Contributed by Katie Brandt Sartain,

Graduate Researcher at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Twitter @bratie_kandt

There is no shortage of drinkers, druggers, and over-imbibers in the Dickensian canon. From Sydney Carton and his bumpers of rum to John Jasper’s ravenous opium habit to the destitution of Stephen Blackpool’s never-named wife, characters whom we might now classify as “addicts” abound in Charles Dickens’s novels and other writings. During the nineteenth century, Victorian societal mores and perceptions surrounding alcoholism and addiction were changing, vacillating between moralization, criminalization, and medicalization. Indeed, Dickens, too, had much to say about the cultural phenomena of drunkenness and temperance in the nineteenth century. Scholars like Helena Michie have pointed out Dickens’s complicated relationship with alcohol, arguing that there are “two distinct and diametrically opposed attitudes to drink in the Dickens canon” (Abstract).

Some scholars have noticed that Dickens’s work displays two contradictory attitudes towards alcohol and those who drink it…Dickens’s texts—from the journalism to the novels, and from the early to the late fiction—compartmentalize the effects of drinking into particular plots and genres. It is as if, in different ways, Dickens’s texts create dysphoric drinkers only to forget them in the move between novels, genres, sub-plots, or sentences (Michie 601).

Dickens was known to partake in drink quite frequently and dabble in opium, but he had also privately funded the rehabilitation of several unfortunate women who had fallen on their own hard times due to their lifestyles and habits. However, sometimes a character whom we never see take a sip of alcohol, partake in a dram of laudanum, or light a pipe of opium can say even more about the role of intoxication, addiction, and recovery—particularly for women—in Dickens’s work and Dickens’s own complicated feelings on those matters. 

In Hard Times, Dickens presents the story of the heroine Louisa Gradgrind. Her story treads the earlier familiar path of the conversion narrative and anticipates the structure of the recovery narrative while also resisting the conventional marriage plot. Recovery narratives began to emerge in the middle of the nineteenth century (George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance” from Scenes of Clerical Life is a good literary example) and would explode in popularity by the early twentieth century with development of self-help groups and twelve step recovery models for those afflicted with alcoholism and addiction. These narratives conventionally follow a format of “what it was like,” “what happened,” and “what it’s like now.” Throughout the narrative of Louisa’s escape from her husband Bounderby, temptation by the libertine James Harthouse, and ultimately marriageless destiny, Dickens mimics this narrative structure while at the same time illuminating his own complicated feelings regarding the relationship between temperance and feminine goodness. 

At first glance, Louisa seems an unlikely target of the title “recovering addict,” but several elements of her character and story as well as the language and thematics of Hard Times itself support this categorization. Dickens describes Coketown’s residents as “people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow”, if anything, a rather habitual bunch (Dickens 22). Specifically, Louisa’s is the narrative of a woman traumatized by her upbringing, used by her family, then repulsed by her marriage to the odious Josiah Bounderby: “What was there in her soul for James Harthouse to destroy…everything being hollow and worthless, she had missed nothing and sacrificed nothing” (125). However, the allusions to her addictive tendencies begin in the first pages of the novel, and she seems to be in constant danger of influence. Dickens describes Louisa and Tom as “little vessels arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim” and later, Tom refers to the childhood home as a “jolly old–Jaundiced Jail” (2; 43). These two passages respectively indicate the Gradgrinds’ propensity to metaphorically imbibe as well as the unfavorable condition of the household environment. 

While Tom is explicitly shown to drink and take narcotic drugs, for Louisa, it is not a literal substance that tempts and intoxicates her into perilous behavior. Instead, it is the handsome libertine, James Harthouse. Dickens often depicts Harthouse in the language of intoxication. Not only does he smoke “the rare tobacco that had such a wholesome influence on his friend…[from] his eastern pipe,” a clear reference to Harthouse’s use of opium (both on himself and Tom), but his very personality is persistently portrayed as a nefarious influence in the Gradgrind family circle, first infiltrating Tom, “who yielded to his influence” and acting as a “powerful Familiar,” and then Louisa who admits, “it must be bad in me to be so ready to agree with you” (134; 102; 153). Through the literal usage of drugs and the metaphorical description of Harthouse as a dangerous substance himself, Dickens makes the connection between Louisa’s attraction to Harthouse and a destructive addiction. Earlier in the novel, Stephen Blackpool’s wife has already shown the dire consequences for women tempted into questionable behavior:

Such a creature! A disabled, drunken creature, barely able to preserve her sitting posture by steadying herself with one begrimed hand on the floor…A creature so foul to look at, in her tatters, stains and splashes, but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful thing to even see her (55).

The chapter titled “Mrs Sparsit’s Staircase” connects this image of the disgraced alcoholic wife with Louisa’s own potential descent into ill fame. Mrs Sparsit describes Louisa’s temptation into adultery with Harthouse as a descent down “a mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame, and ruin at the bottom,” revisiting the same language used to describe Stephen’s wife’s alcoholism (151). Mrs Sparsit does not need to explain what this dark pit of shame and ruin entails; Stephen’s wife has already shown us where it leads. This further underscores Louisa’s precarious position “upon the brink of the abyss” (156). Everything leading up to her escape from Mrs Sparsit’s surveillance and abscondence back to her father’s house encompasses the “what it was like” portion of Louisa’s narrative. It is not until she admits the danger she is in—her powerlessness over Harthouse’s intimate hold over her—and the trauma of her upbringing that she can experience a complete psychic change: the spiritual awakening that ultimately saves her from ruin. This represents Louisa’s “what happened,” or the impetus for change. In the last chapter, when the narrator ruminates on Louisa’s future as a wife and mother as “never to be” he completes the recovery narrative in true fashion: abstinence, or “what it’s like now” (219). 

To end, Louisa’s story at its face is not explicitly about recovery from drugs or alcohol. However, by comparing her near-fall to Stephen’s wife’s dejection, and by reading Harthouse as drug, the similarities between her arc in Hard Times and the recovery narrative are prevalent. Louisa’s story illuminates Dickens’s important contribution to the genre, as well as displays his tendency to link female temperance with female goodness. 

Notes

1. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “addict” did not enter the general lexicon until 1899.

2.  “Theme: Drink.” Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack and Emily Bell (London: Dickens Fellowship), https://dickensletters.com/search-content?body_value=&tid=566&field_period_tid=All&field_addressee_tid=All .

3.  Dickens, Charles. “To George Dolby, 17 February 1869.” Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack and Emily Bell (London: Dickens Fellowship). https://dickensletters.com/letters/george-dolby-17-feb-1869, 10 August 2021.

4. Dickens, Charles. “To Georgiana Morson, 9 October 1851.” Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack and Emily Bell (London: Dickens Fellowship). https://dickensletters.com/letters/georgiana-morson-9-oct-1851, 10 August 2021.

Works Cited and Consulted

“addict, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/2174 Accessed 11 August 2021.

Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack and Emily Bell (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Sources, and Contemporary Reactions, Criticism. Edited by George H. Ford and Monod Sylvère, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton, 1990. 

Michie, Helena. “Drinking in Dickens.” The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens, 1st ed., Edited by John Jordan, Robert L. Patten, and Catherine Waters, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 597-612, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198743415.013.41. 

Woods, Angela, et al. “The Recovery Narrative: Politics and Possibilities of a Genre.” Cult Med Psychiatry, 2019, doi:10.1007/s11013-019-09623-y.