Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Dickens, Charles Hard Times for These Times - George Gissing (essay date 1898)


Dickens, Charles Hard Times for These Times - George Gissing (essay date 1898)

George Gissing (essay date 1898)

SOURCE: "The Radical," in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912, pp. 255-82.

[In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1898, Gissing writes of Hard Times as a failed labor novel..]

We do not nowadays look for a fervent Christianity in leaders of the people. In that, as in several other matters, Dickens was by choice retrospective. Still writing at a time when "infidelity"—the word then used—was becoming rife among the populace of great towns, he never makes any reference to it, and probably did not take it into account; it had no place in his English ideal. I doubt, indeed, whether he was practically acquainted with the "free-thinking" workman. A more noticeable omission from his books (if we except the one novel which I cannot but think a failure) is that of the workman at war with capital. This great struggle, going on before him all...

[The entire page is 435 words long]

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