ROLE OF WOMEN IN HARD TIMES
utilitarianism; a strong belief in facts and numbers, common
Hard Times illustrates the depression and progression of men
and women respectively. It follows the role of women in
Victorian society, where women were associated by specific,
stereotypical traits such as sensitivity and transparency, but
develops into a story highlighting the importance of
femininity in society. Hard Times professes Dickens’s views
on femininity, as he prophesises and analyses the true nature
of women.
During the reign of Queen Victoria, a woman’s place was
within the home. A woman’s mind was seen as only capable
to perform certain domestic and mothering jobs, and this was
seen as sufficient emotional fulfilment. However, during the
Victorian Era the role of women extended and Victorian
feminism began to emerge. Cecilia Jupe embodies and
epitomises the Victorian femininity that regulates
mechanization and engineering. During the first chapter
Sissy or ‘girl number twenty’ is largely portrayed as the
incapable girl, who believes that flowers should be cast upon
the floor, much to her alter ego’s, Mr Gradgrind’s disgust.
One of Sissy’s original traits was her constant blushing and
curtseying; women were compassionate and polite, never
arguing and never having an opinion. Cecilia is again
portrayed as incompetent when she is asked to define a
horse, however is unable and shown up by an exaggerated
ideal Gradgrind in the making, Bitzer, who with ease
programmes his mind to calculate an exact answer and
proves his right to be called a man, or machine. At the end of
the chapter it seems Gradgrind slams a door on Cecilia’s
mind telling her ‘you are never to fancy’ and lectures his
students on the importance of ‘facts, facts, facts’ but if I am
not mistaken this translates to ‘Men, Men, Men’. Sissy is an
emotional girl, represented in her blushing blood filled
cheeks, does not confine in Gradgrinds fact/men only
perspective. She has personality and opinions and becomes a
missing piece in the Gradgrind machine, flipping the story
upside down.
The character of Cecilia Jupe is dramatically contrasted by
the performance of Thomas Gradgrind and his promotion of
philosophy of rationalism, egotism, and raw, rigid fact. He is
portrayed as a rigid man, largely with Dickens comical
interpretation of the man’s appearance; “square coat, square
legs, square shoulders,” Gradgrind is a strong product of
in the nineteenth century. Utilitarianism followers believed
only things with a clear function are worth having, no
beauty, no decorations, and certainly no flowers on the
carpet. Gradgrind represents what was a man; a capable mind
full of facts, has authority and has no need for fancy. Bitzer
is the perfect pupil in Gradgrinds mind; he is full of facts and
nothing else. He has no individual life, opinions or fancy. He
has a cold, lifeless exterior. I believe the paleness of his skin
represents his inexpressive mind. Everything else reflects off
him, and draws all personality out of him, Dickens says ‘he
would bleed white’ which symbolises how inhumane he and
Gradgrind are. This major contrast between Cecilia and
Gradgrind/Bitzer becomes a war between the sexes, and over
the course of the book one largely triumphs over the other.
Louisa is Grandgrind’s daughter, later becoming
Bounderby’s wife. Confused by her cold-hearted childhood,
Louisa feels detached from her emotions and alienated from
other people. Louisa becomes the primary female character,
however does not embody the Victorian feminine
characteristics as Sissy does. Instead Louisa has become cold
and lifeless through the life of her father. While at first
Louisa unable to comprehend and function within the grey
matter of emotions, she can at least recognise their existence
and are more influential within society than her father or
Bounderby lead her to believe, even without any factual
basis. With the help of Sissy and Rachel, Louisa grows and
progresses, blooming into a model woman. She defines the
story. As she grows and changes as does the story, she is the
timeline of feminism and her breakthrough symbolises the
start of female equality.
With her ‘Roman’ and ‘exploding’ nose, Mrs Sparsit became
a significant comical character within Hard Times.
