YMMV / Hard Times

• Anvilicious: This is perhaps Dickens' best example of this trope. Dickens was a populist writer with wide appeal. He had a strong point to make with Hard Times, and he wasn't going to let the message be lost by the dim and undereducated among his readers. Still rather egregious though.
• Ho Yay: Dickens' novels are full of Pseudo-Romantic Friendship, but Louisa Gradgrind and Sissy Jupe do seem particularly couple-y. The ending makes mention of Sissy marrying and having children (though Louisa never remarries), but since the two remain extremely close, and since this is after all Victorian England, the fact of Sissy's marriage somehow fails to sink the ship.
• The Woobie:
  • In the entire course of the novel, absolutely nothing good ever happens to Stephen Blackpool. What does he do about it? Try to ask Bounderby for help. When that doesn't work, he just tries to get on with life and stay out of trouble.
  • Louise herself also counts. She clearly is severely emotionally stunted due to her upbringing, she is forced into a loveless marriage, which thanks to the divorce laws, she can't escape, she struggles with whether to commit adultery, suffers an emotional breakdown, and then her brother gets an innocent man killed.
• Values Dissonance: The scene where Sissy and the other Gradgrinds find Tom in the circus is portrayed by the author as incredibly humiliating for everyone involved, but when the reader gets past the Victorian language and realizes he is covered in blackface as a disguise, this would be much harder to see as humiliating, and more as incredibly racist.
• Values Resonance:
  • The author clearly condemns the unhappy and heavily implied to be abusive marriages that Stephen and Louise find themselves in, and makes it very clear that they would very much like to get out of them, but they can't due to technicalities. This is a plight that is much more relevant now with the knowledge of the harms of spousal abuse.
  • The book's rather harsh condemnation of people like Bounderby who merely fire their employees becomes much more relevant after the 2008 financial crash, which forced policy makers to bail the banks that caused the mess in the first place.

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