Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Published 1854 · 102,805 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire

How hard is Hard Times to read?

Hard Times scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
Dickens employs a rich lexicon combining formal Victorian English, specialized jargon from industry, education, and law, and the distinct dialect of characters like Stephen Blackpool and Mr. Sleary. Frequent allusions to classical literature, the Bible, and contemporary figures, alongside satirical neologisms like 'somethingological' and 'hippo-comedietta,' demand a broad vocabulary and cultural awareness from the reader. This places it significantly above 'literary vocabulary without obscurity' (2666, 65) and comparable to the specialized terms in 'Moby-Dick' (72), but with added layers of dialect and social critique.
Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
Sentences in 'Hard Times' are often long and elaborate, featuring multiple nested clauses, extensive descriptive phrases, and rhetorical parallelism. While not reaching the extreme hypotaxis of Henry James or Faulkner, the consistent intricacy and sustained length of Dickens's prose require careful parsing. The inclusion of phonetically rendered dialect also introduces a unique grammatical challenge, demanding extra effort to comprehend the non-standard structures.
Abstraction: 70 out of 100
The novel is a sustained philosophical critique of utilitarianism and the dehumanizing effects of industrial society, with characters and settings serving as allegorical representations of abstract ideas like 'Fact' versus 'Fancy.' The narrator frequently interjects with explicit social commentary and philosophical reflections, moving beyond concrete narrative to engage in theoretical debates. This pervasive abstract layer is more demanding than 'social observation through story' (The Great Gatsby, 58) and approaches the philosophical depth of 'Brothers Karamazov' (75), though it remains grounded in a narrative.
Information density: 70 out of 100
Dickens's prose is densely packed with descriptive detail, metaphorical language, and satirical observations, often within a single sentence or paragraph. Every character introduction, setting description, and authorial digression is laden with multiple layers of meaning, social critique, and symbolic resonance. This requires constant attention and interpretation to fully grasp the intricate web of concepts, making it more demanding than novels focused purely on plot or character development.
Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
Dickens's narrative in 'Hard Times' is largely direct and explicit, with the omniscient narrator frequently interjecting to explain characters' motivations, societal critiques, and moral lessons. Readers are often told what to think of figures like Gradgrind and Bounderby, rather than left to infer their complexities, as seen in direct statements like 'Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities.' This style is far less indirect than works like 'The Great Gatsby' (65) or 'Beloved' (50), where unreliable narration or fragmented memories demand significant reader inference.
Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
'Hard Times' employs a significant degree of symbolism and allegory, with Coketown itself serving as a central symbol of dehumanizing industrialism, characterized by 'interminable serpents of smoke' and 'melancholy mad elephants' (steam-engines). The pervasive conflict between 'Fact' and 'Fancy' is allegorical, embodied by characters like Gradgrind and Sissy Jupe. While not as pervasively symbolic as 'Moby-Dick' (90), the novel consistently uses motifs and extended metaphors to convey its social critique, such as the 'fairy palaces' of the factories and the 'black canal'.
Ironic distance: 75 out of 100
The novel exhibits a high degree of ironic distance, particularly through its omniscient narrator who often presents the self-serving pronouncements and actions of characters like Gradgrind and Bounderby with a seemingly straight face, while simultaneously undermining them. Bounderby's exaggerated tales of his 'self-made' origins are delivered with a tone that implies authorial skepticism, and the description of Coketown as a 'triumph of fact' is a prime example of this pervasive irony. This ironic mode is comparable to the subtle critique found in 'The Great Gatsby' (70) or the more overt but still layered irony of 'Lolita' (75).
Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
While 'Hard Times' addresses complex social issues, the individual character arcs generally move towards a clear, if not always happy, resolution within the novel's scope. The excerpt itself, ending with Sissy's departure and Stephen's immediate predicament, sets up future developments rather than leaving fundamental questions ambiguous. Dickens typically provides closure for his characters, even if the broader societal problems he critiques remain unresolved, placing it closer to works with defined plot conclusions rather than the open-endedness of 'The Great Gatsby' (60) or 'Crying of Lot 49' (75).
Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
'Hard Times' adheres to a largely linear and conventional narrative structure, typical of 19th-century realist novels. The story progresses chronologically, primarily from an omniscient third-person perspective, without significant timeline jumps, experimental forms, or complex POV shifts. This straightforward presentation of events and character development, with clear chapter divisions and sequential events, positions it far below works like 'Flights' (88) or 'Pedro Paramo' (80) in terms of structural complexity.

How Hard Times is regarded

Hard Times holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Hard Times sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (198 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Hard Times scores 68 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.28. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him.
Symbol: Formal
Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.
Mythos: Irony and Satire, phase 1 (satire of low norm), with tragic pathos in the Stephen and Louisa lines (irony i)
a monster in a lecturing castle, with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood captive
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
Let us strike the keynote, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

Where the story of Hard Times takes place

  • Coketown and its neighbourhood, industrial northern England, mid-19th century (1840 to 1855), the main setting

5 things that are true of Hard Times, with the passage for each

  1. Bitzer defines a horse by listing its forty teeth: twenty-four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisive.

    Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisive.

  2. Gradgrind calls Sissy Jupe 'girl number twenty' in the opening schoolroom scene.

    Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!

  3. Bounderby tells Stephen that a divorce would cost between a thousand and fifteen hundred pounds.

    I suppose from a thousand to fifteen hundred pound

  4. The bank robbery loses a precise sum: a hundred and fifty-four pounds, seven shillings and one penny, as Bitzer insists.

    A hundred and fifty-four, seven, one,” said Bitzer.

  5. The mother Bounderby claimed had abandoned him in a ditch is alive and has been receiving a pension of thirty pounds a year from him.

    he never forgot her, but pensioned me on thirty pound a year

Scenes in Hard Times that Frye would name

39 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Alazon, Mr. Bounderby
A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. Bounderby's false self-made-man boast makes him the book's braggart impostor.
Pathos, The Starlight
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. Stephen's death scene is the sacrificial pathos of the book.
Demonic imagery, The Keynote
out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. Coketown is rendered as a demonic inversion of nature, with serpent chimneys and an elephant engine.
Epos, Men and Brothers
Oh, my friends, the downtrodden operatives of Coketown! Oh, my friends and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an iron-handed and a grinding despotism! Slackbridge's speech is a parody of union oratory delivered to a crowd.
Pharmakos, Men and Brothers
Looking at no one, and going his way with a lowly steadiness upon him that asserted nothing and sought nothing, Old Stephen, with all his troubles on his head, left the scene. Stephen is cast out by his fellow workers and rejected by his master, a ritual scapegoat.
Katabasis, Mrs. Sparsit’s Staircase
She erected in her mind a mighty staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa coming. An allegorical descent into a pit, imposed on Louisa by Mrs. Sparsit's watching.

Books that share these scenes with Hard Times

About the author

Charles Dickens