Academic Details:
Name: Mulrajsinh Gohil
Roll No: 23
Enrollment No: 5108250016
Sem: 1
Batch: 2025-27
E-mail: mulrajsinhgohil100@gmail.com
Assignment Details:
Paper Name: Literature of Victorians
Paper No: 104
Paper Code: 22395
Unit: 1 - Hard Times By Charles Dickens
Topic: Fact, Fancy, and the Factory: Coketown's "Disciplinary City" and the Case of Stephen Blackpool
Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Submitted Date: 6th November 2025
The following information, numbers are counted using QuillBot:
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Words: 2610
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Paragraphs: 33
Sentences: 108
Reading time: 10 m 26 s
Abstract
This essay investigates the critical "case of Stephen Blackpool" in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, moving beyond the novel’s central "Fact vs. Fancy" dichotomy to analyze Coketown as a Foucauldian "Disciplinary City" (Stiltner). It argues that the novel’s philosophy of "Fact" is not merely a personal creed but the software for a totalizing "disciplinary symbiont" (Stiltner) in which the school and the "Factory" work in tandem to "normalize" its subjects and produce "docile bodies." While critics have read Stephen as an artistic failure, a "confused" and "impoverished" caricature (Ingham) or a reflection of Dickens’s own "ambivalence" (Brantlinger), this paper argues he is the system’s most successful, and tragic, product. However, Stephen is not merely a passive "docile body." Drawing on Julie Dugger’s concept of "editorial intervention," this essay re-frames Stephen’s "muddle" and his refusal to join the union not as passivity, but as a sophisticated, "Fancy"-based rejection of all disciplinary systems, capitalist and collectivist alike. Stephen thus emerges not as a failed hero, but as the novel’s true moral agent, whose "editorial" refusal exposes the "unfathomable tangle" of all systems devoid of human sympathy.
Keywords
Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Stephen Blackpool, Fact vs. Fancy, Coketown, Industrial Novel, Disciplinary City, Michel Foucault, Barry Stiltner, Docile Bodies, Editorial Intervention, Julie Dugger, Patricia Ingham, Dialect, Realism, Patrick Brantlinger, Ambivalence, Unionism
Research Question
How does a Foucauldian reading of Coketown as a "Disciplinary City" (Stiltner) re-frame the critical "case of Stephen Blackpool"? Is Stephen an artistic failure of "realism" (Ingham), a passive "docile body," or can his "muddle" and refusal to join the union be interpreted as an active "editorial intervention" (Dugger) that critiques all systemic "Fact"-based solutions?
Hypothesis
Far from being an artistic failure or a "docile body," Stephen Blackpool is an active moral agent whose "muddle" functions as a sophisticated "editorial intervention" (Dugger). By refusing the "disciplinary" logic of both the masters (Bounderby) and the union (Slackbridge), he demonstrates the novel's core thesis: that all systems based on "Fact" are an "unfathomable tangle" (Brantlinger) and that "Fancy," embodied as individual integrity, is the only true form of human agency.
Introduction: The "Unfathomable Tangle" of Coketown
Charles Dickens’s Hard Times presents a world cleaved in two by a single, brutal philosophy: the "eminently practical" creed of Fact. In the novel, this philosophy is embodied by Thomas Gradgrind, a man who "proceeded on the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over" (Dickens, Ch. 1). This "hard, mechanical" worldview transforms Coketown into a "labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts" (Dickens, Ch. 10), a place where human life is suffocated by the "Fact, fact, fact, everywhere" (Dickens, Ch. 5). The novel’s stated antidote to this soul-crushing system is "Fancy", the world of imagination, wonder, and human sympathy represented by Sleary’s Circus. This central thematic conflict, "Fact vs. Fancy," is the engine of the novel’s social critique.
Charles Dickens
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Hard Times
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However, the site of this battle is the "Factory," and it is here that the novel's argument becomes what critic Patrick Brantlinger calls a "dismal, unfathomable tangle" (Brantlinger, p. 271). While Dickens launches a "wrathful condemnation" (p. 271) against the Gradgrind philosophy, his view of the industrialism that philosophy serves is deeply "ambivalent" (p. 273). He is, as Ruskin quipped, a member of the "steam-whistle party" (Brantlinger, p. 270), one who praised British industry even as he was horrified by its social consequences. This "love-hate relation" (p. 271) creates a profound tension in the novel, a "confusion" (p. 285) that is most acutely embodied in the novel's central working-class figure, Stephen Blackpool.