Employed and eventually dramatically fired by Bounderby
for her selfish, manipulative, dishonest antics, she plots to
overturn Bounderby’s marriage in hope of one day taking
Louisa’s place. Mrs Sparsit becomes a key detective in Hard
Times, taking it upon herself to discover who robbed the
bank, probably in hope of impressing Bounderby. Mrs
Sparsit largely comes under the fire of Dickens’s hyperbole.
His constant mocking of her particularly large nose, attempts
to shadow her extraordinary character. I believe Dickens is
scared of her character and scared of appearing too ‘pro-
women’ and must restore a small amount dignity by mocking
a woman. Her character is so strong and ‘unladylike’ he must
fault her. She is the opposite of how a woman was seen, and
must therefore turn her into a comic. I think Dickens is very
fond of Mrs Sparsit and ruins her passionate character to hide
his affection.
Eventually, after the introduction of all the characters they
slowly progress and attack the plot. The female characters
begin to take action and wake from their sleep.
‘Louisa awoke from a torpor’ if I were to summarise the
story with one sentence this would be it. This quote defines
the plot, and the Victorian situation. Dickens tells us the
Louisa along with all women are awakening into realisation.
Louisa is waking from her nightmare counter life, where
Gradgrind decoyed her conscious, and being born as a
woman ready to tackle the world. Louisa’s story can be
related to many modern fairytales where the women are put
to sleep until saved and brought back to society. Sleeping
Beauty tells the story of a passive, naïve girl being put under
a spell. Much like the spell Gradgrind bounded Louisa with.
The only way to release the spell was a kiss, an icon of
emotion. Louisa was ‘kissed’ by Sissy and Rachel with
emotions and unleashed.
After the rebirth of Louisa the evil Gradgrind machine
imploded. With Louisa increasing individual perspective on
life she soon realised her marriage was not worth suffering
for and confesses her depression her father. Gradgrind
becomes conscious that his system of facts was in fact a
failure. Confirmed by the learning of Tom robbing the bank
Gradgrind admits “The ground on which I stand has ceased
to be solid under my feet.” His children have taught him
something. Following my decision the facts equalled men, I
believe this system symbolises the inequality of men vs
women. The destruction of this system resulted in Gradgrind
recognizing the potential of women; ultimately “making his
facts and figures subservient to Faith, Hope and Charity.”
Sissy’s journey does not develop as much as she was waiting
for the world to develop around her. Sissy was ready from
the beginning however she couldn’t bloom until her
confidence grew. She eventually grew and woke Louisa up.
Sissy triggered all other developments of femininity and
became the blushing epicentre of women.
In conclusion, Hard Times tracks and predicts the
progression of feminism within the world. Through the
various female characters in the novel, Dickens suggests that
feminine compassion is essential to restore social harmony.
We can assume that Dickens was a hidden feminist, whether
he tried to mask it with mocking humour or not, this piece of
feminine ante litteram highlights Dickens ingenuity and
feminine side. It’s his protest or warning, informing society
on the rise and bloom of women.
The Importance of Femininity
During the Victorian era, women were commonly associated
with supposedly feminine traits like compassion, moral
purity, and emotional sensitivity. Hard Times suggests that
because they possess these traits, women can counteract the
mechanizing effects of industrialization. For instance, when
Stephen feels depressed about the monotony of his life as a
factory worker, Rachael’s gentle fortitude inspires him to
keep going. He sums up her virtues by referring to her as his
guiding angel. Similarly, Sissy introduces love into the
Gradgrind household, ultimately teaching Louisa how to
recognize her emotions. Indeed, Dickens suggests that Mr.
Gradgrind’s philosophy of self-interest and calculating
rationality has prevented Louisa from developing her natural
feminine traits. Perhaps Mrs. Gradgrind’s inability to
exercise her femininity allows Gradgrind to overemphasize
the importance of fact in the rearing of his children. On his
part, Bounderby ensures that his rigidity will remain
untouched since he marries the cold, emotionless product of
Mr. and Mrs. Gradgrind’s marriage. Through the various
female characters in the novel, Dickens suggests that
feminine compassion is necessary to restore social harmony .
