Hard Times

This Audiobook of Charles Dickens??? novel Hard Times read by Martin Jarvis is excellent. I found myself by turns laughing, groaning, or tearing up, depending on how Dickens channeled by Jarvis wanted to make me feel.

The story is fast-paced and full of wonderful Dickensian descriptions (of buildings and people) and deliciously grotesque or charmingly good characters and plenty of admirably biting social commentary and satire directed at the awful union of Utilitarianism (fact-based rationalization of human beings in the service of the greater good) with the Industrial Revolution (chimneys spewing filthy writhing snakes of smoke, machinery moving up and down like imprisoned maddened elephants, workers dehumanized as ???Hands,??? all of it polluting the world while enriching the owners??? class). It is the angriest, most moving, and least corny book I???ve read by Dickens??? So many memorable scenes, as when ???Girl Number Twenty??? is asked to define a horse in the M???Choakumchild classroom, or when with bitter irony the factory mill windows lit at night are described as looking like fairy palaces, or when Josiah Bounderby???s mother finally sets the record straight.

Martin Jarvis is in fine form throughout, giving each character his or her own perfectly suitable voice and manner of speaking and reading Dickens??? words with great sensitivity and understanding and emotion and clarity. Hearing his Bounderby???s coarse bluster, Stephen Blackpool???s sad self-effacement, Tom Gradgrind???s sour self-pity, Sissy Jupe???s pure sympathy, James Harthouse???s amoral aristocratic bon mots, Mr. Sleary???s kind showman lispings, or any of the other characters is great pleasure.