Melancholia and Machinery: The Dystopian Landscape and Mindscape in Hard Times.

Contributors: Lewis, Darcy - Author. Journal title: Dickens Quarterly. Volume: 31. Issue: 1
Publication date: March 2014.
Melancholia and Machinery: The Dystopian Landscape and Mindscape in Hard Times
Lewis, Darcy, Dickens Quarterly

In "Living with and Looking at Landscape," geographer and historian David Lowenthal
states, "We need to sense landscape as abiding; our essential well-being depends on finding
our surroundings more durable than ourselves" (648). Mark Roskill expounds on this
notion, arguing,

Landscape is an extraordinarily important component of our concrete

physical experiences in the world, the apprehension of things
deriving from these experiences and our accompanying sense of
place. It represents a shaping term in our conceptualization of
what is "out there," and of human relationships as they intertwine
and interact with that. (1)
The land, therefore, is a conduit for human epistemology, as well as a mirrored surface on
which to reflect back societal and individual identities. Indeed, much ecocritical scholarship
in the last twenty years has focused on establishing the relationship between the land and
the people who inhabit it, glorify it, exploit it, and/or build cultures and heritages upon it.
The land and humanity are intertwined in a complex symbiosis in which they inform and
shape one another--the land reflects the people, and the people reflect the land.

For the people of England, the unique English geography, topography and weather provide
a literal space to reify their distance from continental Europe, and, arguably, the rest of the
world. As an island, the insularity created by being, in essence, "borderless"--non-adjacent
to other countries and cultures--strengthens the sense of English landscape as
fundamentally important to English identity. Inherent in the island geography and the
topography of low-rolling English countryside is the temperate cloudiness that keeps the
English land verdant and fertile. Lowenthal argues that the synthesis of England's unique
characteristics has led to a notion of landscape-as-heritage that is "distinctively English.

Nowhere else is landscape so freighted as legacy. Nowhere else does the very term
transcend scenery and genres de vie to suggest quintessential national virtues" ("British
Identity" 213). The idealized scenery that Lowenthal calls the "now hallowed visual cliche"
of archetypal rural England lies in its visually cohesive and orderly "patchwork of meadow
and pasture, hedgerows and copses, immaculate villages nestling among small tilled fields
... the English landscape is not natural but crafted, suffused with human as well as divine
purpose" ("British Identity" 214-15). The landscape that the English have historically
valued is the familiar picturesque beauty of a cultivated countryside bearing the imprint of
human design and labor, in which English identities and ancestries have been literally
imprinted into the soil.
Writing from within this milieu, Charles Dickens was deeply concerned with the way in
which the English landscape was rapidly changing in the nineteenth century. As
industrialism was transforming English towns and countryside into mechanized scenes of
factories and pollution, the evidence of human impress was subsuming the natural
elements on which they were built. Though scholars have proved that Dickens had an
ambivalent attitude toward industrialism as a system, he nevertheless reacted strongly to
the forcible displacement of the English landscape. In his tenth novel, Hard Times,
published in 1854, Dickens exerts an ecological and preservationist sensibility by crafting a
dystopian landscape in his fictional factory town "Coketown," anticipating the dystopian
trend that was to become a common thematic technique in science-fiction novels of the
twentieth century. Beyond a simple "endangered landscape" trope, however, I argue that
Dickens's construction of the physical manifestation of industrialism works correlatively to
the psychic effects of utilitarianism on the people within. In Hard Times, Dickens's dystopia
is manifested on two axes--the physical landscape of Coketown and the psychic
"mindscape" of Louisa Gradgrind--in order to illuminate the effects of industrialization on
the environment and the resulting implications of utilitarianism that would reverberate in
the individual psyche.
The term "dystopia" is of relatively recent origin and somewhat contested amongst
scholars, though there are some universal features identified as necessary to the genre. In
Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial, Erika Gottlieb defines the
literary treatment of dystopia as the proverbial cautionary tale, representing the
simultaneity of social and physical landscape as "a hellscape from which the inhabitants
can no longer return, so that we realize what the flaws of our own society may lead to for
the next generations unless we try to eradicate these flaws today" (4). In his conceptual
definition of dystopia in Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Tom Moylan explains:
Dystopia's foremost truth lies in its ability to reflect upon the causes of social and
ecological evil as systemic ... Crucial to dystopia's vision in all its manifestations is this
ability to register the impact of an unseen and unexamined social system on the everyday

lives of everyday people. Again and again, the dystopian text opens in the midst of a social
"elsewhere" that appears to be far worse than any in the "real" world, (xii-xiii)
As Moylan suggests, the setting of dystopian fiction is usually conceived of as a "social
elsewhere,'" either implicitly or explicitly framed as a future into which the reader's
current society has devolved. Most critics of dystopian literature agree that the genre is an
outgrowth of a twentieth-century reaction to the failed socialist experiment, which
necessitated a futuristic setting post-early-twentieth century in order to fully vest the
cautionary tale trope with the full significance of socialism's repercussions (i.e. totalitarian
dictatorships). In this respect, Hard Times fails the dystopian standard, as Dickens's
dystopia was a treatment of industrial England, dealing with matters in and of his own time
(however exaggerated they might have been through the Dickensian lens). If not a
dystopian novel, per se, but rather pre-dystopian, Hard Times remains Dickens's prescient
response to (and warning about) the industrialism and utilitarianism of his own time.
However, in terms of genre conventions, one universal characteristic of dystopian fiction
that Dickens anticipates perfectly is the parallelism between the oppressive
governmental/social systems and the corresponding representational characteristics of the
setting; the landscape is thematized as the literal embodiment or manifestation of the
systems at work. Moylan further expounds on the dystopian genre, particularly in its
treatment of setting;
As the mise-en-scene is established in an exponential presentation
of the society's structure and operation, the narrative zooms in on
one of the subjects of the terrible place. The story line then
develops around that alienated protagonist as she or he begins to
recognize the situation for what it really is and thus to trace the
relationship between individual experience and the operation of the
entire system. (xiii)
The dystopian enterprise depends upon the totality of one relentless and overpowering
experience--social oppression, governmental oppression and natural/scenic oppression-bearing down upon a specific character, which is reified as monotony, uniformity and
dreariness in the landscape and characters. As the landscape is altered negatively by the
regime in power, it begins to take on negative characteristics (such as darkness,
colorlessness, smokiness), what Gottlieb refers to as the "nightmare atmosphere" (10).
Nevertheless, those negative characteristics, in turn, oppress the individuals living and
working within that landscape, and the landscape then benefits from its relationship to the

positive values of either the reader or a particular character fighting against that system in
the novel. This places a dystopian landscape in a liminal space between victim and
oppressor, a space to pity, mistrust and even abhor all at once.
An investigation into the dystopian landscape of Hard Times must necessarily begin with
Dickens's depiction of the utilitarian-influenced industrial Coketown. Upon the first
introduction of Coketown to the reader, Dickens presents it as the "key-note" to the novel,
highlighting the thematic significance of the setting as fundamental to the narrative
endeavor (20; bk. 1, ch.5). Dickens announces Coketown as "a triumph of fact"--the
archetypal model of the hard-lined utilitarianism urged by Mr. Gradgrind and Mr.
Bounderby--and goes on to describe the landscape of Coketown:
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had
allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted
face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable
serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a
black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building
full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the
piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an
elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like
one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people
equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound
upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as
yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. (20-21;
bk. 1, ch. 5)
The monotony of color in Coketown is immediately distanced from verdant green nature
when Dickens describes it as "unnatural red and black" (20; bk. 1, ch. 5). As red in nature
generally symbolizes danger or death (or sublime flora and fauna), the fact that the few
instances of red color are covered in black (arguably the absence of color) renders
Coketown even more aberrant. Elsewhere, the blackness is commented on as being
extraordinary, as James Harthouse visits from London and asks Mrs. Sparsit if Coketown is
always as black as this, to which she replies, "'In general much blacker " (93; bk. 2, ch.1).
Smoke and ashes obscure the air, and the skyline is eclipsed by "machinery and tall
chimneys" that spout smoke curls resembling serpents. Here, nature is invoked in its most
debased form, the lowly serpent, providing a mediating language of negative natural
imagery through which to imbue sentience into the landscape. Similarly, the elephant-which for nineteenth-century English readers would have connoted exoticism and the
unknown or unpredictable--suggests other negative qualities, marrying the mechanistic
idea of monotonous labor with the dark human emotion of melancholy. The only water in
this scene is a "black canal" and a putrid and unnaturally colored purple river,