This essay will argue that "Fact" in Hard Times is not merely a personal philosophy but a systemic, "disciplinary" (Stiltner, p. 194) mode of power that unites the school and the factory. Through this lens, Coketown emerges as a "Disciplinary City" (Stiltner) designed to manufacture "docile bodies" (p. 195) like Stephen Blackpool. While critics like Patricia Ingham have read Stephen as an artistic failure, an unrealistic and "confused" (Ingham, p. 527) caricature, this analysis fails to see the radical nature of his character. Drawing on Julie M. Dugger's concept of the "editorial intervention" (Dugger, p. 152), this essay will re-frame Stephen not as a passive victim, but as an active moral agent. His famous "muddle" is not a sign of intellectual poverty, but a sophisticated refusal of the "disciplinary" logic of both the masters and the union, making him the novel’s true, if tragic, hero of "Fancy."
"Fact" as System: The Disciplinary City
The primary mistake in reading Hard Times is to see Gradgrind’s philosophy of "Fact" as a mere personal quirk or a simple critique of Utilitarianism. It is, as Barry Stiltner argues, the operating manual for a total system of social control. Coketown is not just a city with a bad school and a bad factory; it is a "Disciplinary City" where the school and factory are a "disciplinary symbiont" (Stiltner, p. 193), two arms of the same body, both dedicated to "the refashioning of the 'self' into a 'docile,' institutional appendage" (p. 194).
The "Fact" of the school is the blueprint for the "Factory." The novel opens in the Gradgrind schoolroom, a "bare, monotonous vault" where M'Choakumchild, a teacher "turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, as so many pianoforte legs" (Dickens, Ch. 2), proceeds to murder the "innocents." The goal of this education is not to enlighten, but to "form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts" (Dickens, Ch. 1). It is an "anti-nomadic technique" (Stiltner, p. 200) designed to "root out everything else" and produce "normalized" subjects (p. 194). Sissy Jupe, with her intuitive "Fancy," is a "variable" (p. 199) to be controlled, reduced from a person to "Girl number twenty" (Dickens, Ch. 2). This system "disassociates power from the body" (Stiltner, p. 195), erasing individual will and replacing it with programmed responses.
This "educational space," Stiltner notes, is designed to "function like a learning machine" (p. 198), and its products are built to be slotted directly into the other machine: the factory. The Coketown factory is not just a place of economic exploitation; it is the physical manifestation of the school's "disciplinary" logic. The streets of the city itself are "all very like one another," and its inhabitants are "equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours... to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow" (Dickens, Ch. 5). This is the "direful uniformity" (Stiltner, p. 195) of a populace successfully "manipulated, shaped, and trained" (p. 194). The workers are "generically called 'the Hands'" (Dickens, Ch. 10), reduced, as Stiltner argues, to "animated segments" (p. 194) valued only as "so much 'Steam Power'" (p. 197).
Bounderby and Gradgrind are the two "institutional agents" (Stiltner, p. 194) of this "disciplinary society." Gradgrind provides the software of "Fact" and "tabular statements," while Bounderby provides the hardware of the "ugly citadel" (Dickens, Ch. 10) that bricks nature out and "kills airs and gases... in" (Brantlinger, p. 284). Together, they create a "machinery of power" whose sole purpose is to produce "subjected and practised bodies, 'docile' bodies" (Stiltner, p. 195). The ultimate symbol of this system is not Gradgrind's prize pupil, Bitzer, but its most tragic victim: Stephen Blackpool.
The Case of Stephen Blackpool: "Realist" Failure or "Docile Body"?
