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 a cheque. That done, the restlessness is laid, the book finished; it can be put upon the shelf, and need never be read again. But with the work of other novelists it is different. Tristram Shandy or Pride and Prejudice is complete in itself; it is self-contained; it leaves one with no desire to do anything, except indeed to read the book again, and to understand it better. . . . But the Edwardians were never interested in character in itself; or in the book in itself. They were interested in something outside. Their books, then, were incomplete as books, and required that the reader should finish them, actively and practically, for himself.

Woolf acknowledges two kinds of fiction; if we continue to judge one by the standards of the other, then her dissatisfaction is justified. But if we trace the novel of social reform back to its mid-Victorian practitioners, we find a literature that certainly deserves to be studied in its own terms and according to the special demands that it made on its original audience. Readers of Hard Times were asked to turn their attention away from the novel. Dickens's valediction in the last paragraph of the novel makes this intention clear: "Dear reader! It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be!" He sets out to initiate "action" in a reader who is seen as something other than just a reader of novels. The novel of social reform completes itself outside the novel in a multitude of acts that may include the joining of societies and the writing of checks. It is also likely to include further reading as opposed to rereading. In the case of Hard Times the original readers were encouraged to see the novel as a form of journalism to be read continuously with Household Words, the weekly magazine in which it appeared. The novel of social reform exists in a continuum with journalism and defines its audience within the general public rather than among the community of "ideal readers" of fiction whose response justifies most literary criticism. The concept of an isolated reading public exercising no other function than the perusal of novels merely reflects the isolation of the Flaubertian artist who has become the archetype of the European novelist since Dickens.

Critical study of the novel of social reform must begin with an understanding of its differences. A great deal of the difference lies outside the novel itself within a context established by journalists, in a format congenial to journalism written for an audience that is prepared to see itself as a social force. In this essay I will re-create the journalistic milieu of Hard Times, which I take to epitomize the novel of social reform in England. This does not mean that the problems of the novel can be explained away by an outside appeal. On the contrary, Hard Times presents certain critical problems which stem precisely from Dickens's understanding of his genre and which I will try to explain in terms appropriate to the genre.

Hard Times was first read by a public which tended to take its newspapers more seriously than its novels. Abundant testimony in the 1850's locates a new source of power in public opinion, and over and over opinion is linked with the press. When novelists set out to enlist public opinion on social issues they generally understood that they were following the lead of the journalists. In an early venture of this kind Dickens follows Oliver Twist into the Magistrate's Court and shifts into the present tense that he reserves for the observation of continuous social abuse in that novel:

Although the presiding Genii in such an office as this, exercise a summary and arbitrary power over the liberties, the good name, the character, almost the lives, of Her Majesty's subjects, especially of the poorer class; and although, within such walls, enough fantastic tricks are daily played to make the angels blind with weeping; they are closed to the public, save through the medium of the daily press.

Critical reception of novels more strictly given over to social issues in the 1840's indicates that they were being read as something other than novels. The Edinburgh Review justified W. R. Greg's long (and largely unfavorable) review of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton with the running head: "Not to be regarded as a mere Novel." Similarly the Manchester Guardian (28 February 1849) identified the book as a form of current history or journalism masquerading as a novel: "There are popular works published in the form of novels that depict either important historical events of bygone years, or the passing realities of the present, in such an intense manner that the impression conveyed is stamped more vividly and indelibly on the mind . . . than from the study of history properly so-called." This, of course, is just what the novelists of social reform intended. Greg and the Guardian reviewer were protecting the domain of journalism. Both criticized the novel for errors in fact and analysis. The novelists themselves understood that they were entering that domain and in some cases improving upon it. Charles Kingsley praised Mary Barton "for the awful facts contained in it." He saw that there are certain functions served by novelistic "facts" that may even surpass the instructive powers of the press. "In spite of blue-books and commissions, in spite of newspaper horrors and parliamentary speeches, Manchester riots and the 10th of April, the mass of higher orders cannot yet be aware of what a workman's home is like in the manufacturing districts." Again, his eye is on facts and their impact on public opinion which he locates among "the higher orders." The interest of this kind of criticism then turns to the distribution of the novel and consequent action on the part of the readership, neither of which has anything to do with the criteria described by Virginia Woolf in her essay on the Edwardians. The reviewer in this case is also a preacher and a publicist and a novelist of social reform. He begins his review of Mary Barton with a call to action: "Had we wit and wisdom enough, we would placard its sheets on every wall, and have them read aloud from every pulpit, till a nation, calling itself Christian, began to act upon the awful facts contained in it, not in the present peddling and desultory manner, but with an united energy of shame and repentance proportionate to the hugeness of the evil." Kingsley's own novel, Yeast, had just concluded its six-month run in Fraser 's where the review of Mary Barton appeared. By this time the periodical press had become the ideal vehicle for the news and the novel.

