Introduction To Hard Times :: essays research papers

The shortest of Dickens novels, Hard Times, was also, until quite recently, the least regarded of them. The comedy is savagely and scornfully sardonic, to the virtual exclusion of the snappishness - that delighted apprehension of and rejoicing in idiosyncrasy and absurdity for their own sakes, which often cuts right across clean-living considerations and which we normally take for granted in Dickens. Then, too, the novel is curiously skeletal. There are four separate plots, or at least four separate centres of interest the re-education through suffering of Mr. Gradgrind, the flick of Bounderby, the life and death of Stephen Blackpool, and the story of Sissy Jupe.There are present, in other words, all the potentialities of an expansive, discursive novel in the full Dickens manner. just they are not and could not be realised because of the limitation of length Dickens imposed upon himself. The novel was written as a weekly ensuant story to run through five months of his magazine, Household Words, during 1854. Dickens had to force his story to fit the exigencies of a Procrustean bed and, in doing so, sacrificed the abundance of life feature article of his genius.That, at any rate, was the general view of Hard Times until in 1948 F.R. Leavis, in his book The Great Tradition, suggested that it was a "moral fable," the hallmark of a moral fable being that "the intention is peculiarly insistent, so that the representative signifi great dealce of everything in the fable - character, episode, and so on - is immediately apparent as we read."By seeing it as a moral fable, Dr. Leavis produced a brilliant rereading of Hard Times that has changed almost every critics approach to the novel. Yet a difficulty noneffervescent remains the nature of the target of Dickens satire. Both Gradgrind and Bounderby are emblematic, to the point of caricature, of representative early-nineteenth-century attitudes. Dickens tells us that Gradgrind has "an unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face" and the novel has been taken as an overture on the philosophical doctrine known as utilitarianism, the doctrine that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the guiding principle of conduct. But utilitarianism can also mean the doctrine that utility must be the standard of what is good for man. Perhaps the two meanings come together in the famous tight-laced phrase, "enlightened self-interest," the meaning of which will turn entirely upon the definition of "enlightened." Utilitarianism in the philosophical sense, as taught by the noble-minded John Stuart Mill, has had a profound and fixed influence on Western life and thought, and Dickens was certainly not competent to criticise it as a philosophical system.