defamiliarizing the normal image of life-nurturing clear blue water and its fluid movement.
Time is also an important component of the dystopian landscape here, insofar as it is
rendered redundant and pointless, every day the same as the last. As Dickens suggests
elsewhere, time (the "Great Manufacturer") is "like its own machinery" and keeps a
rhythmic tempo in the landscape behind the tempo of the factory machines (71; bk. 1, ch.
14).
Immediately following this dismal description of Coketown, Dickens
writes, "These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by
which it was sustained ... You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful"
(21; bk. 1, ch. 5). Dickens further expounds on the city's buildings, describing them as
"pious" and "severe" and practically interchangeable in their similitude (21; bk. 1, ch. 5).
Here Dickens begins his project of linking the landscape to the regime of utilitarianism,
with the corresponding characteristics being monotony, laboriousness and austerity: "Fact,
fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the
immaterial ... the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact
between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery" (21; bk. 1, ch. 5). As fact is "everywhere in
the material aspect" of the landscape, so is it "everywhere in the immaterial" aspects of
Coketown: the relationship between employer and employee, the justice system, the
educational system and even the social system. Dickens's dystopia immediately establishes
a syncretic relationship between utilitarianism and industrialism, and the landscape of
Coketown is the physical space for both systems to conflate and cohere.
The most ubiquitous architectural images of dystopia in Dickens's Coketown are its
factories. In the chapter disconsolately subtitled "No Way Out," Dickens describes the
outside of the factories in sarcastically natural and/or fantastical terms:
The Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale morning showed the monstrous
serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown. A clattering of clogs upon the
pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and all the melancholy mad elephants, polished and
oiled up for the day's monotony, were at their heavy exercise again. (56; bk. 1, ch. 11)
Again employing the skewed and darkly exaggerative natural metaphors of "mad
elephants" and "serpents of smoke" in this passage, Dickens also introduces a
corresponding metaphor of fantasy in the "Fairy palace" as a descriptor for the obviously
dreary and dismal factories, a device meant to elucidate the discordance between the world
of fairies (magical, light and reverent of nature) and factories (dark, utilitarian and
laborious). Earlier, Dickens notes that the lights in the factories looked like Fairy Palaces,
but issues the caveat that "the travellers by express-train said so," intimating that the only
people for whom the factories resembled such beautiful structures were those individuals

passing by on a speeding train, in which case the landscape would be no more than a barely
perceptible blur (52; bk. 1, ch. 10).
Also in this passage, the factory's "monotony" is depicted as either aggressive or onerous in
its actions ("burst," "trailing," "clattering," "rapid ringing" and "heavy exercise") and
descriptions ("monstrous," "melancholy," "mad" and "heavy") except for the two adjectives
meant to suggest efficiency, "polished" and "oiled" (56; bk. 1, ch. 11). Thus, the dystopian
factory is simultaneously aggressive, onerous and efficient, applicable here to
industrialism, but equally applicable elsewhere to Gradgrind and Bounderby's utilitarian
system. As they aggressively inculcate Coketown's citizens with a utilitarianism that is
oppressively burdensome in its far-reaching scope, they preach a message of efficiency at
all costs. Inside, the factories are places of sensorial discord, through the "crash and rattle"
of the "jarring of the machinery," the harsh whistles and bells, and the bright unnatural
lights which emit preternatural illumination before dawn and after dusk (64; bk. 1, ch. 12).
The loom at which tragic hero Stephen Blackpool labors is a "crashing, smashing, tearing
piece of mechanism" (56; bk. 1, ch. 11). The factories are discordant, defamiliarized spaces
that mimic the monotony and physical laboriousness of the work being performed within,
as well as the utilitarian system oppressing from without.
Furthering the connection between the factories and their workers, Dickens often
interchanges their features, making the factories seem more human and humans more
mechanistic. As the factories shut down for the night, Dickens writes
Machinery slackened; throbbing feebly like a fainting pulse; stopped. The bell again; the
glare of light and heat dispelled; the factories, looming heavy in the black wet night--their
tall chimneys rising up into the air like competing Towers of Babel. (64; bk. 1, ch. 12)
The factories are depicted as equally mechanistic and anthropomorphized, often to serve as
a spatial link between the industrial system and its machines, and the people who work
within that system. On the one hand, this serves to implicate the system on a moral level - if
industrialism and its machines are given human qualities, then a moral judgment can be
levied against them when the system goes awry (such as with industrial accidents) or
grows out of control (displacing humanity altogether). On the other hand, by mechanizing
the people enslaved by industrialism, they become as dehumanized as the machines on
which they labor, serving the cautionary tale against suffering a loss of humanity for the
sake of efficiency and profit.
Extending the dystopianism out from the factories and literal machinery, Dickens
represents the weather of Coketown as dreary and dark as the factories enveloped by it. In
the previous description of the setting of Coketown, the factories are set against a natural
backdrop of a "black wet night" that absorbs the dystopian buildings into dystopian
weather and darkness to create layers of dreariness that bury the characters inside. At