Ever since the success of Pickwick had allowed Dickens to leave the Morning Chronicle in 1836, it had been his ambition to unite the functions of the newspaper and the novel. Bentley's Miscellany, Master Humphrey's Clock, and the Daily News all failed to satisfy that impulse before 1850 when all of his ideas jelled around a journal of social reform. His earliest intentions for Household Words included the idea that it should provide the proper context for novels like Mary Barton. Immediately he wrote Gaskell: "There is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me). . . . all will seem to express the general mind and purpose of the journal, which is the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition."

Dickens's public declaration in the "Preliminary Word" to the first number of Household Words (30 March 1850) would appear at a glance to have a quite different aim in mind. He celebrates "Fancy" and the "imagination" and promises to reveal the "thousand and one tales" too often obscured by the smoke of the factories and their flaming chimneys. One might ask how the Condition of England is to be improved by the telling of tales. Through the agency of fancy and the imagination a whole class may be able to adopt the experience of another class. In order for the facts of industrial life to take hold they must be bodied forth in a fanciful way. Then something akin to Romantic sympathy may be made to prick the conscience of a class. But this activation of middle-class sympathy is not to be confused with "class consciousness" on the part of the beneficiaries of that sympathy. Dickens knows that this mixture of fact and fancy could become extremely volatile. At the end of his introduction he moves without apparent transition into a denial of revolutionary intention:

Some tillers of the field into which we now come, have been before us, and some are here whose high usefulness we readily acknowledge, and whose company it is an honour to join. But, there are others here—Bastards of the Mountain, draggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest passions of the lowest natures—whose existence is a national reproach. And these, we should consider it our highest service to displace.

The Dickensian impression of the "Red Cap" and the "Mountain" had recently been kindled by events in France. The radical press in England self-consciously followed the French example. Julian Harney called himself "L'ami du peuple" in the Red Republican, a weekly journal published from June 1850 to July 1851, and Dickens makes it clear from the start that he is no Harney, certainly no Marat, and that his audience are not sans-culottes.

A journal dedicated to "the raising up of those that are down" finds its ideal audience among those who are not down. Dickens's other contribution to the first number of Household Words begins with the favorite formula of the middle-class reformer: "As one half of the world is said not to know how the other half lives, so it may be affirmed that the upper half of the world neither knows nor greatly cares how the lower half amuses itself." The article, called "The Amusements of the People," affirms for the lower orders the right that Sleary claims for all people in Hard Times: "We believe that these people have a right to be amused." Amusement—in this case vaudeville theater—is also education. For the education of the poor Dickens rejects the "Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street" in favor of the theater because "there is a range of imagination in most of us, which no amount of steam-engines will satisfy." The "amusements" and the instruction of the poor are not served by print. Joe Whelks, as Dickens calls the man of the people, "is not much of a reader, has no great store of books, no very commodious room to read in, no very decided inclination to read, and no power at all of presenting vividly before his mind's eye what he reads about." In other words, he is telling his audience, if you are reading this article you are not a part of "the other half." His audience is thus identified as a reading public to whose amusement and instruction is added the responsibility of reform.

