Literature & Theology, Vol. "
. No. ª, December ƪ, pp.

ªÆ–ªª"

WHY THE GOOD SAMARITAN

WAS A BAD ECONOMIST:
DICKENS’ PARABLE FOR
HARD TIMES

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Jennifer Gribble

Abstract
Mr Gradgrind’s subversion of the Bible makes part of a larger cultural
phenomenon Dickens sees in Victorian England ‘eighteen hundred and odd
years after our master’. The novel’s concluding reference to ‘the writing on
the wall’ underlines the inability of a godless realm to heed the ancient
wisdom and moral authority of the repressed text. Dickens’ response to the
truth claims of utilitarian thinking is to restore the marginalized discourse of
Christianity, rewriting the parable of the Good Samaritan for his times. The
parable not only gives interpretative clues to the plot and character, setting
and symbolism of Hard Times, it provides the foundation of its metadiscursive
interest in the nature and significance of narrative. In a series of intersecting
narratives, the novel reflects on the interchangeable roles, and the ability
imaginatively to inhabit the situation of another, inherent in the parable’s
meaning. In exploring the contest between the oppositional discourses of
Christian altruism and market-driven utilitarian self-interest, the novel takes
its ethical bearings from the parable’s narrative of redemptive love. It draws
on the Old Testament as well as the New, activating the theological
connection between the victim’s fall and suffering, and man’s first
disobedience. Various appropriations of the parable, by Gradgrind,
Bounderby, Mrs Sparsit and Stephen Blackpool for example, show the
carnivalesque vitality and moral complexity Dickens finds in the contest.

IN CHAPTER 12 of Book the Second of Hard Times, Mr Gradgrind, at home for

the parliamentary vacation, sits writing to the accompaniment of his deadly
statistical clock. What he is writing is not revealed. The narrator supposes it to
be a parodic form of biblical exegesis: ‘proving something no doubt—
probably, in the main, that the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist’.1
Mr Gradgind’s subversion of the Bible is part of a larger cultural phenomenon

Literature & Theology Vol. "
No. ª # Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved.
428 GOOD SAMARITANS IN DICKENS’ HARD TIMES
Dickens finds in Victorian England ‘eighteen hundred and odd years after our
Master’ (p. 96). The novel’s concluding reference to ‘the writing on the wall’
underlines the inability of a godless realm to heed the ancient wisdom and
moral authority of the Bible. Dickens’ response to the truth claims of
utilitarian thinking is to expose its appropriations and subversions of the
Bible and to restore the marginalised discourse, rewriting the Good Samaritan
for his times.
In view of postmodernism’s repression of the Bible2 it is perhaps not

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surprising that its role in this most highly contested of Dickens’ novels should
have been neglected or misunderstood in recent discussions. While the novel’s
abundant biblical references have been noted, even critics who have
considered the relevance of the Good Samaritan parable in particular, have
concluded that it doesn’t work: that the parable’s moral message3 is no more
adequate than the other ‘positives’ apparently provided (the circus,4 the
family,5 the discourse of fancy6) to stand against the hard facts school. I shall
argue that the parable not only provides interpretative clues to the plot and
characterisation, setting and symbolism of Hard Times, but that it underlies its
metadiscursive interest in the nature and significance of narrative. In a series of
intersecting narratives, the novel reflects on the interchangeable roles, and the
ability imaginatively to inhabit the situation of another, inherent in the
parable’s meaning. It links the oppositional discourses of Christian altruism
and market-driven utilitarian self-interest with the parable’s narrative of
redemptive love. It draws on the Old Testament as well as the new, activating
the parable’s connection of the victim’s fall and suffering with man’s
first disobedience.
On 16 December 1853, a month before he began working on Hard Times,
Dickens declared that ‘schools of industry . . . should reinforce the sublime
visions of the New Testament’.7 In the preceding year, he had written his own
version of the New Testament for his children, The Life of Our Lord,8 which
emphasises central biblical stories on which Hard Times draws: the birth of the
Christ child in the manger, the star that guides the Wise Men, Herod’s attempt
to destroy the child’s power in his murder of the innocents, as well as the
parable of the Sower and the Good Samaritan parable with its journey and
perilous setting, its drama of the fallen victim, the uncaring passers-by and the
helping hand.
The foremost aim of education announced by the British and Foreign
Schools Society early in the nineteenth century was to teach every child in the
kingdom to read the Bible. James Mill, although less anti-clerical than
Bentham, argued in The Philanthropist and The Edinburgh Review for a purely
secular education: ‘it is by accidental association merely, that learning the
principles of religion has been thought to be more necessarily connected
with the learning to read and write, than with any other mechanical talent’.9
 JENNIFER GRIBBLE 429
The ‘object lesson’ began to replace biblical instruction as a means of moral
education,10 and as a way of combating the ‘passive obedience’ John Stuart
Mill, like his father before him, believed to be inculcated by Christian
teaching. In Hard Times, the ‘object lesson’ provides the structure of the most
telling satiric exchanges between teacher and pupil, parent and child.
There is a particular appropriateness then, in the novel’s opening in a
schoolroom in which satiric observation takes its bearings from the New
Testament. The first chapter heading, ‘The One Thing Needful’ refers the