another point, outside of Stephen Blackpool's mill, factory pollution mixes with the grim
rain to create a singular dark amalgamation:
In the waste-yard outside, the steam from the escape pipe, the litter of barrels and old iron,
the shining heaps of coals, the ashes everywhere, were shrouded in a veil of mist and rain ...
Stephen came out of the hot mill into the damp wind and cold wet streets, haggard and
worn. (56; bk. 1, ch. 11)
Pipe steam and chimney ash combine with relentless mist and rain, washing out the
landscape in gray monochrome. The temperatures, though, are extreme, as Stephen leaves
the hot mill for the cold and wet outdoors. There is no comfort to be had in Coketown, as
the weather mirrors the dismal atmosphere of the factories. Whatever would be visually
appealing - color, contrast, moderate light--is absent; whatever would be bodily
comfortable, such as temperateness, gentle sunshine, and clean air, is instead rendered
severe and discordant.
Beyond the factories, which are reflections of utilitarianism and industrialism in progress,
the residential section of Coketown exhibits the effects of those systems on the people. In
such cases, Coketown is juxtaposed in direct contrast to nature; Dickens employs this
oppositional positioning to place humans inside the Coketown systems as antithetical to
nature, aberrant and isolated within Coketown's insular world. Dickens describes Stephen
Blackpool's neighborhood as "the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where
Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in" (51; bk. 1, ch.
10). Aesthetically displeasing and sequestered away from all other humanity and nature,
Coketown actively erects a wall against nature, thus keeping the pollution inside, which
forms the air that the people breathe and the hazy, dreary atmosphere in which they must
live. Earlier, this atmosphere is attributed to causing Bitzer's skin to grow so
"unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he
would bleed white," again defamiliarizing color and suggesting the effects of the industrial
air on the people's normative physical conditions (7; bk. 1, ch. 2). Dickens goes on to
further describe the infrastructure of Coketown as a
labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come
into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man's purpose, and
the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to
death. (51-52; bk. 1, ch. 10)
The maze-like and narrow aspects of the streets make them seem vertiginous and
claustrophobic, demonstrating that Coketown is not only difficult to maneuver in, but also
equally difficult to leave.
Here again the components of the landscape are anthropomorphized, portrayed as a
dysfunctional family characterized by violence and urgency. The houses metaphorically kill