THE ROLE OF MR SLEARY’S CIRCUS
The circus embodies and its members dramatize the social
paternalists’ trope: the family-society metaphor. The
unrelated individuals of the circus society come together and
behave like a loyal family. The whole group interacts as an
extended family, which is stressed when Sleary explains to
Sissy the advantages of staying with the troupe: “ Emma
Gordon in whothe (whose) lap you’re a lying at prethent
(present), would be a mother to you and Jothpine (Josephine)
would be a thithter (sister) to you”.
The circus, then, is both a metaphor in itself and the novel’s
major symbol of fancy, the metaphor-making element. As
critic Louis James describes, “Dickens’s championing of
Sleary’s magical circus against the schoolroom in Hard
Times is a paradigm of his contribution to the social novel:
he transformed “facts” through the entertainment of the
imagination, making the reader see social reality in a new
light.” The circus master, Sleary, is adept at turning one
thing into another. In his most important act of
transformation, he helps young Tom escape by turning him
into a black servant and then into a country bumpkin. The
transforming power of fancy literally (and ironically) saves
the Gradgrinds in the end. However, such a salvation is full
of ambiguity and even humiliating. In that respect, even the
depiction of the circus people is ambiguous to some extent.
The narrator initially describes the circus as a place of
harmless but nevertheless ridiculous ostentation (showiness).
Sleary himself is an icon of modern commercialism : “
Sleary…a stout modern statue with a moneybox at its elbow,
in an ecclesiastical noche of early Gothic architecture, took
the money.” Dickens delights in exposing the circus’
illusions, in revealing the often-shabby reality behind the
fanciful show. Master Kiddermaster, the dwarf, is unmasked
as he is described: “ in private, where his characteristics were
a precocious cutaway coat and an extremely gruff voice…”
Furthermore, Kiddermaster, like Sleary, is an unabashed
(unashamed) mercenary: “ if you want to cheek us,” he
exclaims to Bounderby, “pay your ochre at the doors”.
On the other hand, the circus people, professional humbugs
themselves, see through Bounderby’s show. Bounderby
describes himself as a self-made man several times during
the scene; and he is, in fact, a self-made man in the same
sense that Kiddermaster is a self-made Cupid, for Bounderby
also makes himself up. “There is even an inverted similarity”
observes Catherine Gallagher, “ in their most extreme
pretences: Kiddermaster pretends to be Childers’s son;
Bounderby pretends not to be his mother’s child.”
In the circus, therefore, Fancy and its major mode, the
metaphoric transformation, often produce showy illusions
that are akin to the self-aggrandizing (self important)
mendacity (deception) depicted in the novel.
Curiously enough, close to the end of the novel, a clown at a
circus performance tells a curious riddle, that even can be
considered as the novel’s psychological icon; that is, the
riddle concerning the structure of the threes, the
psychological stages of sowing, reaping and garnering, or
youth maturity and old age. Solving such a riddle is all about
solving the conflict between “fact” and “Fancy”, forces that
are reconciled only in the lives of the circus troupe. Their
attitude comprise of realizing what life is all about…living to
the lees, and yet living it on the lines of complete fellow
feeling.This is the mistake that Gradgrind makes. He
assumes that because the value of the circus cannot be
calculated, the circus has no value. For Gradgrind and
Bounderby the circus is P a g e | 10 “wonder, idleness, and
folly” (Dickens 14). That is, it produces nothing useful for
them and so they assume that it does no work. This view
Dickens specifically rejects. He consistently describes the
circus as a craft and a trade. It is difficult and skilled work
that people have to train at for a long time. The fact that
circus performers learn through apprenticeships is key here.
For Bounderby this is a ridiculous notion (Dickens 30),
because in his mind there is no reason to apprentice yourself
to something useless, to idleness.