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biblically-educated reader to Luke 10:42, where it is Mary who grasps that the
one thing needful is to listen to the words of Jesus, while her sister Martha
concerns herself with practicalities. In M’Choakumchild’s schoolroom, the
eminently practical Mr Gradgind declares that facts are the one thing needful:
‘planting nothing else’ and ‘rooting out everything else’ will form the minds of
the little ‘reasoning animals’. The mechanical procedures of this educational
program (inculcating, as we see, just that passive obedience associated in the
utilitarian mind with Christianity), are set against the physical laws of
germination and growth celebrated in the parable of the sower and in the
titles of the novel’s three books, ‘Sowing’, ‘Reaping’ and ‘Garnering’. The
caricatured body of Gradgrind, with its ‘square wall of a forehead’ and its
unyielding hard edges, underlines physical and emotional deprivations that
will require his change of heart. The disciplinary strategies of his language,
exercising a powerful moral and political surveillance and restraint, interweave
with the voice of the narrator to unfold the novel’s exploration of voice,
language, and the linguistic environment within which utterance, and text,
are situated.
In an instructive passage in ‘Discourse in the Novel’, Bakhtin analyses Our
Mutual Friend as a text ‘everywhere dotted with quotation marks that serve to
separate out little islands of scattered direct speech and purely authorial speech,
washed by heteroglot waves from all sides . . . one and the same word often
figures in both as the speech of the author and as the speech of another—and
at the same time’.11 Similarly, in Hard Times, the sweeping narratorial irony of
the opening chapters mingles authorial speech with the voice and ironic
strategies of Carlyle, the novel’s dedicatee, and with ‘the common speech of
utilitarian ‘philosophy’ in a prose which flickers between authorial despair and
a heavily ironised zenophobic pride. In these exchanges, the discourse of
political economy is seen to infect and undergird the productive activity of the
nation, appropriating the vitality and attempting to contain the oppositional
force of the discourse of Christianity.
In the utilitarian schoolroom, the Church of England Catechism provides
the model of instruction, defining ‘the Whole Duty of Man’ in a commercial
civilisation as the duty to be ‘in all things regulated and governed . . . by fact’
(14). Sissy Jupe, in her childish innocence, points out that its first principle
430 GOOD SAMARITANS IN DICKENS’ HARD TIMES
substitutes self-interest and the laws of the market place for the first and great
commandment that informs the Good Samaritan story ‘to do unto others as
I would that they should do unto me’ (60). Beyond the schoolroom lie the
factory, the town, the country, all gripped by a worship of fact that
replaces the once habitual invocation of divine providence (‘Fact forbid!).
The texts of the derelict Christianity represented in Coketown’s blackening
churches are usurped by the new orthodoxy. The Lord’s Prayer and the
Church of England Book of Common Prayer lend their cadences to a

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secular vision of almighty power. Hovering above the factories of
Coketown are signs of the fall of industrial England from its Christian
identity, in the shape of serpents of smoke, trailing their irremediable evil
‘for ever and ever’:

Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact,
everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the
school of design was all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in
hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be
purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and
never should be, world without end, Amen. (29)

From its Christian sources, this ‘Gloria’ borrows as well, liturgical repetitions
of the talismanic word. Its meaning is delimited, however, to the empty
signifier ‘fact’, insisting on a temporal world no longer co-terminous with the
eternal world of the life everlasting. Authorised by the very texts it seeks to
subvert, the gospel of mammonism hymns a forward-looking nation achieving
industrial greatness through shrewd marketing founded in the immutable laws
of political economy. At the same time, there is registered the human need to
glorify, and the authorial voice judges these appropriations of Christian
discourse a blasphemous exploitation of that need. Against the utilitarian
injunction ‘never wonder’ the unmistakable voice of Boz asserts his credo: ‘I
entertain a weak idea that the people of England are as hard-worked as any
people upon whom the sun shines. I acknowledge to this as a reason why I
would give them a little more play’ (67). ‘The laws of creation’ (as yet
‘unrepealed’) have made human beings to delight in ‘relaxation . . . good
humour and good spirits . . . holiday . . . music’ (31). Foremost among ‘the airy
fables of the race’ denied the people of Coketown, Dickens numbers those
that teach ‘the great charity in the heart, suffering the little children to come
into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony
ways of this world, wherein it were better for all the children of Adam that
they should sun themselves’ (198). In these heteroglossic passages, an ironic
narrator contemplates his parable’s setting, in which the seeds of moral growth
fall upon the stony ground of Coketown and its pock-marked landscape.
 JENNIFER GRIBBLE 431
Scenes that move from the schoolroom to Stone Lodge, home of the
Gradgrind family, from the contrasting life of Sleary’s circus to Bounderby’s
red brick bank and establishment, to the foetid lodging of Stephen Blackpool
and his drunken wife, vividly dramatise the observation that the community
that speaks the language of political economy is a community that murders its
innocents. Yet it still holds the memory traces of the repressed text that once
fed its moral and psychological needs, and which transmits the value system of
the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