Stephen Blackpool is the test case for the novel’s critique. As the primary representative of the "Hands," his portrayal is the lynchpin of Dickens’s argument. For decades, this portrayal has been seen as a profound artistic problem, a point where Dickens's "love-hate relation" (Brantlinger, p. 271) with industry results in a "confused" and condescending failure. This critique, most forcefully articulated by Patricia Ingham, argues that Stephen is a failure of "realism." Ingham's argument is that in the industrial novel, dialect is intended as a tool of "factual accuracy" (p. 518), but Dickens’s attempt fails. His use of dialect for Stephen is not an authentic representation but a "disastrously condescending" (p. 524) literary convention that reveals the narrator’s deep-seated "ambivalence" (p. 527). The result is that Stephen, who "should have been a vindication of [the Hands'] moral superiority," is instead undermined. His speech is said to reveal a "narrow, limited, and rather confused mind," and his famous catchphrase, "'Tis a' a muddle," is interpreted not just as a reflection of society’s confusion, "but a confusion within," a sign that he is "morally and intellectually impoverished" (p. 527).
This reading, while textually compelling, mistakes the symptom for the disease. Stiltner’s "disciplinary" framework offers a more powerful interpretation. Stephen’s "confused consciousness" (Ingham, p. 527) is not an artistic failure by Dickens, but the intended product of Coketown's "disciplinary" success. He is not a failed hero; he is a perfectly "normalized subject" (Stiltner, p. 208).
Stephen is the ultimate "docile body." He is, as the narrator states, "a man of perfect integrity," but pointedly not one of the "remarkable 'Hands'" who could "make speeches and carry on debates" (Dickens, Ch. 10). He is the ideal worker: "quiet, watchful, and steady" (Dickens, Ch. 11), a cog in the "forest of looms" (Stiltner, p. 197). His "muddle" is the very essence of his docility. He has been so thoroughly "formed" by the system that he cannot "wonder" (Stiltner, p. 198), he cannot "get beyond" the "muddle" to formulate an alternative. His inability to articulate a solution when Bounderby challenges him "Sir, I canna be expecten to’t. ’Tis not me as should be spoken to for that" (Dickens, Ch. 21) is not a personal failure but the end-point of a lifelong "disciplinary coercion" (Stiltner, p. 200). In this reading, Stephen’s passivity is the novel’s most profound tragedy. He is the man in whom "Fact" has so thoroughly "rooted out everything else" (Dickens, Ch. 1) that he is left with only his integrity, a moral compass with no "power" (Stiltner, p. 195) to act.
This reading is powerful, but it, too, falls short. It correctly identifies Stephen as a "normalized subject" but fails to see the radical, active nature of his refusals. It still frames him as a passive "victim" (Brantlinger, p. 283). A third, more recent interpretation, offered by Julie M. Dugger, provides the key. Stephen is not a failed "realist" hero, nor is he merely a "docile body." He is an "editorial" agent, and his passivity is a conscious, active, and radical moral strategy.
Stephen's "Muddle" as "Editorial Intervention"
The standard critique of Hard Times voiced by Ingham and echoed by Brantlinger’s focus on "confusion" is that the novel "fails to suggest specific solutions to the social problems it describes" (Dugger, p. 151). The union, led by the "mere figment of the middle-class imagination," Slackbridge, is dismissed as a "stock Victorian reaction," leaving Stephen, the novel’s hero, as a "passive," "retrograde" figure who refuses to join the one body that could help him (Dugger, pp. 152-55).
Dugger argues that this entire line of criticism misreads Stephen's (and Dickens's) project. Stephen’s refusal is "not anachronistic passivity" but a sophisticated "editorial intervention" (Dugger, p. 152). Drawing on Carlyle’s concept of the "Editor" in Past and Present, Dugger argues that Stephen’s role is not to solve the muddle that is the job of those "put ower" him but "to apprise thee that it must be done" (Dugger, p. 159). His speech to Bounderby is not a confused, "impoverished" (Ingham, p. 527) plea; it is a "Carlylean" (Dugger, p. 152) indictment.
This "editorial" framework completely recasts Stephen’s character from passive to active. His "muddle" is not a personal "confusion within" (Ingham, p. 527), but a precise diagnosis of the "unfathomable tangle" (Brantlinger, p. 271) of the system itself. His refusal to offer a solution to Bounderby is his strongest move. He "defies Bounderby's implicit and self-serving suggestion that employees who dare to identify problems should be prepared to solve them on their own" (Dugger, p. 157). He is not a "docile body" (Stiltner, p. 195); he is the only character who speaks truth to power, an act of "quiet confidence" that gets him fired.