one another in an effort to either be erected and stand, or perhaps to rise and be removed
from the stifling atmosphere of Coketown. Dickens ends his description of the
neighborhood by commenting on the connection between the Coketown homes and the
people living in them, writing, "in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver,
where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of
stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who
might be expected to be born in it" (52; bk. 1, ch. 10). The neighborhood is stifled and
exhausted for lack of air, and the chimneys are malformed reflections of the inhabitants
beneath them. Thus, Dickens once again connects the landscape to the people, as the
English men and women become more machine-like within the factories, and the
structures of Coketown reflect human emotion and cognizance of the despair of the town.
The landscape in Hard Times continues frequently in this vein--Dickens juxtaposes the
behemoth unnatural factories against a polluted and discolored sky made even drearier by
rain, clouds and smog. Whenever Dickens includes elements of the natural world inside the
walls of Coketown, it is usually for the dramatic effect of defamiliarizing nature and making
Coketown even more unnatural. As Stephen Blackpool departs and looks back on it for the
last time, he notices elements of nature struggling against the Coketown landscape: "the
coming sun made but a pale waste in the sky, like a sad sea"; "the besmoked evergreens
were sprinkled with a dirty powder, like untidy snuff-takers"; before the chimneys began
"[p]uffing out their poisonous volume--for half an hour, some of the many windows were
golden, which showed the Coketown people a sun eternally in eclipse, through a medium of
smoked glass" (126; bk. 2, ch. 6). Nature is powerless against the forces of Coketown's
industrial machine, and any time the people of Coketown get a glimpse of nature, it is
through the mediating lens of Coketown's pollution, thus creating a defamiliarized
conception of nature and landscape.
In the one instance in which Dickens presents a hope that a bit of natural light, air or
scenery might penetrate Coketown for more than a moment, he quickly transforms it into a
negative quality that highlights the dreariness of the landscape. At the beginning of "Book
the Second--Reaping," Dickens writes, "A sunny midsummer day. There was such a thing
sometimes, even in Coketown" (85; bk. 2, ch. 1). Immediately, though, the daylight's
contrasting quality serves to illuminate the dystopian portrait of Coketown, as from a
distance, "Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the
sun's rays. You only knew the town was there, because you knew there could have been no
such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town" (85; bk. 2, ch. 1). Coketown is a blight
against the English landscape, covered by " [a] blur of soot and smoke ... a dense formless
jumble, with sheets of cross light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness:-Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen"
(85; bk. 2, ch. 1). The light of the summer day elucidates the insularity of Coketown--above

its manmade walls, the smoggy atmosphere hides Coketown from the outside world,
further alienating it from the rest of England.
Within Coketown on this sunny day, many of the dismal aspects of industrialism are only
sharpened and more defined. Instead of providing a sunshiny reprieve, the sun makes the
streets of Coketown "hot and dusty" and heats the pollution in the air to create an effect of
a "stifling smell" and a town "frying in oil" (86; bk. 2, ch. 1). In fact, the sun proves so
oppressive when passed through the atmosphere of "heavy vapour drooping over
Coketown" that it "could not be looked at steadily" (86; bk. 2, ch. 1). By creating shadows of
machinery moving on the wall, the sun's light only serves to make clear the divide between
Coketown and nature:
The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to
show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could
offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Mondays to the night of Saturday, the whirr of
shafts and wheels. (86-87; bk. 2, ch. 1)
In being reminded that nature's beauty exists, but only allowed glimpses of that nature
through artificial reproductions of machinery, the people of Coketown are mentally and
psychologically oppressed by industrialism, as their relationship to nature is mediated by a
wall of machinery and a cloud of pollution.
Behind Dickens's dark dystopia of Coketown, there lies a complex ambivalence toward
both the landscape and industrialism. In terms of the landscape, Dickens was certainly
congruent with his time. As previously established, the English people valued their
landscape as a space to exhibit the full force of national pride and human agency, as the
agrarian countryside and small, established towns throughout represented the ideal. John
E. Dean, in a study of Dickens's reaction to the American landscape in his 1842 travelogue
American Notes, locates a disdain for landscape that appears "non-English":
Dickens imposes English ways of seeing onto the American landscape.
His understanding of aesthetic beauty is informed by his
familiarity with the English landscape, and his taste is bound with
nineteenth-century English epistemology ... The nineteenth-century
English valued landscape only when it was tastefully varied and
aesthetically pleasing. If landscape was not picturesque, due to
its natural monotony, the English wrote it off as non-English, and
therefore, dull and monotonous. (9-11)