For Dickens the value of the circus is in its relations. The
circus people have “an untiring readiness to help and pity
one another” (Dickens 31) that is missing from the
worldview of Bounderby and Gradgrind. This is the crux of
the matter for Dickens. They are good people whether or not
they participate in the system of production. This is why they
are “deserving, often of as much respect, and always of as
much generous construction, as the every-day virtues of any
class of people in the world” (Dickens 31). It is their
compassion that Dickens
consistently puts forward as their primary trait, and he makes
use of it throughout the novel to move the plot forward.
Sleary and the others exhibit more familial love (as distinct
from the sort of love Stephen and Rachel have) for Sissy in
the first 30 pages than anyone else does in the next 150. It is
Sissy’s compassion and love for Louisa that makes her so
effective in the second half of the novel. It is also Sleary’s
compassion for Sissy that makes him willing to rescue Tom
in the end. This is Dickens’s purpose for the community of
circus people and the trait that he values most. Still, Dickens
is very much aware that the lifestyle and community that the
circus represents is dying. It is an old type that will not
survive the industrial revolution. The concept of
apprenticeship is again important. The circus people are
skilled craftsmen. They need the institution of apprenticeship
to learn their skills. The major feature of the industrial
revolution is P a g e | 11that skilled craftsmen were replaced
by unskilled laborers. Dickens is as aware of this as anybody,
and his answer is not to go back to the pre-industrial
organization. All Stephen Blackpool wants to do is work at
his power-loom in peace and marry Rachel, and Dickens
validates that. The industrial type of work is not in and of
itself the problem.
This can be seen in the fact that Dickens does not choose
circus life for Sissy. Circus life is brutal. It requires balms
and oils and broken bones and occasionally drives a man to
abandon his daughter. When Sissy leaves the circus to live
with Gradgrind, Sleary says to her, “You’ll make your
fortune, I hope, and none of our poor folkth will ever trouble
you” (Dickens 34). This acknowledges that Sissy has a better
chance in the life that Gradgrind can give her than she would
have had in the circus.
Dickens’s descriptions of circus people also indicate that
their lifestyle is not the primary model of a good life.
Dickens describes Sleary as “with one fixed eye and one
loose eye, a voice (if it can be called so) like the efforts of a
broken old pair of bellows, a flabby surface, and a muddled
head that was never sober and never drunk” (31). Sleary, like
the other people of the circus, is physically infirm. He has a
voice that is fading away and barely functions as such.
Sleary’s lisp is a constant reminder of this and gives him the
sense of someone who never quite gets through. Like the
circus, Sleary’s voice is more the memory of a thing than it
is the vital, dynamic thing itself. Sleary’s drinking, which
Dickens emphasizes in Sleary’s last scene (217-8) serves a
similar purpose. Sleary is never quite all there. He is always
on the edge of fading away. This characteristic of the circus
as fading is evident in its use in the plot. It emerges long
enough to deposit Sissy and make an impression, and then
the reader does not see it again until the end. There it comes
forward to save Tom, and then disappears from the lives of
the main characters in Dickens’s final description. The
reason for this is that the circus represents the old P a g e | 12
form of labor and community. The circus then fades out
again in Dickens’s final description because there is no real
place for it in Dickens’s world, except perhaps as a reminder.
Sleary both at the beginning and the end says, “Make the
betht of uth; not the wurtht” (Dickens 35 and 218).
He does not want to fit into Gradgrind’s city or his life. The
circus is past the edge. Dickens does support industrial
society, so long as it does not lose its humanity. The circus,
as a pre-industrialform of labor, is not the ideal and Dickens
is aware that it is outdated. Yet he insists that the wise thing
and the kind thing is not to be cross with it (Dickens 218) for
falling behind, not to try to fold it into industrialized life, but
to allow it to exist separately and to take from it the qualities
that the industrialized city needs. The gentle compassion that
Dickens associates with the circus should be carried over
into the industrial world. Sissy is one very real way in which
values are transferred from one to the other. The old form is
also necessary to rescue Tom, because the industrial world
has very little room for mercy interfering with law and order.
