Dickens’s bravely enters. Through the proxy of his narrator, he gave

mixed insight as to whether it is through compassionate individuals or institutions that

people can best be helped. He illustrates that the conflict does not lie in argument as to

whether one can help whilst the other cannot, but rather offers discourse on which has the

greater capacity to help people.

Stephen Blackpool, a factory working Hand in the fictions industrial Coketown endures

marital difficulties that prompt him to seek assistance in leaving the union. Upon his

consultation with his employer Bounderby, the reader becomes aware that the

institutionalized process of divorce involves huge sums of money and legal difficulty.

Through this scene, Dickens suggests that the marital intuition of this Northern English

Milltown and all possibly all of England cannot help a man genuinely in need of support

and compassion. Compassionate support, that is, in his struggle against his problem with

his wife’s alcoholism and vices. And problems, that Dickens suggest, are symptomatic of a

public institution’s inability to help the people that rely on them.

Complimenting the narrators disdain for the marital institution, is his assessment of the

capacity of a private institution to do good in people’s life. Bounderby, owner of a mill

where innumerable, faceless hands work tirelessly is responsibility for their financial well

being. He provides them with jobs and money, helping them to edge away from their

misery of poverty. Never-the-less, this is because of his own private interest in their labor.

Their menial wages tend to a subsistence level and it may even be supposed that instead of

helping them, it instead distracts them from better work opportunities. His capitalist’s

Ricardian institute does help people, but compassion does not enters the mutually

beneficial economic equation. Dickens is here suggesting that the distinction between help

from individuals and institutions is arbitrary since it is individuals who make of

institutions, compassionate or otherwise.

Comparatively, it is compassion that drives those individuals with genuine generosity in

Hard Times to help people. Louisa is prepared to assist the down trodden worker Stephen

in his struggle to escape the ‘muddle’ that he is in. With her sponsorship, Stephen is able to

begin a journey to a nearby town in search of work. Interestingly, it ends that

compassionate charity is the means to a far graver end for Stephen. Dickens ironically

suggests that the ability to help people is dependant upon the utility or otherwise of the

action, irrespective of the compassionate intentions.

The notions of apparent hypocrisy of Dickens stance against utilitarianism is dismissed

upon study of another compassionate individual in the novel. The imminently practical
Thomas Gradgrind was commended as “not unkind”. We may even infer from the text that

his philosophy and teachings are really the product of his compassion for humanity rather

than self interest as may initially be supposed. We may infer that the Man of Facts believes

that through calculating rationality people can overcome their problems. Gradgrind’s

compassion is exposed when he tries to help his son Tom escape legal persecution. Tom

dies in penitence as an outcast from Coketown in disgrace. Despite the compassion of

another individual, it appears that by virtue of his ill deeds, Dickens allocates Tom an awful

ending to him. This rendered the compassion of his father irrelevant to him. It appears that

neither institution nor individual can overcome another character’s unavoidable ill-fate

following ill-deeds.

In Hard Times, Dickens does neither explicitly suggest that through compassionate

individuals nor through institutions may people be properly helped. He does reduce

‘assistance’ to the black and white of good and bad. Assistance, as we have seen, does not

always equate in the recipient being helped. Dickens’s support for moral relativism of the

issue further grounds his stance that the intricacies of human interactions, between

institutions and individuals does not deserve the injustice of simplification. For just as

Dickens suggests that “ It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine

will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or

evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into

vice, or the reverse…” Dickens suggests that neither individuals nor institutions, through

compassion or otherwise, can ever truly help people.