Where Louisa Resists Being Crushed Under the System

Hard Times by Charles Dickens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this more than any Dickens novel I have read. I'm not sure I'd go to the difficulty of arguing that this is his best novel, whatever that means, but I can say it's the one that I had the best time reading.

[Bleak House, maybe, could be his "best" book--IMO, I mean, not in some universal way--and A Tale of Two Cities, despite its overexposure making some dismiss it, should be in the same conversation. But neither was as fun to read, even though they had their charms.]

What's the difference? I think it's largely scale. Most of his books are [searching for a kind word...] freaking bloated and in dire need of editing. I get it. That was the norm, the expectation, and he's just giving everyone what they want. In 2025, many fantasy readers ask for the same thing--a Big Fat Fantasy of a thousand or 1500 pages, filled with "world-building," lots and lots of characters, as many POV characters as you can manage, with tons of subplots. Some of those are, to me, grossly padded and dull, but to readers who just want to be in it, to get lost, the length is the key. I feel like that's what a lot of Dickens readers want, too--enough pages to get lost in, to have room to be in the middle of it for a good long time, even if that means lots of secondary characters making lots of long, pointless speeches. (I'm looking at you, Pickwick Papers. And you, Martin Chuzzlewit. And The Old Curiosity Shop. Even you, David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby.) And to be fair, there's a lot to enjoy in any case in those very long books. I enjoyed parts of every one of those, and overall found them worth reading. Some people (forgive my incredulousness) actually find the ridiculous speeches of ridiculous characters funny. They find blowhards holding forth, page after page on dry-as-dust topics, amusing in their intentional excess. Bless them for that ability. I don't have it, and it made it hard to finish some of those books.

But this novel doesn't make that demand on the reader. We have one main story in one main setting, and the subplots branching from it are connected and integral and interesting. Nearly every chapter advances the plot, giving us meaningful action and emotional, engaging connections between characters that kept me reading more than his other books.

The plot itself is more direct than is usually the case, with a shape and an arc that are clear enough that we don't wonder where we're going. Louisa and her brother are raised in a no-nonsense home, taught to suppress genuine emotion, to make their wishes and dreams subordinate to practical concerns, especially money. Louisa is taught to be compliant and is married off to a rich old banker and industrialist and her brother goes to work for the man, which means they should be perfectly content. Of course, they aren't. Humans aren't made for such cold rationalization.

The dirty, smoky, impoverished industrial city of Coketown is the perfect emblem of this--the wish for beauty and health and color and happiness is subordinated to the need to earn a living and make money. The city is the system, and we find that it crushes lives, exploits workers, subverts justice, and harms even those sitting at the top of the it. Innocents are slandered. Workers who want to do more for their families, who want to organize to balance the power of the wealthy owners, are treated like criminals. Louisa's father, as an educator, wanted to raise up his children and his students to fit in that system, but it's doomed. He learns this himself, to his credit, and tries to make amends, which he does, to a degree.

(As an old teacher, it's hard not to recognize the parallels to modern education. I hope I did a lot better job making education itself more pleasant, but there are elements of the system--think high-stakes testing and similar state-mandated drudgery and pollution--that were unavoidable. Required. Where teachers are unable to modify or ameliorate the system, they try to prepare students for it. "Yes, this is stupid, but let's make it hurt you as little as possible." As misguided as her father was, that in effect was what he was trying to do--he was making square pegs fit industry's round holes, with all the violence and good intentions that suggests.)

Despite the literal gloom here, it's not a sad novel, really. In parts, yes. But there is hope, and growth, and some good people have good things happen. You have to feel sympathy for the poverty and smoke and horrible work, and I do, but there's a feeling that better things are coming, or are at least possible, and Sissy's children (mentioned on the last page) are a sign of that. And it's told in a way that I found more than usually entertaining, making me push farther each time I picked it up than I usually do, interested in what was going to happen next, wanting to find out what happened to the characters. You know--fun.

It was good. I liked it. 5 stars.

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