Dickens initiated Household Words in 1850 with many of the ideas that would animate the writing of Hard Times four years later. The novel represents the principles of the journal as they are stated in its first issue—its belief in the redemptive power of fancy, especially in the industrial milieu, its defense of popular amusement, and its warning not to confuse middle-class reform with demagoguery.

Six months after the conclusion of Hard Times, as an introduction to the eleventh volume of Household Words, Dickens restates the principles of his journal in a leading article called "That Other Public." The threats of the "Red Cap" have receded and been replaced by the corruption of successful politicians and entrepreneurs. The machinations of both tend to render the public sluggish and recalcitrant on issues of reform. The means of both are essentially the same: they manipulate the press through the contrivance of favorable publicity. During the busy first week of February 1855 when Palmerston was to become Prime Minister, several papers reported that he had hired a few disreputable journalists to convince the American press of his pacific international policy. Without naming names Dickens condemns a politician who would "purchase remote puffery among the most puff-ridden people ever propagated on the face of the earth." Since the time of his visit to the United States in 1841, the American example would bring to Dickens's mind the worst excesses of the press and of the promoters who habitually misuse it. From Palmerston he turns to the unnamed author "of a little book of Memoirs" lately published. The list of impostures shows the subject to be P. T. Barnum:

Does the "smart" Showman, who makes such a Mermaid, and makes such a Washington's Nurse, and makes such a Dwarf, and makes such a Singing Angel upon earth, and makes such a fortune, and, above all, makes such a book—does he address the free and enlightened Public of the great United States: the Public of State Schools, Liberal Tickets, First-chop Intelligence, and Universal Education? No, no. That other Public is the sharks'-prey.

In many ways Barnum's Dwarf and Angel—Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind—fulfill the needs that Dickens describes in his articles on "The Amusements of the People" and in Hard Times. A nation governed by Gradgrinds would seem to need its Barnums. Unfortunately, Barnum asks too high a price. All of his tricks, pranks, and promotions represent the utter perversion of the art that Dickens was cultivating in Household Words. Dickens's fictions become Barnum's lies; the public's willingness to absorb fantasy becomes downright credulity. Barnum represents the self-serving publicist whose aim is not to inform but to advertise. In his autobiography Barnum describes the way the press serves the purposes of the entrepreneur:

Whatever your occupation or calling may be, if it needs support from the public, advertise it thoroughly and efficiently, in some shape or other, that will arrest public attention. . . . In this country [the United States], where everybody reads the newspapers, the man must have a thick skull who does not see that these are the cheapest and best mediums through which he can speak to the public, where he is to find his customers. Put on the appearance of business, and generally the reality will follow.

Household Words included no commercial advertisement beyond the announcement of its own future publication, the continuation of a serial or the appearance of separate volumes. When a distributor slipped a sheet of advertisement into one of the issues and angry readers complained to the Times, Dickens traced the "disgraceful effusion" to its source and reported his findings in a letter to the editor (Times, 10 and 20 July 1852). Dickens shared Carlyle's disdain for the new art of advertisement with its seven-foot hats and quack medicines.

The kind of advertisement practiced by Barnum taps what Dickens recognized as a basic human need, the need to be amused. By the time he undertook the editorship of Household Words Dickens had begun to interpret the old injunction to amuse and instruct as a mandate for social reform that could be best fulfilled through the medium of journalism. Much of what he writes in Household Words amounts to the definition and education of a good, responsive, and politically responsible public that would counter the false appeal of the Barnum breed and establish a firm constituency for the Dickensian enterprise. In Hard Times Dickens seeks a public that has been trained to respond to journalism. Various stylistic devices encourage readers to verify and test the fiction outside the novel. When the novel is made to stand alone, its weakness lies in an editorial policy that defers specific issues out of the mouths of novelistic characters and into the journalistic setting where the middle-class public is encouraged to turn from spurious demagogues and entrepreneurial boosters to the reliable guidance of the journalist.

