"Hard Times"

"Hard Times" is possibly one of the least liked of Dickens's novels, but one of the most read. Its imaging of Victorian schoolroom, industrial squalor, and complacent hypocrisy in a society choking in a Utilitarian ethos has provided us with a graphic and enduring portrait of 19th century England. Yet the novel's critical history has been a controversial one. Whilst acknowledging that the novel is insufficiently focussed in its critique of society, Allen Samuels argues that the underlying issues raised in the novel are still presciently with us, in particular the debate within the text of the place of fiction in a society increasingly dominated by scientific fact. The author surveys a range of 19th and 20th century critical views of the novel pointing to them as expressions of social and moral viewpoints ultimately concerned with value. Attention is thus paid to those critics, such as Ruskin, Shaw, Wilson, Orwell, Leavis who have thought of literature as more than the merely academic. Their concern with moral and political value is contrasted with more Formalist criticism, textual scholarship and with historical readings.
Recent theoretical approaches are lightly sketched in an analysis of a deconstructionist reading the text. In his appraisal Allen Samuels argues that we dislodge Leavis's categorization of "moral fable" and replace it with dramatic satire. Pointing briefly to Dickens's theatrical qualities, he then considers how the satire may be interpreted so as to reveal the connections between selfishness and "writing" in a materialist society. Analogies of writing and reading are explored and analyzed. An epilogue queries the nature of "Victorian values" in contemporary discourse, and wonders how "Hard Times" might provide a comment on our own age.