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Page 20
In order to improve the sales of Household Words , which had started to slip in 1854, Dickens began to publish a new serial in weekly installments in that magazine. Hard Times. For These Times , an assault on the industrial greed and political economy that exploits the working classes and deadens the soul, ran from April 1 to August 12, 1854. The Gradgrind philosophy, based on Facts, Facts, Facts of utilitarian calculus, is demonstrated as being not only cruel and destructive to the workers--"hands"--it dehumanizes and exploits but humanly inadequate to the Gradgrind family it purportedly serves. Mrs. Gradgrind sees that her husband has missed something, "not an ology at all," in his life, and Louisa and her brother Tom, "the whelp," are nearly destroyed by the mechanical philosophy of Gradgrindery. Sissy Jupe, who grew up among Sleary's Horse Riding Circus, represents the imaginative creativity and generosity that the Gradgrind family miss. The union of Sissy and Loo, at the conclusion of the novel, is emblematic of what Dickens believes industrial England needs: "let me lay this head of mine upon a loving heart," Loo says to Sissy at the end.
The Crimean War, which broke out in March, 1854, prevented the government from addressing the domestic social ills Dickens had been railing against since at least as early as Oliver Twist. The inept government, which cannot seem to get beyond just muddling along, is captured brilliantly in the portrayal of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit , published in monthly numbers from December, 1855, to June, 1857. The dominant symbol of the novel is imprisonment, and society itself becomes the prison of its inhabitants.