The installments of Hard Times are the only signed articles in Household Words. The name "Charles Dickens" appears above each one, and readers are invited to take the novel as the editor's own comment on the "times." Each installment seems to enjoy both the status of a leading article and the special identity of a signed novel inserted into the journal. The reader who meets the novel in the journal comes away with a quite different impression of the meaning of the fiction than the reader of the hardcover volume called Hard Times for These Times. In Household Words it is simply Hard Times. The reader of the journal did not need the expanded title. Every article appeared under the sign of novelty; all was news, all was timely. Having read the installment, the reader continues into other reports, equally timely. Regular readers of Household Words might recall an article on the Manchester library, "Manchester Men at Their Books," when in the 22 April 1854 issue they read in Hard Times about a library in Coketown; other articles about the London poor or me Preston strike are likely to linger in the mind of the reader of the novel. It is not so much that the reader will transfer knowledge directly from one sphere to another, from fact to fiction and back again, as that he reads with the inclination to do so. Other novels that invoke the facts of historical or contemporary life do not necessarily encourage verification. Hard Times, by virtue of its format, does. The fiction leads the reader to the threshold of fact; the threshold is easily crossed within the same journal. The inquisitive reader will go further. Within the text of the novel Dickens encourages mese excursions outside the novel. He teases the reader with fictions that retain the latent authority of fact.

The facts of industrial life are bound to represent opinions, and it is Dickens's reluctance to lodge fully developed opinions within the text mat renders Hard Times incomplete as a novel of social reform. As we shall see, in one significant deletion he takes words out of the mourn of a character, Stephen Blackpool, and lets them live in a series of reports on factory safety mat appeared before and after the run of the novel. The reformer who characterizes his enemies as revolutionaries—"Bastards of the Mountain"—cannot let his hero wear a red cap. Deletions and swift allusions send the reader back into the journal and locate the source of social improvement as middle-class opinion guided by a responsible reformer-journalist. The reader is led out of the novel into the journal. This process begins with the substitution of fact for fiction.

Hard Times is generally read as a denigration of "hard facts" but at the same time it may be seen as Dickens's attempt to renew radier man reduce me status of fact. He sets out to reclaim fact from the hands of the statisticians by showing that much of what passes for fact in Coketown is really fiction. A master says "that he would 'sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic'" if he is "not left entirely alone" to do as he pleases with his own. "Another prevalent fiction," says Dickens. Any worker who saves his money can become a master or at least a rich man. "This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown." The by-play of "fact" and "fiction" is especially evident when the novel is read in the journal. An article in Household Words calls the image of marital bliss that hides the legal inequality of man and woman "One of our Legal Fictions." On the last page of the article a discreet advertisement announces the appearance of "the SIXTH PORTION of a New Work of Fiction called Hard Times." Fiction is a pejorative word only in a world self-consciously governed by fact. Dickens writes in both worlds.

Both as a novelist and a journalist Dickens contrives fictional proper nouns as a masquerade of fact. Outside the novel Dickens resisted any attempts to identify "Coketown." Literal identification would "localize" and therefore narrow the application of the story. But within the text he invites his readers to ask whether or not a real town exists behind the pseudonym: "Stone Lodge was situated on a moor within a mile or two of a great town—called Coketown in the present faithful guide-book," "A mile or two from Coketown" or even "a mile or two from a great town called Coketown" is a defensible fiction. Knowledge of English geography would reveal no Coketown. But phrased as it is, the town invites identification, especially when we remind ourselves that for its first readers the "present faithful guide-book" was Household Words, a journal filled with factual descriptions of conditions in real factory towns. The reader is always on the edge of the fact in the installments of Hard Times. At any point the author might break through as he does in "One of our Legal Fictions" to say "this is a true story." Charlotte and Robert Desborough (in that article) could be identified. The emergent meaning of the fiction is always validated by the constant possibility of fact. The journalist stands behind the novelist, and the power of the press is brought to bear on a novel whose purpose is "the general improvement of our social condition."