Wild, uncultivated nature, therefore, was not the prized landscape in Dickens's eyes.
Nevertheless, while Dickens valued land made picturesque and economically viable (i.e.
"English") by agrarianism and human intervention, he also began to see the potentiality for
the destruction of that landscape by expansionism and industrialism after his trip to
America. In "Dickens Goes West," Robert Lawson-Peebles writes,
... instead of death in the landscape, the West provided Dickens
with a vision of the death of the landscape. Before he visited
America Dickens realized that virtuous people could die in a
pastoral landscape; after his visit he realized that the landscape
itself could disintegrate. Death not only marked the failure of
human hopes; it became a worldwide, all-embracing holocaust.
(122-23)
This same anxiety was creeping into the English cultural milieu, as the eighteenth-century
urge toward progress and rampant industrialization had led to overcrowding and
industrial sprawl throughout cities and mill towns alike. As Roskill argues, English
industrialization
darkened the sky with massively looming shapes, wasted the
environment with its pollution, and reduced the contribution of
human activity to what seemed like mere rote. Attention then
focused on the need to escape from the perils of further
engulfment, by such seemingly uncontrollable forces. So there
became revivified, with newly persuasive overtones of salvation and
spiritual healthfulness, the long-standing theme of a lost Eden, to
be discovered or established deep in the English countryside. (102)
Thus, Dickens's Coketown can be seen as a construction of that anxiety, a place in which the
very natural features of the prized English landscape were disintegrating, subsumed by too
much human intervention at the hands of the grinding gears of industrialism--an
intervention that had arguably subsumed the human, as well.

Dickens's views on industrialism were equally complicated. At certain times in his life, he
supported the pro-industrial "steam-whistle party," while other times decrying against the
ills of the factory system. In Hard Times, Dickens's dystopian Coketown represents
industrialism gone too far, but as Patrick Brantlinger posits, Dickens never realizes a fullblown critique of industrialism as categorically evil, nor does Hard Times suggest
the destruction of the factories, the establishment of any new
economic system, nor even the passage of more factory laws. It only
suggests that the factory owners should scrap their plea of
laissez-faire and abide by the laws which exist ... Dickens'
criticism of industrialism in Hard Times is generally specific
rather than abstractly ideological. (280)
Nevertheless, Dickens's representation of a dystopian landscape blotting out the beautiful
English countryside that was so highly valued was an implicit anti-industrial charge, as the
English landscape was so synonymous with the English people; as such, industrialism--and
its influencing ideology of utilitarianism--were altering (and in some cases destroying) the
English people.
Indeed, as Dickens's beloved English landscape is obscured, displaced and defaced by the
literal dystopian landscape crafted in Hard Times, so is there a parallel displacement and
defacement of the psychic mindscape of the characters living within the utilitarian and
industrial regime. Louisa Gradgrind represents the quintessential dystopian landscape
correlative as manifested in her psyche, affecting her epistemological and sensorial
experience of the world around her. Just as the Coketown landscape becomes a scene of
monotony, uniformity and dreariness, so does Louisa Gradgrind's psyche or mindscape
correspond. Erika Gottlieb explains that another key characteristic of dystopian fiction is in
the displacement of the individual through "societies in the throes of a collective
nightmare. As in a nightmare, the individual has become a victim, experiencing loss of
control over his or her destiny in the face of a monstrous, suprahuman force that can no
longer be overcome or, in many cases, even comprehended by reason," which leads to
"total domination over the individual's private self, family feelings, sexuality, thoughts, and
emotions" (11). The individual is lost in the totalitarian machine, creating a mindscape
bearing its imprint.
Conversely, whenever physical characteristics of characters mirror the dystopian
landscape, those characters are generally advocates of the utilitarian/industrial system. For
example, the "eminently practical" (12; bk. 1, ch. 3) Thomas Gradgrind--"a man of facts and
calculations" (6; bk. 1, ch. 2)--is presented as being as square physically ("square