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Christ’s injunction to Mary about ‘the one thing needful’ is part of the
interrogation of this value system in Luke 10. ‘Tempted’ by the Jewish lawyer
to reconcile his teaching with the Old Testament law of obedience to God
and love of neighbour, Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Parables, Dickens informed his children, ‘are stories in which Jesus taught his
Disciples . . . because he knew the people liked to hear them, and would
remember what He said better if He said it in that way’.12 Hard Times also
celebrates the pleasures of narrative, but the novel shows a more sophisticated
understanding of its qualities and purposes. Expressing one story in terms of
another, the parable form is perhaps the most accessible example of the
cultural role of the Bible as infinitely reinterpretable text. The Good Samaritan
parable, in particular, points to a ‘new unfinished reality that is not determined
by the absence of suffering and which cannot be calculated’.13 In rereading
the parable, Dickens is clearly aware of his place in a series of narrative
appropriations. Jesus himself inherits the parable form from rabbinic tradition.
Like his dialogue with the lawyer, the story he tells shows an astute response to
the contemporary political context. In so far as it casts the Samaritan as
redemptive figure, and the priest and Levite, members of the priestly tribes of
the Jews, as the uncaring passers-by, the parable underlines the role played
by the Jewish sense of tribal superiority in the contest between self-interest and
the law of love. And Luke clearly saw the appropriateness of this parable to the
concerns of his Hellenistic audience.14 Hard Times, in turn, reflects on the
complexities inherent in Jesus’ narrative answer to the question ‘who is my
neighbour?’: Luke 10:37a seems to suggest that the Samaritan is the neighbour
who should be loved; 37b suggests that he is an example of a man who loved
his neighbour.15 ‘The primitive exegesis’ of St Augustine’s interpretation of
the Samaritan as exemplifying Christ’s redeeming love for humankind is
echoed by Karl Barth: ‘Jesus stands before the lawyer incarnate, although
hidden under the form of one whom the lawyer believed he should hate, as
the Jews hated the Samaritans.’16 Yet it is in the spirit of the parable as
Jesus told it that Dickens’ novel should resist the fixed assignation of roles.
The narrative strategy of this parable defamiliarises the culture’s patterns of
thinking about identity and behaviour. It exposes habitual constructions of
identity as barriers to viable community and genuine self-knowledge.
432 GOOD SAMARITANS IN DICKENS’ HARD TIMES
That is why I would argue that Hard Times resolves the apparent contra-
dictions Raymond Williams found in it: between a rationalist philosophy
deriving from Godwin and Owen, which sees people as products of their
environment, and the Christian view that people can change and be
changed.17Although Hard Times satirises the indoctrination of little pitchers by
a materialist philosophy, and shows Bitzer as a triumphal product of his
education, his predictable behaviour is juxtaposed with the more surprising,
changeable ‘mystery of nature’ which overturns formative experience, as in

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the case of Mr Gradgrind. The novel’s reflections on the parable point up
questions that preoccupy Dickens in the later novels: questions of how
identity is formed or ‘given’; of how altruism might feed an innate self-
interest, even in that paraclete in human form, Little Dorrit; of how the
capacity to enter imaginatively into the circumstances of another is the
necessary foundation of moral behaviour.
Hard Times dramatises the moral function of imaginative hypothesis in
a series of debates. In Chapter 2, aptly titled ‘Murdering the Innocents’, a
tendentious Gradgrind is entangled in questions of definition and representa-
tion. In the comic dialogue that focuses on Sissy Jupe’s father’s profession of
horse-breaking, the inadequacy of Gradgrind’s ‘object lesson’ is measured and
the victory in the struggle for discursive supremacy is awarded to the
common-sense, experience-based discourse of the little girl. Foregrounding
imaginative hypothesis as the site of contention between utilitarian
‘philosophy’ and its opponents, their exchange demonstrates that the
distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fancy’ is, in practice, untenable. The distinction
collapses not because of inconsistencies in Dickens’ thinking, but because
he finds imaginative hypothesis so fundamental to representation and
therefore to pedagogy that even utilitarianism cannot do without it.
Most notably, it is indispensable to the construction of the identity of
Thomas Gradgrind, that ‘man of realities. A man of fact and calculations’.
The ‘George Gradgrind . . . John Gradgrind . . . Joseph Gradgrind’ who
figure a suppositious self are essential to the simplified self-identity with
which he models a scaled-down life for himself and his children. At the
same time as the narrator enjoys the exposure of Gradgrind’s fiction of self
and anticipates the rumbustious exposure of Bounderby’s myth of origins,
the ground is prepared for the fuller self of feeling that will grow
through Gradgrind’s Samaritan role, his rescue of the orphaned Sissy from
her ‘tumbling’ and drifting life.
In providing a network of intersecting versions of the Good Samaritan
parable, Hard Times establishes the power of biblical discourse to instruct as
well as delight. The manifest impossibility of isolating the simply rational or
factual from the affective domain is not only the source of narrative irony
and comic dialogue. It provides the mainspring of the novel’s plot. In its
 JENNIFER GRIBBLE 433
interpenetrating narratives, it is always the first and great commandment that
holds the clue to plot surprise, reversal, and resolution. When the dying Mrs
Gradgrind tries to define, for her daughter Louisa, that ‘something—not an
Ology at all—that your father has missed, or forgotten’ (225) her words take
the textual form of ‘figures of wonderful no-meaning’ traced upon her
wrappers. But the text she cannot access sheds its explanatory light on all the
mysteries that surround her. Why does Louisa’s face change in the presence of
her brother Tom, and why does Louisa marry the grotesque Bounderby? In

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penetrating the riddle, the predatory James Harthouse thinks to parody her
Good Samaritan role, ‘holding out the hand of friendship’ to Tom in order to
seduce his sister. Why does ‘Mrs Pegler’, visit Coketown once a year in order
to stand outside Bounderby’s Bank until it is time for her to return to her
distant village? ‘I can love for love’s own sake’ (263), she tells Bounderby, who
has managed to expunge her maternal presence from his life story completely.
Why is it a mark of Mr Jupe’s love that he deserts his beloved daughter?
‘This is good, Gradgrind. A man so fond of his daughter that he runs away
from her!’ expostulates Bounderby (38).
What Dickens finds in the Good Samaritan parable is a story in which the
outgoing and self-transcending impulses in human nature have the power to
confront the stereotyping assumptions that derive from class, gender, and
ideology. This dynamic is played out in the interweaving scenes of the novel.
Anti-types of the Samaritan and parodies of his saving action, together with a
shifting interchange between the parable’s figures of woundedness, self-
interest, and altruism, between the story of the fall and the story of
redemption, embody Dickens’ awareness of the power of the parable to
illumine moral questions and ethical dilemmas.
It is Bounderby who appropriates the parable first, with his story of
abandonment in a ditch (and some additional richly ironic borrowings from
the parable of the Prodigal Son). An entirely fictitious victim, he wallows in a
myth of origins that exhorts his factory workers and parodies their genuine
hardship:

I hadn’t a shoe to my foot, I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a
pigsty . . . I was so ragged and dirty that you wouldn’t have touched me with a
pair of tongs . . . nobody to thank for my being here but myself . . . I pulled
through it, though nobody threw me a rope. (23)

The richly-embroidered rhetoric hints at the highly constructed nature of his

repetitious autobiography: the deserting mother, the drunken grandmother,
the cot in an egg-box, the vagabondage, the instruction picked up on the
streets ‘under the direction of a drunken cripple’. Bounderby is his own
Samaritan, usurping the role by erasing the self-sacrificing love of his honest
434 GOOD SAMARITANS IN DICKENS’ HARD TIMES
and hard-working parents. The gospel of self-help, so serviceable in an age of
social mobility and laissez-faire economics, enables him to transcend his
humble origins by denying them. Bounderby’s self-authorship is not only an
appropriation of the role of a creator God and of the lowly manger
in Bethlehem. His story even lays claim to what Geoffrey Thurley has
named ‘the Dickens myth’.18 Bounderby, like the young Dickens, is not
unacquainted with blacking bottles:

For years upon years, the only pictures in my possession, or that I could have got

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into my possession by any means, unless I stole ‘em, were the engravings of a man
shaving himself in a boot, on the blacking bottles that I was overjoyed to use in
cleaning boots with . . . (170)

The indispensable role of fancy in the construction of identity is acknowl-

edged by a wry narrator. But the self-authorship of Bounderby knows no
bounds, transforming the love of others into self-interest and self-love. It gives
vividly individual life to Coketown’s subversion of the laws of creation, setting
him up for the satisfying denouement in which the revelation of his mother’s
devotion exposes his story for the lie it is.
There is a sexual dimension to Bounderby’s offence against the first and
great commandment. His murder of Louisa’s innocence is made palpable in
her frenzied rubbing away of his kiss on her cheek: ‘‘‘You may cut the piece
out with your penknife if you like, Tom, I wouldn’t cry’’’ (27). Dickens
underlines the patriarchal collusion behind this not untypically Victorian
arranged marriage. Bounderby’s puffed head and forehead, his ‘strained skin’
and ‘swelled veins’, the ‘pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a
balloon, and ready to start’ (21) represent him as a huge engorged phallus.
Bounderby will impose himself on the virginal Louisa, just as he has imposed
himself on Mrs Sparsit, ‘without whom B’s story incomplete’, as Dickens notes
in Number plan VII.
The fall of this ‘born lady’ ‘from very high up the tree’ is what keeps
Bounderby inflated. In return for an ‘annual compliment’, and the expectation
of an even larger share in Bounderby’s life, Mrs Sparsit submits to a myth of
origins that complements his own:

‘You were coming out of the Italian Opera, ma’am, in white satin and jewels,
when I hadn’t a penny to light you.’
‘I certainly, sir,’ returned Mrs Sparsit, with a dignity serenely mournful, ‘was
familiar with the Italian Opera at a very early age.’ (51)

A perverse Samaritan, Bounderby provides economic succour, enabling

a social and sexual dominance only undermined by his marriage to Louisa.
Mrs Sparsit responds with a scheme fatefully positioned between remedy
 JENNIFER GRIBBLE 435
and reprisal. In a carnivalesque play with the parable’s roles, she is seen as
Levite, zealously upholding the letter of the law, consigning her victim Louisa
to an eagerly expected fall. Observing Louisa’s domestic misery, and the intent
of James Harthouse to seduce her, Mrs Sparsit envisages a grand staircase,
down which she sees the victim descending to her social and sexual ruin But
Mrs Sparsit is also, hilariously, the victim of her own imaginative scenario.
In a comic come-uppance that parallels that of her master, it is Mrs Sparsit
herself who falls.

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Her pursuit of Louisa through the stony land of ‘coalpits past and present’,
towards what she imagines to be an assignation and elopement, is the novel’s
most brilliant variation on the parable. A malign Samaritan, ‘Mrs Sparsit
exulted hugely. The figure had plunged down the precipice, and she felt
herself, as it were, attending on the body’ (214). Like the Old Testament
prophet Elijah, Mrs Sparsit embarks by train ‘as if she had been caught up in a
cloud and whirled away’ (210). In the satirically-constructed Eden of
Harthouse’s trysting place in the woods, Mrs Sparsit, moral vigilante and
voyeur, descends to the level of ‘worms, snails and slugs, and all the
creeping things that be’ (210). She takes on first, the shape of the serpent in
the undergrowth, and then, in the comic climax, of the mangled and fallen
body:

Wet through and through: with her feet squelching and squashing in her
shoes whenever she moved; with a rush of rain upon her classical visage;
with a bonnet like an over-ripe fig; with all her clothes spoiled; with damp
impressions of every button, string, and hook-and-eye she wore, printed
on her highly-connected back; with a stagnant verdure on her general
exterior, such as accumulates on an old park fence in a mouldy lane;
Mrs Sparsit had no recourse but to burst into tears of bitterness and say,
‘I have lost her.’ (214)

In this carnivalesque denouement, the humiliation inscribed on Mrs Sparsit’s

body is caught in the imaginative leap from buttons to social connections.
Sexual energies and rivalries overturn social and moral hierarchies: the
officially repressed biblical text establishes an overarching perspective that
exposes Bounderby’s life-story, Mrs Sparsit’s self-serving ambitions, and
Mr Gradgrind’s self-delusion, preparing the way for the moral redemption
of father and daughter.
Around the figure of Stephen Blackpool cluster further dimensions of
the parable. He invokes it, first, as a model of the mutual caring of the ‘hands’:
‘Be poor amoong ‘em, be sick amoong ‘em, grieve amoong ‘em for onny o’
the monny causes that carries grief to the poor man’s door, an’ they’ll be
tender wi’ yo, gentle wi’ yo’. Comfortable wi’ yo, Chrisen wi’ yo’ (151).
436 GOOD SAMARITANS IN DICKENS’ HARD TIMES
Later, in the ironically titled chapter ‘Men and Brothers’, after the shunning
that follows his refusal to join the trade union, he casts himself as the victim:

‘I know weel that if I was a lyin’ parisht ‘I th’ road, yo’d feel it right to pass me by,
as a forrener and stranger.’ (145) The response of the hands is inevitable: ‘by
general consent, they even avoided that side of the street on which he habitually
walked.’ (147)

Dickens is clearly aware that trade unionism is a complex issue, politically and

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morally.19 In a passage subsequently added to the manuscript, the narrator is
at pains to stress the eagerness and the earnestness of each worker, ‘led astray’
by the feeling that his only hope lay ‘in his allying himself to the comrades by
whom he was surrounded’ (142), and made vulnerable, by lack of education,
to the practised manipulation of orators. The rhetoric of the aptly named
Slackbridge belies the brotherhood he preaches. He, too, appropriates
scripture for his purposes. Appealing to a self-interest the obverse of biblical
values, his discourse is nevertheless permeated by the language of the Bible.
The slackness of his moral vision is indicated in the casualness with which he
deploys the trope of the fall. He first casts the exploited workers as the
parable’s fallen victims:

Oh my prostrate friends, with the galling yoke of tyrants on your necks and
the iron foot of despotism treading down your fallen forms into the dust of
the earth, upon which right glad would your oppressors be to see you
creeping on your bellies all the days of your lives, like the serpent in the
garden . . . (248)

He returns to the serpent in his account of the expulsion of Stephen: ‘you

remember how, face to face and foot to foot, I pursued him through all his
intricate windings; you remember how he sneaked, and slunk, and sidled, and
splitted of straws . . . ’ (249). As with Mrs Sparsit’s victimisation of Louisa, it is
the pursuer who is reduced to the level of the serpent.
The theology of the fall sheds further light on the role of Stephen. If he
comes to represent the fallen traveller of the parable, he does so in no simple
way. Called again and again to rescue his drunken and outcast wife ‘all
wandering and lost . . . wounded, too, and bruised’, he is much inclined to
relinquish the Samaritan role to the woman he loves. It is Rachel who
cares for Stephen’s wife (‘she poured some liquid from a bottle and laid it
with gentle hand upon the sore’) (87), and who intervenes to save her
from certain death by drug overdose, thereby also saving Stephen’s ‘soul alive’.
His hope of divorce and remarriage has been rudely dispelled by his
master Bounderby, to whom, ironically, he appeals for advice. A strange,
 JENNIFER GRIBBLE 437
proleptic dream explores the role his self-interested desires play in his wife’s
hazardous journey:

He thought that he, and someone on whom his heart had long been set—but she
was not Rachel, and that surprised him, even in the midst of his imaginary
happiness—stood in the church being married. While the ceremony was
performing, and while he recognised among the witnesses some whom he knew
to be living, and many whom he knew to be dead, darkness came on, succeeded
by the shining of a tremendous light. It broke from one line in the table of

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commandments at the altar, and illuminated the building with the words. They
were sounded through the church too, as if there were voices in the fiery letters.
Upon this, the whole appearance before him and around him changed, and
nothing was left as it had been, but himself and the clergyman. They stood in the
daylight before a crowd so vast, that if all the people in the world could have
been brought together into one space, they could not have looked, he thought,
more numerous; and they all abhorred him, and there was not one pitying or
friendly eye among the millions that were fastened on his face. He stood on a
raised stage, under his loom; and, looking up at the shape the loom took, and
hearing the burial service distinctly read, he knew he was there to suffer death.
In an instant what he stood on fell below him and he was gone. (89)

The dream not only prefigures Stephen’s fall into the Old Hell shaft: it
interprets that fall in the light of biblical commandment. ‘The writing on the
wall’ is not specific, though the intensity of its physical effects is evoked. But
the irrevocable loss of Rachel’s physical presence (she is, and is not ‘there’)
makes it clear that the marriage for which he yearns is a sin of apocalyptic
proportions. By the dream logic, Stephen is cast out of human society
because his love cannot be dissociated from destructive impulses, murderous,
adulterous, that would put him in breach of the sixth and seventh
commandments, cutting him off from Christian community, and sentencing
him to the death due to his fallen nature. And this, too, is the logic of the plot:
there is a link between Stephen’s love for Rachel, which elicits his promise not
to join the union or take part in the strike, and which leads to his social
alienation. Framed by Tom Gradgrind for the robbery at Bounderby’s bank,
compelled to leave Coketown in search of work, he becomes ‘a proscribed
figure, with a price upon his head’ (249). Rachel, heckled by an agitated
narrator, is able to forestall Stephen’s moral fall by seizing the lethal dosage
from his crazed wife as he looks on, powerless to act.
It is the discovery of his ‘poor, crushed, human creature’ at the bottom of a
disused mineshaft, however, that restores Stephen’s representative status as
victim of a system that murders its innocents. Dickens omitted from the
published version of Hard Times the most horrifying description of the
mangled body of innocence. In the cancelled ‘factory accident passage’, which
438 GOOD SAMARITANS IN DICKENS’ HARD TIMES
provides the motivation for his promise to Rachel, Stephen recalls the death
of her little sister, ‘her child arm tore off afore thy face’.20 Himself a child of
the factory, Stephen, as he lies dying, recounts a tamer version of her death:
‘young and misshapen, awlung o’ sickly air as had’n no need to be’ (273). His
fall into the shaft symbolically underlines the way in which relentless
industrialism destroys its innocent victims: ‘when it were in work it killed us
wi’out need; when ‘tis let alone it kills us wi’out need. See how we die an no
need, one way an another—in a muddle—every day!’ (272). Yet the novel

