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Hard Times was published In 1854 and serialized in a weekly magazine called Household Words edited by Charles Dickens himself. The story, based on the tense relationship between labor and capital in Victorian society, intends to present the livings of poor working people and publication, for it has been translated into dozens of languages and in 1994 it was first adapted into movies. However, it has also received mixed reviews from different critics. Cazamian criticizes in his The Social Novel in England 1830-1850 that “industrial theme does not really take up the central position of this novel, and Dickens just sketches it out, which causes the novel’s artistic defects” (1973: 75). Professor Yin Qiping, on the other hand, notes that “the work run through with industrial theme, although Dickens wrote a lot about Stephen’s suffering in his marriage, he intended to show that working people like Stephen were the real victim of industrial society” (On the “Failure” of Hard Times, 2003: 25). Whatever criticism, the influence of the novel has been indeed profound.
1.2 Literature Review
Hard Times is a novel written by Charles Dickens intended to reveal the severe labor-capital conflicts in his time. It is popular not only because the novel itself is thought-provoking, but also because of the ceaseless criticisms and comments on the novel as well as its author, Charles Dickens.
So far, many researches have been done on this novel. Some analyze the novel from personality structure; some concentrate on its utilitarianism; some scholars criticize the fault in dealing with the class plot and the industrial theme; still some try to analyze the imagery in the novel.
Scholar Chen Shuangshuang analyzes the personality structure. In her book Personality Structure in Hard Times (2011) she uses Freud’s personality structure theory to reveal the full representation of this psychological mechanism in the novel. She analyzes the embodiment of the id, ego and superego, and represents them respectively from the perspective of Tom and James; Sissy and Mr. Sleary; Gradgrind and Bounderby, to show that the fate of every person is severely connected to his or her saying and doing, or we can put it in one word, personality.
Utilitarianism is also widely discussed. It is an ethical theory according to which the rightness and wrongness of acts depends entirely on facts about overall well-being. It is commonly related to the phrase “the greatest good for the greatest number”, and it typically requires people to act in whatever way will result in the greatest possible amount of well-being, where well-being is understood as closely associated with happiness. Often, researches about consequences of it are focused on two aspects: humanity and education. According to The Tragedy of Utilitarianism by Wang Yanjun (2008), it is indeed the utilitarianism that destroys humanity and then leads to the miserable fate of human beings. Take the two protagonists Gradgrind and Bounderby for example. Gradgrind’s facts education destroyed his own children, while Bounderby was utterly isolated in the end. Similar to Wang, in the book Utopian Studies (2012) written by Jennifer Wagner-Lowlor, he compares the education in Hard Times with the Utopian one, and then finds that an education that reflects the ideological “value” of facts alone, of self-interest, of calculation and profit, and of social conformity and obedience produces precisely the “worst of us” that destroys so many lives. It is a good illustration to show us the deficiency of utilitarian education.
Many scholars in western academia regard the way that Dickens deals with its class plot and industrial theme in the novel to be more or less faulty. Julian Markels asserts in his Towards a Marxian Reentry to the Novel that the development of Stephen’s fate is so quaint that he could not be a representative for the whole working class, which results in the inconsistence in the class plot. Due to the failure of one of the main lines in the novel, it causes the unsymmetry in its form structure. Terry Eagleton also makes comments which are similar to Markels’ in Critical Commentary. He delivers that the literary style of the novel lacks coherence. With the development of the novel, the industrial theme is quickly replaced by the conventional patterns of entanglement between man and woman as well as stealing. What is more, Raymond Williams issues in his Culture and Society 1780-1950 that Dickens is not an excellent observer in the life of working people, and his description of the labor-capital conflicts just remains in the surface, but without a feasible solution to solve it.