Greater Than the Sum

By Kate Farrington

There are those that hold that there is a wisdom of the head and a wisdom of the heart.

—Charles Dickens

He is the father of plucky orphans, virtuous maidens, and delightfully despicable villains. He’s the creator of heroes who overcome tragedy to inherit fortunes, of eccentric recluses, downtrodden workers, and the occasional Yuletide spirit. His stories are a whirl of nail-biting action, last-minute rescues, tearful-yet-loving partings, and happily-ever-afters that defy all logic. He is the “Inimitable Boz,” the embodiment of Victorian optimism, industry, and above all, sentiment.

And yes, Charles Dickens stands guilty before us—every inch of him the rank sentimentalist he is accused of being. But it isn’t entirely his happy endings and “all’s well that ends well” plots that keep us coming back for more: if that were the case, Hard Times (which some critics have called the only Dickens novel without a clearly happy ending) wouldn’t have survived. Dickens is much more than the sum of his sentimental parts. In his splendid, sprawling body of work we see—we sense—a man searching for something, a restless spirit roaming far and wide, through rich and poor, town and country, past and present, the here and the hereafter. The search brought him unparalleled fame and fortune, but as much frustration as happiness. Few writers have ever worked so tirelessly, so obsessively, to capture the spirit of their age—and his uncanny ability to tug at the heartstrings is only one aspect of a far greater whole.

Charles Dickens, circa 1850

Charles Dickens was a household name in England at the age of twenty-five and an international icon at thirty. Born in 1812, the diligent son of spendthrift parents, his rise to fame coincided with the start of the Victorian age—his image and art as inextricably linked with the era’s ethos as the young queen who lent it her name. His career spanned four decades, more than a dozen novels, an assortment of novellas, essays, short stories, articles, plays, and one public scandal.

He was always on the go; he worked tirelessly when on deadline, planned elaborate parties and theatricals for his friends in his rare free time, championed causes and charities, and gave readings of his works to spellbound audiences. Every new experience was an adventure, from the rigors of weekly publication, to leading the public outcry against workhouses and prisons, to undertaking (and eventually abandoning) married life. His impossibly high expectations of people, places, and causes often left him disappointed in their reality, but he never stopped seeking—sometimes eagerly, sometimes in near desperation—new journeys and new scenes, in life and in art. His restlessness finds its way into many of his characters—often with a good-humored touch of self mockery.

His writing dove into every strata of society and confronted every social ill to be found there, from the desperate plight of lower-class women such as Nancy in Oliver Twist to the inefficiencies and cruelties of British justice in Bleak House. His was a clarion call to social justice—sometimes slyly humorous, sometimes goaded into passion and fury by the disinterest and inaction he saw around him every day.

In 1853, two seemingly disparate events caught Dickens’ wandering eye: first, news that the union workers of Preston had been locked out of their factories by masters who refused to hear their call for higher wages, and then, hearing that a friend had published a book of “de-magicked” fairy tales for children.  By the beginning of the following year he was hard at work on a new book, shorter, faster, and more focused than anything he had written in years, weaving the two threads together into a tale of a factory town where the de-magicking has taken hold for a generation. In doing so he created one of his most memorable stories.

The scene is Coketown. “A town of machinery and tall chimneys,” where Sleary’s Horse Riding—a traveling circus—brightly colored and utterly out of place in this barren corner of the world, has just rolled into town. But it finds a chilly reception: Coketown is no place for idle fancy.

The town’s machinery is set to work on the inhabitants almost from birth. In Mr. Gradgrind’s school children are indoctrinated with the power and primacy of Fact: “plant nothing else in your mind and root out everything else.” They are heads without hearts and minds without souls. As adults they take their place in the working world as “Hands” under the auspices of factory owners like Josiah Bounderby, who believes his workers are expected to know their place: “a race who would have found more favor with some people if Providence had seen fit to make them . . . only hands and stomachs.”