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draws on the redemptive aspect of the Good Samaritan parable in its account
of Stephen’s death. Rachel and Sissy, searching tirelessly, discover him at last.
He is revived by drops of cordial and wine, and carried, on his improvised
stretcher, with his broken right hand lying bare on the outside of the covering
garments ‘as if waiting to be taken by another hand’:

They carried him very gently along the fields, and down the lanes, and over the
wide landscape; Rachel always holding the hand in hers. Very few whispers
broke the mournful silence. It was soon a funeral procession. The star had shown
him where to find the God of the poor, and through humility, and sorrow, and
forgiveness, he had gone to his redeemer’s rest. (273)

The pageant of communal compassion enacts the relevance of the Christian

discourse affirmed by the narrative voice. The star that has shone down on the
wounded Stephen, keeping him alive with its promise of Christian hope, is
emblematic of the redemptive love that now envelops the outcast and
reaffirms the bonds of community in which he has believed.
Stephen’s dying faith that ‘a better unnerstan’in o’ one another’ will solve
the material and moral muddle of industrial England is played out in the
cluster of reflections on the Samaritan parable that centre on Gradgrind. The
chastened father, educator, parliamentarian and economist at last renounces
the dismal science, ‘making his facts and figures subservient to ‘Faith, Hope
and Charity’ (296). These are the values that underpin the novel’s
hermeneutic, signalled throughout in its invocation of the parable, and in its
coming to rest in the faith that is essential to shared linguistic community, the
hope that keeps interpretation open to possibilities of meaning not yet
determined by its context, the charity that is open to the other.21
The penultimate chapter, entitled ‘Philosophical’, juxtaposes the language
of utilitarianism with that of the biblical ‘charity of the heart’ in complex ways.
Gradgrind’s philosophy, while it has contributed to the ‘mercenary marriage’
of which her brother Tom accuses her, does not prevent Louisa from
appealing to her father’s love and protection, nor prevent him from seeing the
destructive consequences of the ‘self-interest’ to which he has guided her.
Louisa’s marriage, financially calculating as it may appear to be, has been
 JENNIFER GRIBBLE 439
motivated by her love for Tom. Tom’s murdered innocence and moral fall, in
which self-interest grows into self-indulgence, ingratitude and felony, is made
literal in the blackened face and circus livery though which he hides from
justice, and from which he will be rescued by those latter-day Samaritans,
Sleary and his circus. Prompted to one last act of self-interest, Gradgrind
appeals to the avenging Bitzer in a confrontation as searching in its satire as is
his conversation with Louisa about marriage. Notwithstanding his educational
debt to Gradgrind, Bitzer now tells him that the bargain is ended, that having

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bought in the cheapest market, he has to dispose of himself in the dearest.
Good economist that he is, Bitzer’s calculations suggest to him that protecting
a criminal would not be so good an investment as securing for himself
Tom’s position at the bank:

‘If this is solely a question of self-interest with you—’ Mr Gradgrind began.

‘I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir!’ returned Bitzer; ‘but I am sure you
know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must
always appeal to, is a person’s self-interest. It’s your only hold. We are so
constituted. I was brought up in that catechism when I was young sir, as you are
aware.’
‘What sum of money,’ said Mr Gradgrind, ‘will you set against your expected
promotion?’ (287)

Bitzer’s grasp of ‘the whole social system’ is indicated in attitudes to its

basic unit, the family, that replicate those of his new master, Bounderby. ‘This
excellent young economist’ takes up his option to consign his mother to the
Coketown workhouse, only debating whether to allow her an annual ration
of tea, since ‘all gifts have an inevitable tendency to pauperise the recipient’
(120). Economic considerations dictate that he will not marry and create
dependants. A ‘social system’ that denies the self-giving love and mutual
dependence of family is a system that cannot survive.
Yet the novel does not present ‘the family’, nor indeed the circus, as a self-
sufficient answer to the problems it explores. In its shifting perspectives on the
Good Samaritan parable, it shows how that narrative will always be differently
inhabited by different people at different times. The Samaritan acts counter-
culturally, effecting a decision about the meaning of self, other and moral
action the novel affirms as the proper ground of all moral action and
communal well-being. As a model of community, Dickens clearly prefers the
creativity, individuality and mutual support of the circus to the enforced
conformity and demagoguery of contemporary trade unionism. But if Sleary is
given a moral to deliver, it is in the lisp that signals the idiosyncratic language
of the circus world: ‘There ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interstht
after all, but thomething very different . . . that it hath a way of calculating,
440 GOOD SAMARITANS IN DICKENS’ HARD TIMES
or not calculating, whith thomehow or other ith at leatht ath hard to give
a name to, ath the wayth of the dogth ith!’ (292). In celebrating the animal,
the instinctual, the circus bears witness to a ‘nature’ more surprising and
spontaneous, more open, than utilitarianism’s ‘reasonable animals’ can
understand. Yet the circus has its limitations too: its peripatetic, bohemian
life cannot suffice for Sissy, who must leave it in order to develop and thrive.
The vision of the future unfolded by the vatic narrator parallels Sleary’s
account of the replenishing fortunes of the circus family. It envisages a social

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world affirming the bonds of love in compassionate as well as practical ways:
Gradgrind making what reparation he can to exonerate the memory of
Stephen Blackpool; Rachel serene and ever supportive of his begging widow;
Tom repenting of his harshness to Louisa; Louisa educating the children of
others, helping ‘to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those
imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither
up’; Sissy with her own well-loved children around her. And ironically
juxtaposed, there are the proliferating Josiah Bounderbys. Named for their
patron, they are heirs to a self-interested ideology that represses the discourse
which bespeaks the community’s most effective moral values and ensures
its future.

