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A review by blueyorkie
Tempos Difíceis by Charles Dickens
4.0
John Ruskin declared Hard Times Dickens' best novel. It is worth asking why this was Ruskin's opinion since he would have been the first to recognize that comparing works of art with each other and discussing which is the best is a sportsman's habit, not a judge of enlightened art. Let us understand that Ruskin meant Hard Times was one of his favorites among Dickens's books. Was it a whim of taste? Or is there another rational explanation for the preference? I think so.
Excerpt from the Introduction to Hard Times, in 1911 by Bernard Shaw.
In this very committed novel, but also profoundly moving (from my point of view, in any case), Charles Dickens denounces, beyond the living conditions of the workers of the first mechanized spinning mills in the North of England, the Industrial Revolution in his outfit. This historical process was not content with modifying the landscapes, the scales, and the ways of living, thinking, and producing; it simply replaced them with others, without resemblances or standard measures with the landscapes, the scales, and the ways of living, thinking, and producing of the agricultural and artisanal age that preceded. In this way, the Industrial Revolution was a fundamental change of civilization. A shift in civilization of such brutality that the sky adopted another color, the earth no longer had the same consistency or the same relief, and the two no longer joined on the same line as before. Before that, the air changed its smell and density, and disoriented men and women experienced the most difficulty adapting to the furiously utilitarian, madly materialistic, hideously disfigured world they had created. In this respect, Difficult Times is undoubtedly among the first novels describing the Anthropocene.
These proletarians and these bourgeois who were born in the space of a handful of years were all individuals thrown into the unknown at the speed of throwing stones. Of course, they did not all land in the same place. Still, whatever their point of fall, all had been forced to conceive new ways of living or surviving in this new world; all had to reinvent themselves as human beings in this society dedicated to machinery, perpetual motion, and profitability; everyone had to find justifications or explanations for their existence as rich or poor. It is the stories of some of these men and women that Dickens tells us in this dark social novel, which, beyond its biting irony and its virulent criticism of a greedy, contemptuous bourgeoisie sure of its good right (but also of a working class that is too gullible and easily influenced), is also a plea in favor of imagination and fantasy.
It would seem that Hard Times was the subject, for various reasons, of numerous negative reviews, whether at the time of its publication or more recently. It is profoundly different from the author's previous great novels, if only because it is or seems more austere, more desperate, and we do not find as many truculent characters as usual, but I loved it. All the more adored because it could be that the questions he asks about the thirst for power, the taste for profit, economic alienation, or education have lost none of their relevance since 1854.
Excerpt from the Introduction to Hard Times, in 1911 by Bernard Shaw.
In this very committed novel, but also profoundly moving (from my point of view, in any case), Charles Dickens denounces, beyond the living conditions of the workers of the first mechanized spinning mills in the North of England, the Industrial Revolution in his outfit. This historical process was not content with modifying the landscapes, the scales, and the ways of living, thinking, and producing; it simply replaced them with others, without resemblances or standard measures with the landscapes, the scales, and the ways of living, thinking, and producing of the agricultural and artisanal age that preceded. In this way, the Industrial Revolution was a fundamental change of civilization. A shift in civilization of such brutality that the sky adopted another color, the earth no longer had the same consistency or the same relief, and the two no longer joined on the same line as before. Before that, the air changed its smell and density, and disoriented men and women experienced the most difficulty adapting to the furiously utilitarian, madly materialistic, hideously disfigured world they had created. In this respect, Difficult Times is undoubtedly among the first novels describing the Anthropocene.
These proletarians and these bourgeois who were born in the space of a handful of years were all individuals thrown into the unknown at the speed of throwing stones. Of course, they did not all land in the same place. Still, whatever their point of fall, all had been forced to conceive new ways of living or surviving in this new world; all had to reinvent themselves as human beings in this society dedicated to machinery, perpetual motion, and profitability; everyone had to find justifications or explanations for their existence as rich or poor. It is the stories of some of these men and women that Dickens tells us in this dark social novel, which, beyond its biting irony and its virulent criticism of a greedy, contemptuous bourgeoisie sure of its good right (but also of a working class that is too gullible and easily influenced), is also a plea in favor of imagination and fantasy.
It would seem that Hard Times was the subject, for various reasons, of numerous negative reviews, whether at the time of its publication or more recently. It is profoundly different from the author's previous great novels, if only because it is or seems more austere, more desperate, and we do not find as many truculent characters as usual, but I loved it. All the more adored because it could be that the questions he asks about the thirst for power, the taste for profit, economic alienation, or education have lost none of their relevance since 1854.