Always concerned with issues of class, social injustice, and employment, Dickens shows in Hard Times, written in 1854, a broader concern with the philosophies and economic movements which underlie those issues. Three parallel story lines reflect a broad cross-section of society and its thinking. Mr. Thomas Gradgrind runs a school founded upon the principles of rationalism, a belief in the importance of facts, the antithesis of romantic “fancy” and imagination. Basically a good man, he denies the importance of emotion–for himself, his children, and his students. Gradgrind’s friend, Mr. Bounderby, is a banker and factory owner, aged fifty, who claims to have risen from the gutter to his present lofty position purely through hard work. The third story line involves Stephen Blackpool, a worker in Bounderby’s factory, trapped in a marriage to an alcoholic who periodically appears and extorts money from him. As the story lines overlap and intersect, often with consummate irony, Dickens keeps a light enough hand to prevent the story from becoming a polemic, though his criticism of hypocrisy, corruption, and “progress” at the expense of humanity is clear.
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Set in Cloisterham, a cathedral town, Dickens’s final novel, unfinished, introduces two elements unusual for Dickens–opium-eating and the church. In the opening scene, John Jasper, music teacher and soloist in the cathedral choir, awakens from an opium trance in a flat with two other semi-conscious men and their supplier, an old woman named Puffer, and then hurries off to daily vespers. Jasper, aged twenty-six, is the uncle and guardian of Edwin Drood, only a few years younger. Drood has been the fiancé of Rosa Bud for most of his life, an arrangement made by his and Rosa’s deceased fathers to honor their friendship, and the wedding is expected within the year. Jasper, Rosa’s music teacher, is secretly in love with her, though she finds him repellent. Especially intriguing because it is unfinished, this novel continues to fascinate mystery lovers and literary scholars more than a century after its first publication.
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A handsome young man who finds himself the sole support of his mother and sister after his father’s death, Nicholas Nickleby is hopeful that his uncle, Ralph Nickleby, a weathy speculator in London, will assist the unfortunate family in its hour of need. Ralph’s cruel response, however, is to make Nicholas the assistant headmaster at a notoriously abusive school in northern England and to make his beautiful sister a seamstress and part-time hostess at his own parties. There she is subjected to innuendo and to the drunken intentions of men whose accounts help keep Ralph a wealthy man.
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In what may be her most exciting and original novel, George Eliot weaves two completely different plots, one of which is a uniquely sympathetic and fully developed story with Jewish protagonists. Presenting no Jewish stereotypes, as we see in Dickens (in Oliver Twist and other novels) and even Trollope (with The Way We Live Now (Barnes & Noble Classics)), she depicts characters who have, in one case, tried to avoid their heritage and in another have been drawn irrevocably to a religion and culture with which they have had no previous contact.
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George Eliot’s epic novel MIDDLEMARCH, often considered her masterwork, portrays life in an English Midlands community from the point of view of several main characters and the people with whom they interact. While developing characters and plots, however, she also illustrates a variety of themes related to the social milieu of the early 1830s. Dorothea Brooke, the main character, is a bit rebellious, in the sense that she wants to do something with her life, not just be the typical upper-class wife of her period. For this reason, she rejects an early suitor in favor of Edward Casaubon, a man more that twenty years her senior, who has devoted his life to arcane scholarship. Numerous peripheral characters add to the portrait Eliot creates of several levels of provincial society and their lives. All are consumed with money (or imprisoned by it), since the society is based on class and the ability to live up to class standards. The poor are just trying to earn enough to stay alive. Eliot creates fascinating characters, especially Dorothea, the talented and intelligent woman who wanted more intellectual stimulation than she was able to find as an upperclass woman in the 1830s. Eliot herself often challenged the status quo, shocking her society by living openly for many years with a married man, George Henry Lewes.
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