Dickens was not the only person who shared this view, however, as his good friend and fellow philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, felt ever so strongly about the damaging effect utilitarianism was having on people. He felt that society was threatened by the industrialisation of England.
In 1829 Carlyle wrote Signs of the Times, which criticises the effects of industrialisation. Carlyle argued that people were being reduced to mere machines and that their individual identities were being eroded. He wrote:
It is the age of machinery in every outwards and inward sense of that word. Nothing is now done directly or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance…Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.
Notice here Carlyle’s concern with the term ‘hand’ and his regret that so little human or humane contact is still in evidence, and that all has been given over to machines.
Throughout Hard Times Dickens refers to the workers as ‘Hands’, men and women who are only important to their masters because they can manage machines. Dickens says they have lost any sense of the importance and value of the individual – that ‘unfathomable mystery’ – that contrasts so vividly with the insensibility of the machine:
So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for the good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions.
The ‘sophisticated’ utilitarian system of education robs the children of their childhood. It takes away all imagination, wonder and prosperity for them and replaces it with cold calculation and mathematical thought. This is not good as childhood is the greatest part of a person’s life, and this education is not teaching them life skills, only how not to be clinically humane. Children are denied access to stories, thus halting their flourishing imagination at a sudden stop. They are exposed to statistics at an early age and therefore have a ‘cold’, mathematical future as they are constantly fed facts without any imagination to escape to. Children grow up to be just out for themselves, as selfishness and ‘hardship’ takes over them. They have been taught that humans desire nothing but material possessions and that they must do everything in their power to get these. This makes them cold and mechanical, as that is all they have been taught and imagination and happiness has been locked away from them. What people learn in their childhood is what they grow up to be, and these children have been robbed of everything good and human from them. They will grow up to be just like machines. If the philosophy of utilitarianism had continued, the world would have continued industrialisation not only with machines but also with people. As the teachings of utilitarianism make humans mechanical, as cold calculation and ‘moral arithmetic’ does not make humans, but a continuous running of machinery and industrialisation.
The town environment is attacked in the novel. Dickens sees the town of Coketown as oppressive and destructive; it is a prison from which no-one can escape:
Nature was as strongly bricked out as the killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets… and the whole unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death.
‘Nature’ is ‘bricked out’ of Coketown. Dickens suggests that the factory/mill domination of the town is unnatural. People are not meant to be confined and kept away from nature. The industrial process emits ‘killing airs and gases’ which produce ‘dead’ people; life is slowly being drained from the people of Coketown – they are being murdered by industrialisation and the owners’ desires for profit and productivity.
Dickens also explores how an environment can shape behaviour. Sissy is brought up in the imaginative and amusing world of the circus where play and imagination are encouraged. It is also an environment that fosters emotions and compassionate behaviour. The circus is free and is not restricted to one area. Sissy therefore grows up to be compassionate, imaginative and free; she is unable to be educated by Gradgrind’s utilitarian school because she possesses a capacity to feel. Bitzer, on the other hand, is exposed to the utilitarian philosophy from a young age. He has only known the ‘bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom’ and adheres to the direction that he ‘mustn’t fancy’. He grows up to be a cold, calculating, selfish man. He is devoid of compassion and pity.
The sub-titles to three parts of the novel – Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering – call to mind the biblical words ‘As ye sow, so also shall ye reap’. These words would have been familiar to Victorian readers, and could be found framed and displayed in many a middle-class Victorian home.
They had a special reference to the upbringing and education of children. They suggested that the ground children received in their formative years would directly affect their adult lives; the seeds that were sowed in childhood would bear fruit in later years. If the early influences were good and wholesome the results would meet with approval and acceptance by society. If the early influences were bad then the outcome would be disastrous.
Dickens uses this notion in the opening chapter of Hard Times in the educational environment he provides in the classroom. There he openly suggests two forms of educational emphasis: facts and imagination. Dickens suggests that the exclusion of the imagination and the mere pursuit of facts is inhuman and will, given time, produce disastrous results. The novel explores the consequences of planting a utilitarian philosophy in childhood. Tom, Louisa and Bitzer are all products of a system that is ultimately shown to be a failure. The irony of the agricultural metaphor or sowing and reaping gains considerable significance, given the novels preoccupation with industrialism.
The central theme of the novel is the conflict of Fact and Fancy in children’s education. The grim pursuit of facts is contrasted with the colourful and rich life of the imagination as experienced by the circus folk. When one of them is subjected to the rigours of Gradgrind’s educational philosophy her human nature naturally rejects the attacks made on it: Sissy Jupe leans nothing from the artificially imposed educative processes familiar in the Gradgrind household. Nut, as we see later in the novel, her own essential goodness is instrumental in educating those suffering from the inadequacies of the Gradgrind philosophy.
The children are denied the natural pursuits of childhood such as play, fantasy, fun and entertainment. They are ‘dead’ as children and are forced, by Gradgrind’s system, to become unnatural children. They are therefore without essential qualities needed in adulthood and as of this they become in humane.
Tom Spence