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
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. Dickens had begun the novel, significantly, with the title "Nobody's Fault" in mind, but later entitled the work after its heroine, Amy Dorrit. Amy is the daughter of the "Father of the Marshalsea," who has been confined in debtors' prison for twenty five years. Arthur Clennam, whose gloomy childhood resembles what David Copperfield's would have been had he been raised by the Murdstones, is a middle-aged man looking for meaning in life.
Clennam and Little Dorrit escape the imprisonment of this stultifying society by discovering their love for each other, a love that is difficult to discover since Arthur is so much older than Amy and she has the goodness, and physical resemblance, of a child. Importantly for Dickens, Arthur and Amy are willing to engage the fallen society of London and to attempt to change it. After their wedding Arthur and Amy "went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar." Unlike Esther Summerson and her husband, Arthur and Amy stay in London where they live "a modest life of usefulness and happiness."
Launched All the Year Round
On April 30, 1859, Dickens launched the weekly journal, All the Year Round . To get the journal off to a good start, the first installment of A Tale of Two Cities appeared in the inaugural issue and continued in weekly installments until November 26, 1859. Set in the time of the French Revolution, this novel once again looks at the potential for revolutionary violence Dickens had explored in Barnaby Rudge . If the ruling class in England does not take seriously the lesson of the French Revolution, Dickens appears to be saying, such a violent outburst is possible again. While Dickens deplores violence, his sympathies are clearly with the victims of oppression.
Only the kind of sacrificial love represented by Sydney Carton's willing sacrifice of himself for his loved ones will be able to prevent such a revolution if society continues along its present course In an effort to pick up declining sales of All the Year Round , Dickens once again published a novel in weekly installments of the journal. Great Expectations ran from December 1, 1860, to August 3, 1861. Dickens and Catherine had recently separated after over twenty years of marriage.
Perhaps in an attempt to come to terms with his personal unhappiness, Dickens returns to the first person narrator in Great Expectations. To assure that he did not fall into "unconscious repetition" as he wrote this story of a "hero to be a boy-child, like David," he reread David Copperfield. Pip is "raised by hand" by his shrewish older sister and her husband, Joe Gargery, whom Pip treats "as an older species of child." Pip comes into Great Expectations as the result of befriending the convict, Magwitch, but is led to believe that it is actually the eccentric and half-mad Miss Havisham to whom he is indebted. Pip is also under the misapprehension that the beautiful Estella, Miss Havisham's daughter by adoption, will become part of his inheritance.
Pip's real education begins when he realizes that Magwitch is his benefactor and that he has betrayed the loving Joe for the false society made available by ill gotten gains from an escaped convict. His redemption comes as the result of his coming to love and value Magwitch, who, he realizes, has been much truer to Pip than Pip has been to Joe.
Novel based on own life
In the earlier novel based loosely on his own life, Dickens has David Copperfield marry Dora, has him suffer the consequences of yielding to the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart. When Dora dies, David is able to discover his true wife, Agnes, who had seemed almost supernaturally removed from him. Here, Pip falls hopelessly in love with Estella, who is as icily indifferent to him as are the stars, because, as she says, she has no heart. Dickens originally intended for Pip and Estella to remain apart in the end, but Bulwer Lytton persuaded him to change the ending.
Dickens has Estella discover, through suffering inflicted in a brutal marriage, her own heart and the value of Pip's love. At this time in his career Dickens seems clear about the values that must be embraced if society is to succeed, the values of selflessness, compassion, and sympathetic love. He does not seem as sure that those qualities can sustain personal happiness, at least not for him at this point.