Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Dickens, Charles Hard Times for These Times - Roger Fowler (essay date 1983)


Dickens, Charles Hard Times for These Times - Roger Fowler (essay date 1983)

Roger Fowler (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: "Polyphony and Problematic in Hard Times, " in The Changing World of Charles Dickens, edited by Robert Giddings, Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1983, pp. 91-108.

[Here, Fowler discusses Dickens's use of language and dialect in Hard Times as a tool for characterization and "unresolved ideological complexity. "]

The polarization of critical response to Hard Times is familiar enough to make detailed reporting unnecessary, but since this polarization is a fact relevant to my argument, I will recapitulate it briefly.

Popular reception of the novel has been largely antagonistic or uninterested. The character of the earlier novels has led to the formation of a cheerful and sentimental 'Dickensian' response which finds Hard Times, like the other later novels, cold and uncomfortable, lacking in the innocent jollity, sentimentality and grotesquery of the...

[The entire page is 6371 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass