Dickens, Charles Hard Times for These Times | Joseph Butwin (essay date 1977)
Joseph Butwin (essay date 1977)
SOURCE: "Hard Times: The News and the Novel," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 1, June, 1977, pp. 166-87.
[In the following essay, Butwin examines Hard Times as a novel of social reform and compares it with social-reform journalism of the period.]
Modern criticism tends to judge the novel that aims at social reform by standards that are appropriate to another kind of novel. This tendency is typified by Virginia Woolf s rejection of the novels of Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy according to standards that she derives from the novels of Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen:
What odd books they are! Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave One with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write...
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