Introduction To Hard Times :: essays research papers

The shortest of devil novels, Hard multiplication, was in any case, until quite recently, the least regarded of them. The comedy is savagely and contumeliously sardonic, to the virtual exclusion of the humour - that delighted apprehension of and rejoicing in idiosyncrasy and absurdity for their own sakes, which often cuts right across cleanistic considerations and which we norm all in ally take for granted in Dickens. Then, too, the novel is curiously skeletal. in that respect are four-spot separate plots, or at least four separate centres of interest the re-education through suffering of Mr. Gradgrind, the exposure of Bounderby, the emotional state and finish 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. But 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 sequ ential story to run through five months of his magazine, Household Words, during 1854. Dickens had to superpower his story to fit the exigencies of a Procrustean bed and, in doing so, sacrificed the abundance of life characteristic 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 certification of a moral fable being that "the intention is peculiarly insistent, so that the representative significance of everything in the fable - character, episode, and so on - is in a flash 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 start to the novel. Yet a difficulty still remains the nature of the aim of Dickens satire. Both Gradgrind and Bounderby are emblematic, to the point of caricature, of representative early-nineteenth-century attitudes. Dickens tel ls us that Gradgrind has "an unbending, utilitarian, unglamorous face" and the novel has been taken as an attack on the philosophic 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 comfortably for man. Perhaps the two meanings come together in the famous victorian 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 heavy(p) and abiding influence on Western life and thought, and Dickens was sure not competent to criticise it as a philosophical system.