The literal identification of Oldham or Preston or Wigan would mean nothing. Dickens frequently makes his point by making up names. Coketown is more descriptive and evocative than Preston. In "On Strike," which we take to be a factual, journalistic report of a trip to Preston, Dickens meets a nasty (but convenient) antagonist "whom I had already began [sic] to call in my own mind Mr. Snapper, and whom I may as well call by that name here as by any other." Snapper is a straw man; he serves a purpose but he is not a real, historical person. A reader accustomed to modern, "objective" journalism is less prepared to accept Dickens's identification of an obnoxious potential demagogue as "Gruffshaw" when other, reliable reports reveal only a "Grimshaw" among the leaders of the strike. Gruff is a nice replacement for grim. A reader might recognize the hand of the novelist in this anonymous report. A few months earlier, in another article about Preston, a well-known leader of the workers named Cowell is misidentified as Cowler. In this case the change of name is meaningless and a little careless. The author was James Lowe, a journalist who knew Preston well. Lowe corrected himself six years later in his report to the Social Science Association where he names both Cowell and Grimshaw. When we look back to 1853 and 1854, I think that we can safely say that Lowe just made a mistake, but that Dickens deliberately mixed newsmaking and novel writing in order to gain the best of both in Household Words.

Together the techniques of the novelist and the journalist can be made to serve the rhetorical function of persuasion. And yet in a novel that is so harsh on other forms of rhetoric—Slackbridge's oratory, Bounderby's self-aggrandizement, and Sleary's advertisement—Dickens is unable to create a worthy spokesman for the poor. Stephen Blackpool, for one, is almost mute. Thanks to a significant deletion from an early speech, Stephen is barely allowed to give specific designation to the complaint of the factory workers, and thanks to the same deletion we never know why it is that he is unable to join the union. His public declaration leaves questions unanswered: "But I ha' my reasons—mine, yo see—for being hindered; not on'y now, but awlus—awlus—life long!" As it happens, he has made a vow to Rachael, but that vow is hidden in the deleted passage. In chapter 13 Stephen is sitting a night watch over his drunken wife. He very nearly allows her to poison herself with an unprescribed dose of medicine when Rachael wakes up and takes the matter in hand. In the dialogue that follows she alludes to a dead sister whose death is explained by Stephen in a passage that made it through the manuscript into the corrected proofs before it was cancelled:

"Thou'st spoken o' thy little sister. There agen! Wi' her child arm tore off afore thy face." She turned her head aside, and put her hand [up]. "Where dost thou ever hear or read o' us—the like o' us—as being otherwise than onreasonable and cause o' trouble? Yet think o' that. Government gentlemen come and make's report. Fend off the dangerous machinery, box it off, save life and limb; don't rend and tear human creeturs to bits in a Chris'en country! What toilers? Owners sets up their throats, cries out, Onreasonable! Inconvenient! Troublesome!' Gets to Secretaries o' States wi' deputations, and nothing's done. When do we get mere wi' our deputations, God help us! We are too much int'rested and nat'rally too far wrong t'have a right judgment. Haply we are; but what are they then? I' th' name o' th' muddle in which we are born and live and die, what are they then?" "Let such things be, Stephen. They only lead to hurt, let them be!" "I will, since thou tell'st me so. I will. I pass my promise."

Why delete? Dickens was certainly pressed throughout the writing of Hard Times to cut it down to fit twenty short installments, but it is hard to believe mat a passage of such brevity and such importance had to be sacrificed for space. It may be that at the last moment he decided that this was simply bad drama, that Rachael's arbitrary prohibition was weaker than Stephen's unexplained mystery.