This lens also resolves the novel’s "Factory" problem. Stephen's famous refusal to join the union is not, as critics claim, an anti-union "Tory" move. It is a radical rejection of all "disciplinary" systems. The union, led by the "tyrant" Slackbridge, is shown to be just another version of the "Fact" system. It demands "that every man 'body and soul, lead his life at the command of the delegates'" (Dickens, Ch. 20), echoing the "disciplinary" control of the factory. Stephen’s refusal is a moral choice. He is, as Dugger implies, rejecting one "disciplinary" (Stiltner, p. 194) apparatus for another. He refuses to trade the tyranny of the master for the tyranny of the "brotherhood" (Dugger, p. 170).
This is where "Fancy" re-enters the equation. Stephen’s actions are not guided by "Fact," "tabular statements," or the "regulations" (Stiltner, p. 197) of either the masters or the union. They are guided by "Fancy" in its highest form: an internal, non-systemic moral code. His refusal is based on a "promise," a sacred "word" (Dickens, Ch. 21) given to Rachael. This "Fancy" (faith, integrity, personal honor) is precisely the "imagination" that the "Disciplinary City" was built to "root out." He is, in effect, the novel’s only true "individual" (Dugger, p. 164), a man whose identity is based not on his function as a "Hand," but on his "perfect integrity" (Dickens, Ch. 10).
This is why his case is so central. Stephen is the "unfathomable tangle" (Brantlinger, p. 271) that the "Fact" system cannot solve. He is the human variable that breaks the "disciplinary" machine. He is, as Stiltner notes, the "one genuine but fleeting revolutionary moment in the novel" (p. 202). His "editorial intervention" is to demonstrate through his own destruction the absolute failure of all systems "Fact" and "Factory" alike that do not have "Fancy," or human sympathy, at their core.
Conclusion: The "Tangle" of "Fact," the Agency of "Fancy"
The critical "case" against Stephen Blackpool that he is ambivalent (Brantlinger), a "realist" failure (Ingham), or a passive "docile body" (Stiltner) collapses when his actions are viewed not as passivity, but as a profound "editorial" refusal. Dickens's novel does not offer a "muddle" (Brantlinger, p. 285) as its solution; it diagnoses the "muddle" as the problem. The "unfathomable tangle" of Coketown is the "Disciplinary City" (Stiltner, p. 193) itself, a totalizing system of "Fact" and "Factory" that attempts to grind all human "Fancy" into "a mere question of figures" (Stiltner, p. 198).
Stephen's greatness is not that he offers a five-point plan to fix the "Factory," but that he refuses to accept its "disciplinary" logic. His refusal to join the union is not a political failure but a moral triumph, an act of "editorial" agency (Dugger, p. 152) that preserves his individual integrity against the "disciplinary" demands of both masters and men. He demonstrates that any system, whether capitalist or collectivist, that is based purely on "Fact" and "power" will inevitably crush the human soul.
In the end, Stephen Blackpool is not a "docile body"; he is the novel's most active agent of "Fancy." His final "editorial intervention" is his death. Gazing up from the "Old Hell Shaft" a literal pit dug by the "Factory" system he finds his only solace not in the logic of "Fact," but in the "star" of "Fancy" (Dickens, Ch. 34). His death proves his "muddle" to be the ultimate truth: that the "Disciplinary City" is a "Babel" of "confused" (Dickens, Ch. 34) systems, and the only way out is not a new system, but the "Faith, Hope, and Charity" (Stiltner, p. 211) that the "Fact"-based world has "rooted out." He is the case that proves the system wrong.
Works Cited
Brantlinger, Patrick. “Dickens and the Factories.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 26, no. 3, 1971, pp. 270–85. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2933206. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Project Gutenberg, 2004, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/786/786-h/786-h.htm.
Dugger, Julie M. “Editorial Interventions: ‘Hard Times’’s Industrial Imperative.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 32, 2002, pp. 151–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44372055. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
Ingham, Patricia. “Dialect as ‘Realism’: Hard Times and the Industrial Novel.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 37, no. 148, 1986, pp. 518–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/516440. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
Stiltner, Barry. “Hard Times: The Disciplinary City.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 30, 2001, pp. 193–215. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44372015. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
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