What a novel! First published in 1854, when Dickens was 42, it exudes anger about social injustice from the first page to the last.

I first read it as a set text on my English course at teacher training college, worked on it during my Open University degree and later taught it for GCSE but hadn’t, until now, revisited it for a while. And, of course, one of the great joys of rereading is that you notice different things at different stages in your life as well as responding to changing mores in your own time and culture.

For example, in chapter 3 Dickens makes it clear that Louisa is pubescent or even (in an age when girls developed later) pre-pubescent: “She was a child now, of fifteen or sixteen: but at a not distant day would seem to become a woman all at once”. A few pages later, in chapter 4, we find the repulsive, tedious hectoring, boastful, self important Bounderby who is nearly 50, begging a kiss from her. In 2023 we’d call him a paedophile and I’d never noticed that before.

Another thing I wondered about a lot during this re-reading is Bounderby’s bedroom performance – or lack of it.  Louisa is almost 20 when she marries this man whom she loathes. They are together for a while but there are no children. In Victorian novels children, or absence of them, usually convey a covert message about a couple’s sexual status. At the end of Jane Eyre, for example, Charlotte Bronte pointedly tells us that Mr Rochester eventually recovers enough eyesight to see his first born son. Perhaps Louisa could have had this distastrous marriage annulled on grounds of non-consummation? Towards the end of the novel Dickens mentions, in another context, Bounderby’s “blustering sheepishness” which would make a good discussion classroom point in relation to several aspects of his character.

Hard Times is, at heart, a satirical attack on ruthless, money-driven, exploitative industrialisation and the sort of education which is required to underpin it – if you take the principles to their logical, comical extent. The opening of Hard Times is famous for its depiction of a fact-driven classroom in which one boy is commended for his long, wordy definition of a horse while Sissy Jupe, who has grown up in a circus training horses, is ridiculed for her lack of knowledge. Every modern teacher knows this passage and “Grandgrindery” has passed into the language as code for teaching/learning which over- emphasises irrelevant theory.

Mr Gradgrind, who owns and funds the school, is not a bad man, however. He is initially misguided but eventually changes. He loves his children too. Characterisation in Hard Times is often beautifully nuanced. Other characters who are subtly drawn include Sissy who starts as a nervous child abruptly removed from her own environment and develops into a wise, kind, practical young woman and a worthy “sister” to Louisa especially when things go seriously wrong. Also a delight is Mr Sleary, the circus owner, who is kind, reasonable and warm although I wish Dickens had spared us the rather laboured phonetic representation of his lisp.

Both Gradgrind and Bounderby, who are good friends, have made their money – a lot of money – from the heavy industry of Coketown, the fictional northern town in which the novel is set. The subplot, which ensures sure that we really do see the divide between the rich and the poor, concerns Stephen Blackpool, an innocent and decent factory worker who loves Rachael but who is saddled with a drunken, vagrant wife who occasionally returns to distress him. (Disastrous marriage is thematic in Hard Times.) Then Mr Bounderby’s bank is robbed and suddenly, the finger of suspicion lands on Stephen but it’s clear to the reader who is actually responsible in a fairly tightly plotted novel.

Two other things struck me afresh. First: I love, and have always loved, Dicken’s frequent, comic use of anaphora. “No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject …” And so he dances on and on.  in similar mood, he compares the pistons of Coketown’s heavy industrial plant with “the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness” in chapter 5 and then refers to the elephants whenever he mentions the factories for the rest of the novel. Young Tom Gradgrind is continually, and rather contemptuously dubbed “the whelp”. It’s a Dickens trademark. In Great Expectations he repeatedly compares Wemmick’s mouth with a post office and who could forget Mr Carker’s teeth in Dombey and Son?

Second: how brave it was of Dickens – writing over a century before we got to post-modernism – to give us a post-modernist ending. He describes possible long term outcomes for his characters and then invites us to choose. It’s almost John Fowles territory.

Yes, Hard Times is a very worthwhile reread. If, on the other hand, it’s new to you then believe me, you have a treat in store. And if you think Dickens’s novels are always dauntingly huge then be reassured that this one is less than 300 pages.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:  Heresy by SJ Parris

Whenever I’m in touch – and that’s quite often – with my dear old college friend who lives in Brisbane, we always swap a few book titles, just as we did almost daily when we were students together. And, as a bonus, she often mentions titles by Australian authors which have slipped beneath my radar in the UK.  Our tastes are quite similar so I usually buy her suggestions and am rarely disappointed and I certainly wasn’t with this powerful, poignant, intelligent novel.

