As I am about to post chapters 11 and 12 of my version of Hard Times, shadowing Dickens’s instalments from 170 years ago, I wanted to shared where I got the idea for writing it, as well as talk about where the two songs that were sung in last week’s instalment by Kit and Ailise came from.
The idea for this story first came to me as I was doing a read-along with some Dickensian colleagues of mine a few years ago, and I bemoaned the fact that Mrs Blackpool never got a chance for her voice to be heard, her side of the story to be told. I started to think about what that story might have been. And so, this novel was born, the first chapter written in something of a trance, as Kit’s voice sang through my head, a voice laced with frustrated hope, hurt, and anger.
Not even given a name in Dickens’s novel, Stephen Blackpool’s wife was cast as a device for Dickens to argue for the freedom to divorce (just as he was beginning to contemplate abandoning his own wife) and was depicted as little more than an alcoholic scourge on the life of her miserable and pitiable husband. Seen only as a failed wife, in my re-working of the Dickensian tale, Kit gets her own story, and reclaims her agency and power as a woman in a world in which people of the working class were expendable and a wife was all but invisible. Having decided I wanted to tell Kit’s story, I also realised, with the 170 year anniversary of Hard Times coming up, it might be a good time to try my hand at writing in instalments, and so I have followed the format of the original novel with all the chapters sharing the same name as those in Hard Times.
Dickens wrote Hard Times for his periodical journal Household Words, which strove to be a publication dealing with the important topics of the day, and it was full of articles and stories that were entertaining, informative, as well as being educational, even activist in tone. He wrote it with the hope that it would ‘shake some people in a terrible mistake of these days’ (letter to Thomas Carlyle, 13 July 1854). He wanted his novel to make a difference, to go some way to alleviating the dreadful condition many men and women lived out their lives. The thing is, I don’t think he was ever going to be able to capture the true horror of what life was like for a working class woman like Kit, especially given how notoriously poor he was at writing authentic female experience.
As I have mentioned previously, Hard Times was serialised from 1 April to 13 August 1854, and the most challenging aspect of the writing of this novel for Dickens was space – or, more precisely – the lack of space. He agonised over the need to fit his story into the space that was allotted, complaining that ‘the difficulty of the space is CRUSHING’ and that there was no ‘elbow-room’ for him in his writing (letter to John Forster, February 1854). In order to keep the novel within the constraints of the space available to him (remembering that it was he who determined how much space he was to have as the self-styled conductor, or editor of the journal) he cut from it some of what he had hoped to include. He had intended, for example, for Rachael to have a sister who had been maimed within the factory. Once I understood this, I was unable to see Rachael without that phantom sister by her side. Thus, Little Lizzie was born, although born to be nothing better than fodder for the mill, like so many of the young children whose lives were lost on account of workplace injury all across the country. It was something that became even more real for me after my visit to Quarry Bank Mill (one of the infographics I saw is pictured below). Standing in the environment, my imagination in full throttle, it became almost suffocating. Industry really was built on the tragedy of the existence of the working class man and woman.
During her life many changes were made to protect workers, those protections enshrined in law, including the Factory Act of 1833 which stipulated that there were to be no workers under the age of nine. Before then, girls – little girls – could often be found toiling in the factories or mines for a pittance, their lives and health in constant peril. For many men and women, these legal protections came far too late to save them from injury, illness, or death and I wanted to reflect the brutal reality of their world in my novel.
The song that Kit remembers Billy singing is The Hand Loom Weavers Lament from John Harland and T. T. Wilkinson, Ballads and Songs of Lancashire: Ancient and Modern, 1882.
The song that Ailise sings at Little Lizzie’s funeral is The Spinning Wheel, an Irish folk song from the 1800s about a young girl spinning by the fireside in her home in Ireland, while caring for her blind grandmother, who ultimately runs away with her lover. I first became aware of this song when I was served by a young waiter in a restaurant in the Metrocentre in Gateshead, who had a small tattoo of a spinning wheel on her wrist. When I asked her the significance of it, she explained that her grandmother used to sing an old Irish song about a spinning wheel to her when she was a little girl. Deep in the process of writing this story, I was immediately intrigued, and asked if she would email me the words of the song. I would like to thank Ailise Graham for taking the time to do so. The song made a fitting tribute to mark the passing of Little Lizzie and also gave me the name for Rachael and Lizzie’s mam.
Writing in instalments remains very challenging. When writing a novel, I like to write the whole thing, going back to fix those parts of the stories that need fixing, correcting mistakes and timeline errors, plugging in the gaps in the story. Instalment writing does not come with that luxury and gives me greater appreciation of the inherent skill of writers like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. The pressure is now on to write the next two chapters to ensure I can keep this story going.
You can check it out on my substack: https://deborahsiddoway.substack.com/p/writing-dickens-chapters-ix-and-x?r=1j2955. I would love to know how you are enjoying it.
Deborah Siddoway 