Let us say that Dickens rids himself of one dramatic gaffe; he also avoids a subtle connection with the rest of the novel and a major statement of a specific industrial complaint coming from a factory worker. At the end of the last chapter four paragraphs describe the future of the survivors. Each ends with a similar refrain: "Such a thing was to be. . . . Such tilings were to be. . . . Such a thing was never to be. . . . These things were to be." Only the last of mese confirms a cheerful future that is dependent on "no fantastic vow, or bond . . . or pledge" but on Sissy's dutiful promotion of "childish lore . . . imaginative graces and delights" among her children. It is then that Dickens in the final paragraph enjoins the reader to promote "similar things. . . . Let them be!" Taken as an affirmation of responsible action, this last "Let them be" is a repudiation of the cynical carelessness of the Harthouse philosophy, "What will be, will be," which is another way of saying "laissez-faire." Stephen calls this policy on the part of the manufacturers "lettin alone." The final allusion to vows and pledges seems to imply a freedom from the unreasonable constraint by which Stephen was bound doubly in promises to Rachael and to his wife. The last "Let them be" is an ironic reflection on Rachael's opposite use of the phrase. In the deleted passage she had said, "Let such things be, Stephen" in a way that means "Let them alone. Desist." The final "Let them be" means "Let them exist. Act in such a way that these lessons will prevail." It is an injunction to action on the part of his readership. Now it may be that Dickens foresaw a problem and was unwilling to allow any ironic reflection on Stephen's promise to Rachael. The uncorrected version could be taken to mean that workers are wrong to "let such things be" in Rachael's sense. When one considers the truth (and simple eloquence) of Stephen's complaint in the deleted passage along with his pathetic fate, the vow that he makes to Rachael can be made to look at least as unfortunate as his marriage vow—to evoke shades of the red cap and the mountain and a kind of working-class activism that Dickens truly means to avoid. If there is to be any political initiative, it is to be taken not by the working class but by the reading class to whom he safely returns responsibility in the last paragraph of the book.

Stephen's complaint on the subject of preventable accidents is not entirely lost to the novel. It is deferred to a highly elliptical passage in his last speech, spoken as he lies dying beside the Old Hell Shaft. Of course, Stephen's physical condition at this point does not allow a developed argument. Stephen reminds Rachael that the Old Hell Shaft has caused many deaths and been the subject of many petitions from the miners unheeded in Parliament. "When it were in work, it killed wi'out need; when 'tis let alone, it kills wi'out need." Stephen's death becomes another industrial accident. Now, to complete his argument, Rachael's little sister is resurrected in a brief allusion which is not likely to have much resonance in a novel in which she has only been mentioned once, two hundred pages or two months earlier not (thanks to the deletion) as an industrial victim but simply as a dead child among the angels. Now her death is explained not as a result of brutal amputation but as a result of "sickly air":

"Thy little sister, Rachael, thou hast not forgot her. . . . Thou know'st. . . how thou didst work for her, seet'n all day long in her little chair at Ay winder, and how she died, young and misshapen, awlung o' sickly air as had'n no need to be, an' awlung o' working people's miserable homes. A muddle! Aw a muddle!"

The reader jumps from the immediate situation into the question of preventable accidents in the mines and the unwillingness of legislators to act. From there we follow the weak link of Rachael's forgotten sister into conditions in the factories and the cities which, presumably, might also be amended by legislation and enforcement. A reader who has only the novel in hand may well be perplexed.

This digression does not seem to serve the immediate demands of the story of Stephen's attempt to clear himself of guilt or to say a few last words to the woman he loves. As a political prescription this mingling of open pits and petitions, a misshapen sister and miserable homes is somehow incomplete, no more than a "muddle." Dickens certainly does not wish to limit his comment here to a suggestion that unused mine shafts should be fenced off. A reader familiar with contemporary controversy would have heard the description of a man whose life has been "mangled . . . out of him" in an unfenced "shaft" as an allusion to the factory as well as the mine.