Gradgrind and Louisa could not have circumvented the law
in that way. As modern people, they do not have the tools,
but need to call on an older type of person and an older set of
values for help. The circus’s main value to the plot is not in
bringing amusement but in bringing compassion in the form
of Sissy and help in a time of need. As Sleary says, “there ith
a love in the world, not all Thelf-interetht after all, but
thomething very different” (Dickens 218). Gradgrind
recognizes this in the form of “Faith, Hope, and Charity”
(Dickens 221). These, not facts, were always the things that
were needful in order to counter the problems of the
industrial city. The circus, in depositing its best qualities into
the industrial world, has made the place human.
SYMBOLS
Staircase
When Mrs. Sparsit notices that Louisa and Harthouse are
spending a lot of time together, she imagines that Louisa is
running down a long staircase into a “dark pit of shame and
ruin at the bottom.” This imaginary staircase represents her
belief that Louisa is going to elope with Harthouse and
consequently ruin her reputation forever. Mrs. Sparsit has
long resented Bounderby’s marriage to the young Louisa, as
she hoped to marry him herself; so she is very pleased by
Louisa’s apparent indiscretion. Through the staircase,
Dickens reveals the manipulative and censorious side of Mrs.
Sparsit’s character. He also suggests that Mrs. Sparsit’s self-
interest causes her to misinterpret the situation. Rather than
ending up in a pit of shame by having an affair with
Harthouse, Louisa actually returns home to her father.
Pegasus
Mr. Sleary’s circus entertainers stay at an inn called the
Pegasus Arms. Inside this inn is a “theatrical” pegasus, a
model of a flying horse with “golden stars stuck on all over
him.” The pegasus represents a world of fantasy and beauty
from which the young Gradgrind children are excluded.
While Mr. Gradgrind informs the pupils at his school that
wallpaper with horses on it is unrealistic simply because
horses do not in fact live on walls, the circus folk live in a
world in which horses dance the polka and flying horses can
be imagined, even if they do not, in fact, exist. The very
name of the inn reveals the contrast between the imaginative
and joyful world of the circus and Mr. Gradgrind’s belief in
the importance of fact.
screen that prevents him from noticing his workers’
miserable poverty. Through its associations with evil, the
word “serpents” evokes the moral obscurity that the smoke
creates.
Fire
When Louisa is first introduced, in Chapter 3 of Book the
First, the narrator explains that inside her is a “fire with
nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself
somehow.” This description suggests that although Louisa
seems coldly rational, she has not succumbed entirely to her
father’s prohibition against wondering and imagining. Her
inner fire symbolizes the warmth created by her secret
fancies in her otherwise lonely, mechanized existence.
Consequently, it is significant that Louisa often gazes into
the fireplace when she is alone, as if she sees things in the
flames that others—like her rigid father and brother—cannot
see. However, there is another kind of inner fire in Hard
Times—the fires that keep the factories running, providing
heat and power for the machines. Fire is thus both a
destructive and a life-giving force. Even Louisa’s inner fire,
her imaginative tendencies, eventually becomes destructive:
her repressed emotions eventually begin to burn “within her
like an unwholesome fire.” Through this symbol, Dickens
evokes the importance of imagination as a force that can
counteract the mechanization of human nature.

Smoke Serpents

At a literal level, the streams of smoke that fill the skies

above Coketown are the effects of industrialization.
However, these smoke serpents also represent the moral
blindness of factory owners like Bounderby. Because he is so
concerned with making as much profit as he possibly can,
Bounderby interprets the serpents of smoke as a positive sign
that the factories are producing goods and profit. Thus, he
not only fails to see the smoke as a form of unhealthy
pollution, but he also fails to recognize his own abuse of the
Hands in his factories. The smoke becomes a moral smoke