N a r r a t i v e9 5as though by a south- of- England observer glimpsing it from a
train. The novel’s hero is Stephen Blackpool, a deferential, morally
conscientious working man. We are invited to admire the way he
refuses to cave in to trade union pressure during a strike, but the
truth is that Stephen has very little political consciousness at all. He
is remote from his fellow workers for personal reasons, not political
ones. He dies in solitude, and the general impression is that he ends
his life as a martyr to the bigotry of organised labour. Yet his death
actually has no political significance whatsoever.
The novel portrays the labour movement as loud mouthed,
sectarian and potentially violent. In doing so, it writes off one of the
few forces in Victorian Britain which challenged the very social
injustices it is so indignant about. The strike in the novel is based on
a real- life one, and Dickens paints a far more sympathetic portrait of
the event in his journalism than he does in his novel. In fact, he
commends what he sees as the self- restraint of the striking workers.
Hard Times also delivers a savage caricature of Utilitarianism, a
creed which was actually responsible for some vital social reforms
in Dickens’s England. The founder of the movement, Jeremy
Bentham, was opposed to the criminalisation of homosexuality, an
astonishingly enlightened position for someone of his time.
Utilitarianism involved a lot more than making a fetish out of facts,
which is the way the book crassly presents it. Since some of
Dickens’s best friends were Utilitarians, it is hard to believe that he
could not have been aware of this distortion.
A story may take up no attitude to its subject- matter even
when we might expect it to. This is true of Evelyn Waugh’s satirical
novel Decline and Fall, which uses its hero, Paul Pennyfeather, as a
focus for the antics of English high society. Because he is simply
a point of entry into this world, Pennyfeather is not meant to be a