Department of English,
University of Sydney, NSW Æ Australia
jennifer.gribble@english.usyd.edu.au

REFERENCES
1
C. Dickens, Hard Times, K. Flint (ed.)
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 215.
3
All subsequent page references are to this
edition.
2
See L. Ferretter, Towards a Christian Literary
Theory (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003) for a comprehensive
4
argument of this case. Martha Nussbaum,
in an otherwise impressive discussion of
5
this novel’s moral thinking, ‘The Literary
Imagination in Public Life’ in J. Adamson,
R. Freadman and D. Parker (eds), Renego-
tiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and
6
Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998)
makes no reference to its biblical
sources. The gap in our knowledge
of Dickens’s religion noted by K.J.
Fielding in 1963 and addressed in part
by D. Walder in Dickens and Religion
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981)
remains large.
See A. Samuels, The Critics Debate: David
Copperfield and Hard Times (London:
Macmillan, 1992): ‘the simplest, yet most
difficult and absurd of Christian messages’,
p. 89.
Ibid., p. 90: ‘it is left to the holy fools of the
circus to produce the lesson of the gospel’.
C. Gallagher, ‘Family and Society in Hard
Times’ in J. Peck (ed.), David Copperfield
and Hard Times: New Casebooks (London:
Macmillan, 1900), pp. 171–93.
J.F. Carr, ‘Writing as a Woman’ in
S. Connor (ed.), Charles Dickens
(London: Longman, 1996), p. 171, sees
‘the oppositional discourse of fancy’ as
impotent to construct an effective shared
feminine discourse to oppose ‘the word of
 JENNIFER GRIBBLE
the fathers’ she finds embodied in
Gradgrind.
7 18
Quoted E. Johnson, Charles Dickens: His
Tragedy and Triumph (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1979), p. 341.
8
Not published until 1934 (New York:
Simon and Schuster).
9
The Philanthropist No. 5, 1812, pp. 64–7,
quoted in L. Gribble, Metropolitan Philan-
thropy: Popular Education and Political
Culture in Nineteenth Century England
(D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford,
1999), p. 115.
10
M. Simpson, The Companion to Hard Times
(Mountfield: Helm Information, 1997),
p. 10.
11
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by
M.M. Bakhtin, M. Holquist (ed.) (Austin:
Texas UP, 1981), p. 307.
12
Life of our Lord, p. 62.
13
J. Champion, ‘The Parable as an Ancient
and a Modern Form’ in Journal of Literature
and Theology 3(1) (March 1989) 35.
14
Ibid., p. 21.
15
D. van Doren, The Kingdom of God
is Like This (London: Epworth, 1976),
p. 108.
16
Quoted D. Penman, The Parables of
Jesus (Sydney Square: Anglican Informa-
tion Office, 1985), pp. 1–63.
17
K. Flint, Charles Dickens (Brighton, Sussex:
Harvester, 1986), p. 93 quotes Williams in
441
support of her view that the novel displays
‘ambivalent attitudes’.
The Dickens Myth: Its Genesis and Structure
(St Lucia, Queensland: Queensland UP,
1976). Thurley argues that the character-
istic Dickensian hero is ‘the child aban-
doned by feckless or unfortunate parents
[who] climbs out of the abyss of poverty
and darkness towards security, peace and
light’, p. 18.
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19
D. Thomas, Hard Times: A Fable of
Fragmentation and Wholeness (New York:
Prentice Hall, 1997), pp. 102–13, notes
Dickens’ preoccupation with the issue
in ‘On Strike’, Household Words
(18.2.1854), and ‘Railway Strikes’, HW
(11.1.1851), where he argues that trade
unionism fostered identification with a
particular group and not with the general
interest.
20
Inserted on verso after ‘Hurrah’, p. 142,
MS of Hard Times (London: Forster
Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum).
Thomas, op. cit., p. 38 discusses theories
about the omission.
21
I have drawn on Kevin Mills’ argument, in
Justifying Language: Paul and Contemporary
Literary Theory (Basingstoke and London:
Macmillan, 1995) that the Pauline remain-
der makes the basis of a viable model
of reading. But see also Ferretter, op. cit.,
pp. 140–4.