7 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Write What You Know
Date of Review: Apr 19, 2001
The Bottom Line: Honestly, it's not worth the ten or fifteen bucks. Even if you find it free in a book bin, it's probably not worth the room on your shelf.
Hard Times, originally published in segments in the magazine "Household Words", is meant to be a brilliantly witty and socially penetrating commentary on the Industrial Revolution, the philosophy of Utilitarianism, and the state of British class tensions in the 1850s. Sadly, it falls flatter than a pancake on all points.
Dickens, a gentleman of not inconsiderable income himself, had no experience of being a real labouring man, and it is painfully obvious in his portrayal of Stephen Blackpool, Hard Times' protagonist and victim. The dialect Dickens used when writing as Stephen was purportedly lifted from a handbook (!!), while Stephen's character is so far from representative of Britain's working classes, it is absolutely ridiculous. Stephen is a "white man's Injun," a romanticized, more perfect personification of the abstraction known as the working class.
Not only did Dickens know next to nothing about actual labourers and strikes, he was also nearly completely ignorant of Britain's then-existing educational system. Utilitarianism, the philosophy against which he railed so vehemently in the Gradgrind/Bounderby sections of Hard Times, had not been and would never be adopted in the schools.
Dickens' social criticism, while well-intentioned, is ludicrously lacking in any basis in fact. He comes off as blustering and self-righteous, sounding like a a born-again Christian who is eager to save everyone's soul, but who hasn't yet found time to read the Bible.
