[In the excerpt below, Hardy examines Hard Times as one among several novels in which Dickens chose not to affirm a sure solution to the social problems he addressed.]

Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations limit their concluding demands on the reader and do not expect us to settle down and see everything and everyone as now prospering after all that pain. The sense of reality begins in Hard Times (1854), with a toughening of moral humours in the two chief women characters. Sissy Jupe is a more subdued type of womanly virtue than Esther [in Bleak House] and we are asked to concentrate not on Sissy but on Louisa, a close study in moral psychology who also does not task our credulity or our faith. Like Edith Dombey, to whom she is related, Louisa is a case of repressed passion and vision. She sees the highest, but pride, self-contempt and doubt drive her into following the lowest. She perversely represses her capacity for virtue, and tries to act out the utilitarian disregard for feeling which her education has held up as a model. She is also moved by her love for her brother, and does not follow Edith's earlier course of punishing herself and her male aggressors, and is indeed moved by Harthouse (and he by her, and by Sissy) as Edith never is by Carker. Harthouse is a less stagey and a more compressed version of Carker, a study in perverted ennui who is a sketch for Eugene Wrayburn. Louisa is also exposed to experience not simply as a victim, like Esther Summerson, but as a susceptible and malleable human being who has a capacity for damnation.

Though the treatment of the working-class characters and industrial problems is sentimental and crass, the virtue of Hard Times lies in a new kind of truthfulness about social conditioning of character. We do not find, as in Bleak House, the anatomy of destructiveness followed by a small-scale model of construction. The humours of the self-made man gloriosus, in Bounderby, and of the convertible Utilitarian, in Gradgrind, are incisive and spirited, very much in the manner of those Jonsonian humours whose very narrowness produces a pressure of vitality. The presentation of the circus with its symbols of pastime, joy and goodhearted sleaziness is effective within the limits of the fable and, in spite of its embarrassing lisping innocence, responds adequately enough to the counter-symbol of the fact-choked and fact-choking schoolroom. The novel lacks a proper adult paradigm for the imaginative and sensual life denied by Gradgrind, but so much of the focus is on the child's education that this passes almost without notice. That it does not escape entirely without notice is perhaps a tribute to the delineation of passion, repression and conflict in Louisa. Dickens cannot really be said to explore her inner life, but he manages very skilfully, as with Dombey, to imply it.

Louisa does not go right down to the bottom of Mrs Sparsit's gloatingly imagined moral staircase, but her redemption is treated with some sternness and there is no falsely triumphant climax. The anatomy of a heartless education and a heartless industrialism, linked by the criterion of efficiency, concludes with no more than a sad and sober appraisal:

Herself again a wife—a mother—lovingly watchful of her children, ever careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a childhood of the body, as knowing it to be even a more beautiful thing, and a possession, any hoarded scrap of which, is a blessing and happiness to the wisest? Did Louisa see this? Such a thing was never to be.

The last words to the Dear Reader, which recall the end of The Chimes, though discussing the possibility of remedy, is free from optimistic flights: 'It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not'. Dickens looks forward to rebirth—in the lives of children still unborn and in deathbed repentance—but he denies Louisa a brave new life; the quiet and almost matter-of-fact language is true to the experience of the novel. His liking for cheers and congratulations at the end is subdued, as he suggests that Louisa's future will be undertaken 'as part of no fantastic vow, or bond, or sisterhood . . . but simply as a duty to be done'. It is particularly satisfying that Dickens avoids the pendulum-swing so grossly offensive in Bleak House; he does not offer the language and symbolism of strong feeling and vivid fancy in reaction to the world and values of hard fact. He matches heartless rationality with a rational warmth. The very last words of the novel are placed in a context of age and death: 'We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold.' The image of dying fires is wholly sensitive to Coketown, and remembers its ashes, in contrast to the way that Esther's little 'Bleak House' depended on ignoring the larger bleakness.