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The shortest of Dickens novels, Hard Times, was also, until quite recently, the least regarded of them. ...
That, at any rate, was the general view of Hard Times until in 1948 F. ... Leavis produced a brilliant rereading of Hard Times that has changed almost every critics approach to the novel. ... " And it is precisely those elements of nineteenth-century economic thinking that denied life which he is attacking in Hard Times. ... In Hard Times the attack is on its consequences in education, as is made clear in the wonderful satire of the opening chapters, in which Sissy Jupe, whose whole life has been spent among horses, is convicted of ignorance of their essential nature, as compared with Bitzer, whose "correct" definition of a horse could have been given equally well by someone who had never set eyes on the animal. ... I have heard you talk, a hundred times, of its being a law. ... In Hard Times, poetry, the life of the imagination, is symbolised in the "horse-riding" Mr. ... Nine years before Hard Times appeared, Disraeli had applied the phrase "The Two Nations" (the subtitle of his novel Sybil) to Britain. ... He reacted toward it, and toward the attitudes that had made it what it was, with horror and fear - with what intensity Hard Times shows. ... As a critique in fiction of industrial society, there is nothing to compare with Hard Times until we come to D.
Approximate Word count = 1983
Approximate Pages = 7.9
(250 words per page double spaced)
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