The Factory Act of 1844 required the fencing of open shafts that housed dangerous machinery, but inspection had always been inadequate and the owners unwilling to sacrifice the expense necessary for safety. In 1854 and 1855 the inspectors, with support from the Home Secretary and an informed public, began to enforce regulation. As we shall see, articles in Household Words contributed to the making of a public policy that would draw the masters out into the open.

The ellipses in Stephen's argument in Hard Times can be filled in by further reading in Household Words. In the number that included the fourth installment of the novel, an article by Henry Morley called "Ground in the Mill" also appeared (22 April 1854). The article is really an extended statement of the complaint that Dickens would delete from Stephen's speech three weeks later. Within that passage Dickens had inserted a footnote directing the reader back to "Ground in the Mill." Footnotes frequently refer to other articles in Household Words. In this case the note was deleted with the passage, and the modern editor assumes that it was done because an "intrusion of this kind of documentation would distract his readers from the realities of his fictional world." As editor of Household Words Dickens himself was not intent on maintaining the inviolability of his fictional world. Different political intention rather than the different status of fact and fiction may have prompted Dickens to reduce the association between the opinions of fictional characters and the editorial stance of Household Words. Within the novel the specific complaints of the workers are abbreviated, and attention is diverted from the novel to the journal where the editorial voice suggests action on the part of the middle class rather than the working class. An eloquent Stephen would be as unreliable as Slackbridge. Neither Morley nor Dickens advises initiative on the part of the workers; both hold the owners responsible, but neither expects much response from the owners without coercion. The owners speak directly to the Home Secretary through their "deputations." Their victims have no voice but that of their middle-class sympathizers whose effective power resides in public opinion.

In 1854 the reading public was prepared to consider conditions in the factories. The strikers at Preston were just about to give up their long and well-publicized struggle when Hard Times began to appear in the April issue of Household Words. Soon news from Crimea would seem to drive the Condition of England into oblivion, but journalists remained "to show the evils of that carelessness, which, in great matters and little matters, from Balaklava to the Lancashire coal-pits, is undoubtedly becoming a rather remarkable feature of our national character." If we take the monthly reviews and daily press to be both a gauge and a guide of public opinion, we may measure the relative impact of the novel of social reform and the journal in which it was placed. As we might guess, since Dickens allowed the journal to absorb the most pressing issues related to the industrial theme, it was the journal and not the novel that made itself felt in the press and on the platforms of public debate.

By the mid-1850's a press that was generally hostile to the claims of labor was ready to acknowledge as wholesome the appeal that the new, national unions were making to the court of public opinion. "It is public opinion, and that only which can assist the workmen in the recovery of their 'rights' if any such have been lost. From this all-controlling force manufacturers are no more exempt than any other classes in the kingdom" (Times, 2 January 1852). But until the renewal of the debate of the factory acts in 1854 the manufacturers were not inclined to consult public opinion. Strikes could be suppressed quietly, and the strikers' claim to higher wages could never wholly penetrate a community still dominated by the laws of a free and open market. It was the high incidence of preventable accidents in the factories that would fix the attention of middle-class reformers and finally draw the masters into the public arena. Here economic arguments meant less, and the humanitarian argument could hold its own. And in this case legislation and enforcement could be retained as a middle-class enterprise without the necessity of intervention from the beneficiaries. (It was not until 1882 that a working man, J. D. Prior of the Amalgamated Carpenters, was made an Inspector.) Factory safety, the latent basis of Stephen Blackpool's complaint in Hard Times, would become the favored crusade of Dickens and Morley in Household Words.

