While stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, I participated in an online reading challenge. I don’t remember the exact requirements, but I recall one prompt in particular standing out; it instructed me to read an author I knew I ought to read but didn’t think I would enjoy. I wasn’t thrilled. That meant it was time to try Dickens again. With A Christmas Carol as a singular exception, I had never enjoyed (or finished) a Dickens novel. To be fair, I think even my affection for the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge was heavily indebted to childhood memories, Brian Henson, and Michael Caine. To complete the challenge, I carefully selected the shortest Dickens novel I could find, and that is how I first experienced Hard Times.
On that reading, I found Hard Times to be just what I expected of a Dickens novel: the characters were flat, the tone was moralistic, and I completed the audiobook just to check it off my list, promptly forgetting its plot and characters. It is clear to me now that my approach to Hard Times was deeply tinged with my anti-Dickensian prejudice. It wasn’t until the fall of 2025 that I revisited the book, this time with more curiosity and context through a Memoria College class on the English novel. After entering the Victorian period through the work of Charlotte Brontë, our class was assigned Hard Times. I held my proverbial breath and dove in.
What I found on this reading shocked me with delight. While Dickens’ novels are frequently described as having a fable-style morality, I began to see that Hard Times takes the satirical attributes of Dickens’ writing and adds to them a fairy-tale quality. This charming and ironic approach to a critique of utilitarianism is what cracked the book open for me and helped me enjoy Dickens beyond A Christmas Carol for the first time.
Hard Times is the cautionary tale of Thomas Gradgrind and his children. Gradgrind, a strict adherent of rationalism, believes that facts—and only facts—are all that is necessary for education. He tests this educational method on his own children, Louisa and Tom, insisting they forgo any strong emotion, imagination, or flights of fancy. The results are disastrous. Tom becomes a morally bereft wastrel, and Louisa drifts through life, lost and despairing. The events of the novel take place against the backdrop of Victorian commercial society, where mill workers struggle against the crushing and dehumanizing effects of industrialization. While I will spare you plot spoilers, you should know that the characters find crucial resolution at a circus through the compassion of its performers. The contrast is intentional and, if you’re paying attention, hilarious.
After this closer and more enjoyable read of Hard Times, I looked further into Dickens’ relationship to fairy tales. I was surprised to find that he had a vehement attachment to fairy stories and attributed his own well-being in part to them during a difficult childhood. When Dickens heard that a friend and illustrator, George Cruikshank, had begun to rewrite fairy tales into morality tales for children, his reaction was strongly negative. He wrote a piece decrying the practice in his weekly magazine, Household Words, and I think his sentiments there give insight into both his impetus and his approach to Hard Times. He opens this way:
We must assume that we are not singular in entertaining a very great tenderness for the fairy literature of our childhood. What enchanted us then, and is captivating a million of young fancies now, has, at the same blessed time of life, enchanted vast hosts of men and women who have done their long day’s work and laid their grey heads down to rest. It would be hard to estimate the amount of gentleness and mercy that has made its way among us through these slight channels. Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force–many such good things have been first nourished in the child’s heart by this powerful aid.
Seeing fairy tales as a tool by which to teach virtues of compassion, love of nature, gentleness, and mercy, Dickens thought that twisting them to teach a pet social issue of the (new) author was a particularly heinous sort of literary violence. He opines that using fairy stories in this way would quickly lead to a complete loss of the beautiful, fantastic originals. Therefore, Dickens asserts that the genre of fairy tale should be protected and given its due. He continues:
In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected. Our English red tape is too magnificently red ever to be employed in the tying up of such trifles, but every one who has considered the subject knows full well that a nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun. The theatre, having done its worst to destroy these admirable fictions–having in a most exemplary manner destroyed itself, its artists, and its audiences, in that perversion of its duty–it becomes doubly important that the little books themselves, nurseries of fancy as they are, should be preserved. To preserve them in their usefulness, they must be as much preserved in their simplicity, and purity, and innocent extravagance, as if they were actual fact.
So it seems Dickens discovered a new front on which to battle the encroachment of utilitarianism and the problem of inadequate education. It is no accident that this essay on the importance of fairy tales was published mere months before the first installment of Hard Times appeared in the same magazine.
The story takes place in a fictionalized town (Coketown) rather than London or other real English locations, the typical setting of Dickens’s novels. The characters are caricatures: larger-than-life types with exaggerated physical descriptions and one-note personalities. The plot is straightforward, moving from point A to point B in predictable, rhythmic patterns through the expected and consistent actions of the characters. In short, the book expresses “simplicity, purity, and innocent extravagance,” just as Dickens attributes to fairy stories that are useful for shaping good moral character.
In an extra twist, Dickens spends the book inserting references to famous fairy stories, especially, it seems, around the characters and places that seem most resistant to fantasy. The mills are called “fairy palaces,” Mrs. Sparsit is described as a dragon, and Mr. Gradgrind is contrasted with Bluebeard. Throughout the book, readers are pointed toward the fantastic and the strange. The very air the characters are breathing is full of fairy tales, though they do their best to deny it. Mr. Gradgrind went to work in chapter two “not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves.” The workers in the factories are described as “melancholy-mad elephants.” And this is to say nothing of the literal circus!
Dickens’ desire to tell a fairy tale that exposed the moral pitfalls of utilitarian education is no surprise, considering his love of the fairy story and his belief in its power.
The more I reflect on Hard Times, the more I see similarities between Hard Times and Roald Dahl’s stories full of strange, exaggerated personalities and children in impossible, difficult situations. The villains are larger-than-life and get what they deserve, even if that just means living with their own wickedness. Dickens is not as absurd or fanciful as Dahl, but the tone of strangeness and detachment feels related.
In 1853, Dickens felt the need to publicly champion the fairy tale in “Frauds on the Fairies,” and in 1854 he published one serially for adults as Hard Times. Little did he know, a golden age for fairy tales and unmoralized children’s stories was coming. Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865, Little Women in 1868, and The Princess and the Goblin in 1872. In the meantime, Hard Times clearly resonated with readers since the circulation of Household Words doubled during its run.
Works Consulted
Connor, Steven. ‘Deconstructing Hard Times’ in David Copperfield and Great Expectations: A New Casebook, ed. John Peck. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/76-101qt/DeconstructingHardTimes.txt
Dickens, Charles. ‘Frauds on the Fairies.’ ed. Philip V. Allingham. https://victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva239.html
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. London: Penguin, 2007.
Dickens, Charles. “Hard Times Working Notes,” transcribed and edited by Adam Grener and Isabel Parker. Digital Dickens Notes Project. Anna Gibson and Adam Grener, dirs. 2023. http://dickensnotes.com/notes/hard-times/mirador/
Herrington, Boze. ‘Hard Times: An Introduction.’ Last modified August 29, 2023. https://wreninkpaper.com/2023/08/29/hard-times-an-introduction/
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