forefinger," "square wall of a forehead," "square coat, square legs, square shoulders") and
as severe (eyes like "two dark caves," "wide, thin, and hard set" mouth, "obstinate
carriage") as the utilitarian system he values, a reflection of the square schoolhouse he
oversees (5; bk. 1, ch. 1). Josiah Bounderby, the owner of several Coketown factories, has
many congruent features with machinery, such as being "[a] big, loud man, with a stare,
and a metallic laugh," made of "coarse material," "swelled veins" and "strained skin" on his
face (15; bk. 1, ch. 4). Bounderby's anatomical features mimic the involuntary, unconscious
and metallic quality of factory machines, while his rhythms move like and resemble their
relentless pumping, contracting and pressurizing. As these characters physically reflect the
dehumanized dystopian landscape, so do their names (Gradgrind, Bounderby and
M'Choakumchild) become symbols of oppressive actions (grinding, binding and choking) in
service of the industrial machine. Whenever a character is part of the ruling elite
perpetuating the utilitarian ideology and industrial system, his physical features and name
reflexively announce him as essential to that system.
In contrast, however, as a disillusioned yet defeated citizen of Coketown living underneath
the repressive and oppressive systems, Louisa Gradgrind's psyche is a parallel space to
reflect in figurative terms the literal dystopian landscape. For many features of the
dystopian landscape, there exists a corresponding description of Louisa's dystopian
"mindscape," and Dickens artfully places Louisa in the narrative so as to highlight the
relationship. For example, Louisas disdain for Bounderby and his utilitarianism is
introduced to the reader at the end of "Chapter IV," right before the introduction of
Coketown and the effects of industrialism on the landscape; thus, Louisa and Coketown are
the bookends on either side of Dickens's all-important chapter heading "The Key-Note."
Elsewhere in the novel, when in depressive contemplation at Mr. Gradgrind's Observatory
at Stone Lodge, Louisa sits opposite a window looking out over Coketown, with its "high
chimneys and the long tracts of smoke looming in the heavy distance gloomily" (75; bk. 1,
ch. 15). Her own gloom reflects the dismal scene confronting her, and she is implicitly
presented as the psychic mirror to Coketown's landscape. Thus, in terms of the narrative
layout, Coketown and Louisa share a spatial relationship throughout, serving to illuminate
their correlative dystopias.
Dickens describes Louisa's psychic mindscape with many of the same descriptors that he
uses for the landscape of Coketown, metaphorized here when applied to the non-material
space of her psyche. Throughout the novel, she is referred to as "metallurgical" (13; bk. 1,
ch. 3); "overhung by a dark cavern" (44; bk. 1, ch. 8); enclosed by "artificial barriers" (78;
bk. 1, ch. 15); "impassive, proud, and cold" (81; bk. 1, ch. 15); "colourless" (163; bk. 2, ch.
12). She carries herself with "an air of jaded sullenness" (14; bk. 1, ch. 3) and a "heavy,
hardened kind of sorrow" (150; bk. 2, ch. 9). Her psyche is made akin to the metallic, hard
and self-important machinery of the factories, as well as to the dark, cold, colorless and
sullen atmosphere of Coketown's sky. She erects artificial barriers to her psyche that

mirror Coketown's fortress-like walls and haze of smog. Her emotional space reflects the
damage executed by utilitarianism in the same way that Coketown reflects the damage
done by industrialism. As she nihilistically asks her father what she could possibly know of
tastes and affections and "that part of my nature in which such light things might have been
nourished," she "unconsciously close [s] her hand, as if upon a solid object, and slowly
open[s] it as though she were releasing dust or ash" (79; bk. 1, ch. 15). At the point when
she is most self-consciously aware of her dystopian mindscape, her body responds by
imagining the discharge of dust or ash from her hand, metaphorically letting go of the
byproduct of industrial factories and closely associating her psyche with the literal
dystopian landscape of Coketown.
Nevertheless, Dickens makes clear that Louisa's mind is not inherently dreary and
mechanical, just as the English landscape is not, either. Dickens writes of Louisa's internal
conundrum: "struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there was a light with
nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself
somehow" (14; bk. 1, ch. 3). Much like the momentary glimpses of the sunlight in
Coketown's smoky windows, Louisa has moments in which her true "strong, wild,
wandering interest peculiar to her" comes to life. But just as the sun quickly becomes
displaced by smog and rain, Louisa's unique inquisitiveness and independence are "gone
astray like a banished creature, and hiding in solitary places" (48; bk. 1, ch. 9). Louisa often
stares into the fire with a face described as "unreadable" by other characters, a blank wash
of dreariness and monotony displaced by utilitarian schooling and parenting. Yet, upon
James Harthouse's first introduction to her, he sees the conflict raging within Louisa:
She was so constrained, and yet so careless; so reserved, and yet so watchful; so cold and
proud, and yet so sensitively ashamed of her husband's braggart humility ... Utterly
indifferent, perfectly self-reliant, never at a loss, and yet never at her ease, with her figure
in company with them there, and her mind apparently quite alone ... she baffled all
penetration. (98-99; bk. 1, ch. 2)
In the same way that the English countryside on which Coketown was built was once a
space of positivity--verdant, fertile and sensitive to impress--so is Louisa Gradgrind's
mindscape reflective of the same latent fertility and sensitivity.
In shaping his dystopian correlative between Coketown's landscape and Louisa Gradgrind's
mindscape, then, Dickens accomplishes his goal of warning against mechanomorphism-humans becoming mere models of machines and losing that which makes them human--in
an increasingly industrialized England. In this way, Hard Times is the quintessential
dystopian novel:

Whereas it can be said that utopia and much utopian thought are the brain children of the
scientific world view in their attempts to "scientifically" restructure society, dystopia
always aims to critique and ridicule that world view for its adherence to instrumental
values, its elevation of functional and collective ends over the humanistic and individual.
(Aldridge ix)
Gottlieb reiterates the fundamental characteristic of dystopian fiction as being a cautionary
tale for humanity, stating, "the overall strategies of the dystopian novel are those of
political satire--The function of the message is that of a warning, an exhortation--against a
future that could and should still be avoided by the Ideal Reader's generation" (13-16).
Dickens's warning was more urgent, however. His Coketown dystopia was becoming more
and more commonplace throughout the English landscape.
Nevertheless, as Brantlinger states:
Dickens' criticism of industrialism in Hard Times does not go much
beyond the fact that mill owners too often fall short of their
moral obligations--So dreary is Coketown--but its particular malady
is much more psychological than economic ... Whenever Dickens
scores the ugliness and monotony of Coketown, there is a hint of
the 'esthetic socialism' of Ruskin and Morris, but there is no
suggestion of a return to handicrafts or any other preindustrial
condition, no outline of a future utopia, and only equivocal
sympathy for working-class brands of radicalism. (280-81)
Dickens does not offer a solution to industrialism and the Coketown dystopia. However, at
multiple points throughout the novel, he reiterates the moral of his story that the greater
loss is the human loss, and he uses this dystopian landscape and mindscape as the
metaphorical vehicle, as the national sense of English identity and heritage made the loss of
landscape so meaningful. If the beloved English countryside and its characteristics could be
entirely swallowed by industrialism, what would happen to the individual subsumed by
industrial labor and utilitarian strictures? Dickens exhorted his fellow Englishmen to heed
the call against the total loss of "fancy" and imagination:
Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and
used up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds, the poor you will have always
with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and

affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph,
when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face
to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you. (124-25; bk. 2, ch. 6)
For Dickens, reality was soon to take that "wolfish turn" in nineteenth-century England,
destroying the romantic, picturesque beauty of the English landscape, but to the even
greater detriment of the devolution of the Romantic English soul.
WORKS CITED

Aldridge, Alexandra. The Scientific World View in Dystopia. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research
Press, 1984.

Brantlinger, Patrick. "Dickens and the Factories." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 26.3 (1971):
270-85. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 Nov. 2011.

Dean, John E. "Nineteenth-century English and American Views of American Landscape:

Romantic vs. Utilitarian." EAPSU3.1 (2006): 8-23. EAPSU.net. Web. 15 Oct. 2011.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Eds. Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Monod. Norton Critical Edition.
3rd ed. New York: Norton & Company, 2001.

Gottlieb, Erika. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Quebec:
McGill-Queen's UP, 2001.

Lawson-Peebles, Robert. "Dickens Goes West." Views of American Landscapes. Eds. Mick
Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 100-109. Lowenthal,
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--. "Living with and Looking at Landscape." Landscape Research 32.5 (Oct. 2007): 635-56.

Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 2000.

Roskill, Mark. The Languages of Landscape. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP,
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DARCY LEWIS

University of North Texas