Hard Times is a short Dickens novel. Which is not really a contradiction in terms, but it does indicate that there is going to be something missing, some essential Dickensian excess. There are some twenty or so memorable characters, which may seem like a lot, but really is no more than one might expect from any novel. There are good comic bits, and good righteous anger, and villains who destroy each other, and all that good stuff, but writ small. Which works, in its way, but it’s in a different way than my favorites.
I do think that it’s worth thinking about how we have, in our twenty-first century way, computerized and standardized Mr. M’Choakumchild, who now proceeds to narrow the appropriate content of classroom education not through a vital and passionate (and misguided) belief in the unassailability and utility of Facts, sir, of Facts, but simply through the modular and scalable necessity of test scores. We can loathe Mr. M’Choakumchild, and we can enjoy loathing him, and we can blame him for what happens to the children of Coketown, and we can enjoy blaming him. It’s harder to blame our modern M’Choakumchild, who doesn’t exist, after all, as we can see when we compare the medians, averages, and percentages in last weeks’ round, particularly when compared to two weeks ago.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.