Abstract
In Hard Times Dickens made colour a major feature of design. One of the titles he considered for it was ‘Black and white’.1 The novel is patterned on a progression between the two most powerful scenes: the first in the ‘intensely whitewashed’ schoolroom at the beginning, with its albino star pupil, Bitzer, so pale that he looks as though he would ‘bleed white’ (4–5), and the second set in Sleary’s darkened circus ring at the end, with Tom Gradgrind disguised as a blackamoor clown, his face ‘daubed all over’ with a ‘greasy composition’ of black make-up (283).
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Notes
See the notes bound in with the manuscript in the Victoria and Albert Museum. These notes are readily available in the Norton Critical Edition of Hard Times, ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966) p. 232. This tentative title, though one among many, is underlined twice in Dickens’s list, suggesting it might have had priority after ‘Hard Times’ itself.
Monroe Engel sees the tentative title ‘Black and white’ as a sign of the book’s ‘scant measure of the very quality for which it argues, imaginative pleasure’ — The Maturity of Dickens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959) p. 172. And David M. Hirsch, without exploring or apparently noticing Dickens’s development of his colour motif in the novel, complains, ‘When one thinks of the heights that Herman Melville had reached three years earlier in his potently imaginative use of white and black color imagery in Moby-Dick, then Dickens’s failure is obvious’ — ‘Hard Times and Dr. Leavis’, Criticism, 6 (Winter 1964) 5.
Melvyn Haberman, ‘The Courtship of the Void: The World of Hard Times’, in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome H. Buckley (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975) p. 40.
Annotators have not pointed out that this is an allusion to the frequent Victorian source for references to the tale of ‘Blue Beard’, George Colman’s Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity (1798), a dramatic version that must have been often revived, and also recalled in J. R. Planché’s Blue Beard: An Extravaganza of 1839. There is no blue chamber in the original Perrault version of the tale, but the dread Blue Chamber in Colman and Planché is the setting for a climactic scene. It was also Colman who contributed the name Fatima for Blue Beard’s final wife, which Dickens uses elsewhere (BH, 855). See Juliet McMaster, ‘Bluebeard at Breakfast: An Unpublished Thackeray Manuscript’, Dickens Studies Annual, VIII (1980) 199.
For a detailed examination of the fire imagery in the novel, see Alan P. Johnson, ‘Hard Times: “Performance” or “Poetry”?’ in Dickens Studies, 5 (May 1969) 62–80.
One might expect Mrs. Blackpool to belong to the category of those who, because of their weakness, cannot be expected to help themselves and so deserve our compassion; but Dickens apparently classes her as one of the weak-willed, as he certainly judges her harshly as responsible. For these categories of judgement in Dickens’s social attitudes, see George Ford, ‘Self-help and the Helpless in Bleak House’, in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958) pp. 93–5. Warrington Winters suggests that Dickens’s animosity towards Mrs. Blackpool stemmed from his growing exasperation with his own wife — ‘Dickens’s Hard Times: The Lost Childhood’, Dickens Studies Annual, I (1971) 227.
John Holloway recognizes this scene as a ‘superb moment’, but says it is ‘barely … related to Dickens’s major problems in the book, though it is one of its best things’ — ‘Hard Times: A History and a Criticism’, in Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) p. 171. The scene, however, is a key one in the dominant and consistently developed visual design of the novel.
He has a ‘puffed head and forehead, swelled veins’, and ‘a pervading appearance … of being inflated like a balloon’, and his hair seems to be ‘blown about by his windy boastfulness’ (HT, 14). Likewise, it is his habit to stand before his own portrait as though he were gong to explode himself into it (296). See Miriam Benn, ‘A Landscape with Figures: Character and Expression in Hard Times’, Dickens Studies Annual, I (1971) 172.
I do not go so far as Robert E. Lougy, who sees Bounderby’s state of intense inflation as a sign of sexual frustration — ‘Dickens’ Hard Times: The Romance as Radical Literature’, Dickens Studies Annual, II (1972) 246.
K. J. Fielding and Philip Collins have shown that Dickens was barking up the wrong tree in this passage, and attacking the fairly enlightened Department of Practical Art for the wrong reasons. See K. J. Fielding, ‘Charles Dickens and the Department of Practical Art’, Modern Language Review, 48 (1953) 270–7; and
Philip Collins, Dickens and Education (London: Macmillan, 1963) pp. 156–8.
I find no evidence for Robert Lougy’s astonishing claim (‘Dickens’ Hard Times’, Dickens Studies Annual, II, 246) that the Bounderby marriage is unconsummated, nor does he provide any. A symbolic reading of Tom’s penknife, however, might have been used in support of Daniel P. Deneau’s argument for an incestuous sexual element in Louisa’s relation to Tom — ‘The Brother-Sister Relationship in Hard Times’, The Dickensian, 60 (1964) 173–7.
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© 1987 Juliet McMaster
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McMaster, J. (1987). Hard Times: ‘Black and White’. In: Dickens the Designer. Macmillan Studies in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06933-0_6
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