Heads, minds, hands, stomachs: Dickens itemizes them, all separate, all isolated—just as teacher Gradgrind has isolated the mind from the imagination. When little Sissy Jupe, a child of the Horse Riding troupe, “fancies” flowers, Gradgrind admonishes her. When the worker Stephen Blackpool yearns for a happier life, Bounderby rebukes him for “turtle soup and . . . gold spoon” wonderings—for wanting what is not his to want. We must “never wonder,” Gradgrind tells us. Facts, statistics, lists, and “isms”—that is the total sum of their human condition. And the result? Hard Times shows us a world fragmented, lifeless. Dissected.

And with no room for circuses.

Never, ever wonder, says Gradgrind.  But if we never wonder “what if,”are we doomed to know only “what is?” And if our world is all facts and figures, will we ever stand in awe—in “wonder” at what we see? And, most importantly, when we cannot “imagine” ourselves into someone else’s life—when we cannot think “what would I do in their place?” do we not kill empathy, that most peculiar and most human of traits?

Weavers' houses in Victorian England

This is the great tragedy of Dickens’ Coketown: that empathy and imagination have been cut away from the human hearts of the town. Gradgrind’s students can excel only in those calculations “relative to Number One.” The cotton masters and the Hands can reach no common ground because both sides are deaf to the other’s needs—and neither can understand Stephen’s desire to keep clear of their “muddle.” Gradgrind rails comically against flowered carpets, but the day is coming when he must face the possibility that his Factual world has stripped his fellow citizens, his own children, of the thing that makes them human. He has left them nothing but heads, stomachs and hands—and they are, in consequence, much less than the sum of all their parts.

But things are not as bleak as they appear. “I have such ungovernable thoughts that they will wonder” Louisa admits to her brother Tom. Despite being walled in by her father’s “ologies,” Louisa must wonder. Even as she agrees to a loveless but practical marriage to Bounderby, she wonders. As she watches her husband’s thoughtless cruelty toward Stephen Blackpool, she wonders. And when Mr. James Harthouse sidles into her life with words of love she has never heard before, she knows. Something is missing.

And that is perhaps the greatest “wonder” of them all. The heart is not so easily silenced, it appears, and once Louisa’s heart is awakened, her eyes are opened to the world around her—to the plight of the Hands in the industrial town, to the dissipation of her brother and the coarseness of her husband, and to the incomprehensible love that Sissy brings with her from the Horse Riding. There is damage that can’t be undone, but it can be overcome. We are, Dickens is telling us, more than merely our work or our education. Our future can always be greater than our past—if we allow it to be.

In many ways Dickens is ready-made for the stage. Indeed, it was a common theatrical practice to stage his books even before they were finished (a practice that drove the author to distraction). Perhaps it is because Hard Times is already so streamlined (by Dickensian standards, that is) that it feels so right to hear these words spoken and to see these characters striding across our stage. Playwright and adapter Stephen Jeffrys has tapped into Dickens’ innate theatricality with incredible insight, finding the crux of the story and compressing it into a complex, complete take on this poignant little tale.

My tattered copies of Dickens’ books attest to how often I return to these stories. But if you asked me, why the dickens, Dickens? I’m not sure I could answer you. There are other books and plays I quote more readily, other characters throughout literature who mean more to me personally than his curious creatures. But if pressed to name my favorite author, I think it might be Charles Dickens—impossibly virtuous maidens, stalwart heroes, and all. He is unique. He is expansive, passionate, flawed, gregarious, meticulous, careless, noble, and supremely cheeky. His art is greater than the sum of its parts, because he will settle for no less than an entire world crammed, bursting, into his pages.

A group of early factory workers.

And in his brief, combustive foray into the world of Coketown, he offers the simplest and most profound defense of the imagination, and of artists everywhere, spoken in the rasping voice of an aging circus performer. “You must have us.” Even in hard times, the imagination must, must, be nourished.

Because if it isn’t—what can we possibly amount to?

For more information about The Pearl’s production of HARD TIMES download our full Playgoer’s Supplement.

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