Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Dickens, Charles Hard Times for These Times - David Sonstroem (essay date 1969)


Dickens, Charles Hard Times for These Times - David Sonstroem (essay date 1969)

David Sonstroem (essay date 1969)

SOURCE: "Fettered Fancy in Hard Times," in PMLA, Vol. 84, No. 3, May, 1969, pp. 520-29.

[In the following essay, Sonstroem identifies conflict between Fact—dry statistics and empirical definitions—and Fancy—variously identified with imagination, romance, wonder, and nonsense—as central to the structure of Hard Times.]

Clifton Fadiman on Dickens's anti-politicism:

[There] is something that bids us pause before accepting the easy view of Dickens as the revolutionary whose socio-economic libido was insufficient to make him fall in love with the proletariat. To be even an unconscious revolutionary one's temper must be dominantly political—and the feeling comes over one that Dickens was not only nonpolitical, but anti-political. Hard Times is full of sympathy for the oppressed factory-worker, though hardly for the union....

[The entire page is 8300 words long]

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