Limberlost was published last year and is newly available in paperback. I read it on Kindle. Arnott, wrote it during his year as writer-in-residence at University of Tasmania and the island state provides the setting for his novel. I have been to Tasmania and, even today after decades of global industrialisation, it remains a remote place with more “wilderness”, as the Australians call it, than anywhere I’ve ever been. Conservation is now carefully managed and in Tasmania I saw more wildlife, casually in the wild than I’ve seen anywhere else – an echidna feeding on the roadside grass verge, a wombat near our cabin door and pandemelons cavorting in the snow for example.

And that sense of nature thrums through Limberlost which is set in the 1940s – when Tasmanian devils were still present in high numbers and you could hear them at night. Today they are affected by a rare form of cancer, unusual in that’s it’s contagious, and the only ones I saw were in a sanctuary. Ned is growing up in northern Tasmania in the 1940s, the youngest of four. His mother died when he was a baby. His father is a strange, unpredictable, distant man, His two older brothers have gone to war and his sister is the only female figure in his life apart from his best friend’s sister in the next valley. The main industry is farming – specifically orchard fruits but it’s vey hard to make a living.

Haunted by the memory of seeing, in infancy, something mysterious from a boat, Ned hankers for a boat of his own. He yearns for, and reflects on,  things he can’t understand and the boat dream represents that. Eventually he acquires one but not before he has accidentally injured a quoll and secretly nursed it back to life. The animal becomes a symbol for the inner turmoil the boy often feels and but can’t fathom. At one level he is desperately worried about his conscripted brothers but there’s much more to it than that.

It’s a double narrative. In parallel with the account of his teenage years we also see Ned married with a family and making a reasonable success of his life and there’s a hint towards the end that we are seeing the whole of his life from a present day point of view.

Arnott is good at lyrical prose without it ever feeling self-conscious. He really does evoke the sounds, smells, sights and feel of what Tasmania must once have been like and of Ned slowly experiencing the changes. When he visits his daughters at the university, for instance, one of them turns on him quite viciously and berates him about the theft of all the land in Tasmania from the indigenous people – and suddenly I’m back in The English Passengers by Matthew Kneale (2000). Yes, there’s plenty to think about here.

Limberlost is a succinct novel by 2023 standards – less than 200 pages so it can be soaked up in a day or two. Warmly recommended.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Every family has stories which are passed down through the generations. Typically, they are unconsciously reworked at each retelling and in the end – who knows? That is partly what Marina Warner’s rather magnificent, 1987 novel The Lost Father is about.

I first read it soon after publication, when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and I still have the hardback copy I bought then. It’s a family saga but the narrative is anything but linear so you have to concentrate, especially at the beginning.

Anna is a London-based independent woman of the 1980s and a single mother. She works in a museum threatened with closure, where she is a collector and curator of ephemera. Her family was part of the post-war Italian diaspora and she has become so intrigued by its history that she is trying to write a book about it.

Gradually we learn that, in the first quarter of the 20^th century, Maria-Filippa married Davide to whom were born four daughters and a son in a traditional, quite remote part of southern Italy. Anna’s mother was the youngest daughter so these were her Italian grandparents. Davide, a gentle soul who loved opera, died while still relatively young, apparently in a duel for honour with his brash friend Tomasso – or perhaps it wasn’t quite like that?

The flashbacks into Anna’s work-in-progress present a masterful picture of how southern Italy was and how it changed with the arrival of the fascists. There is, for instance, a desperately sad moment when the widowed Maria-Filppa is forced to give up her wedding ring for “the cause”. I remember finding this upsetting in 1987 and it moved me again this time.

The girls, as Anna imagines them, are all different – and in some cases maybe not quite as pure as convention and the Catholic church expects them to be – with ambitions and longings, even as they launder, cook and sew with their mother.  It’s very evocative and atmospheric. You can almost smell the laundry and the vegetables cooking. And of course their adult lives eventually become very different from the world of their childhood.

At the very end of the novel Anna goes to California to visit one of her – now prosperous – aunts and meets the extended and  extensive family  which now spans more generations. And at last she discovers the “truth” but we left reflecting that truth is a slippery concept especially in family and folk memory when things change but retain an inner truth of their own.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Limberlost by Robbie Arnott