All of the emotional appeal of Rachael's little sister "wi' her child arm tore off afore thy face" is released in the first of Morley's articles. He begins the argument of "Ground in the Mill" with little vignettes of children who are caught in moments of play and punished by the machines:

"Watch me do a trick!" cried such a youth to his fellow, and put his arm familiarly within the arm of the great iron-hearted chief. "I'll show you a trick," gnashed the pitiless monster. A coil of strap fastened his arm to the shaft, and round he went. His leg was cut off, and fell into the room, his arm was broken in three or four places, his ankle was broken, his head was battered; he was not released alive.

Another is "caught as he stood on a stool wickedly looking out of window at the sunlight and the flying clouds." Imprisoned children punished, a taste for freedom and play quelled. No question of circuses here, and, for that matter, no question of polytechnic education. In conclusion Morley describes a factory school (also provided by the Act of 1844) which is flawed by complete carelessness and irregularity rather than by the rigors of the school room in Hard Times. The novel describes the price paid by children of the middle class rather than the working class. Rachael's sister is the only factory child mentioned in Hard Times. "Ground in the Mill" is dense with examples, and all are true. Twenty-six examples of death and mutilation have almost no statistical force, but they argue strongly when described one by one. Dickens and his writers replace one kind of fact with another, and as journalists they are unrelenting. One can follow the fate of their agitation in the press and what one finds is a public that reads, responds, reacts in decidedly nonliterary ways. This then was the public for the novel as well.

In an article called "Fencing With Humanity," written a year after "Ground in the Mill," Morley describes the campaign mounted by the manufacturers since that time. The Home Secretary has ordered enforcement and "instantly a large number of millowners fly to the platform, deliver and hear angry orations, form deputations, and declare themselves a slaughtered interest." This is Stephen's deleted speech cleansed of dialect: "What follers? Owners sets up their throats, cries out, 'Onreasonable! Inconvenient! Troublesome!' Gets to Secretaries o' States wi' deputations." The novel moves toward a statement that is made in the journal. Together they seek the same public, and in this case the effect can be measured by the response of competitive publicists. "Fencing With Humanity" is dated 14 April 1855, a Saturday. It appeared for sale on the preceding Wednesday (11 April). On the following Tuesday (17 April) a meeting of manufacturers calling themselves The National Association for the Amendment of the Factory Law met in Manchester. They would enlist public opinion which, they recognized, had recently turned against them. Household Words was selected by the chairman as an example of the most obvious opposition.

The chairman was the ubiquitous W. R. Greg, and the meeting was given thorough coverage in the next day's Guardian. According to Greg, the current troubles of the manufacturers are a result of "the amount of ignorance and prejudice and ill-will towards them on the part of the community-at-large." He produces an example of this ill-will:

Dickens's Household Words—(hear, hear)—a paragraph from which he would read to them, and which had been very good-naturedly put into the London morning papers only a few days ago. He would read it not merely to give an idea, if proof were necessary, of the ignorance and prejudice existing against them, but because in it were stated facts, partial facts, but still facts, on which were grounded, no doubt, the general feeling against the millowners which pervaded the community, and the abuse which was then lavished upon them as a body.—(hear, hear). (Manchester Guardian, 18 April 1855)

After reading an especially unflattering paragraph from Morley's article of the preceding week, Greg launches into his own statistics. The government, he says, finds time to prosecute factory owners for the death of one worker in 70,000 when thanks to its own neglect men are dying in Crimea at the rate of 1000 per week. And more in that vein. Greg is seconded by a Mr. Turner who knows the value of these awesome numbers in the making of public opinion. He only hopes that the chairman's words will "travel throughout the length and breadth of the land, and prove an antidote to the trash, the poison, published on Saturday in Household Words." He attacks "philanthropic writers": "They wished, of course, not only to write works which might create a popularity for themselves, but the publishers of twopenny publications wished to add grist to their mill—and so the one wrote and the other published for the prejudices of the people." Dickens is accused of barnumizing. After receiving support from a speaker with the charmingly Dickensian name of Holdforth, Turner enjoins his fellows to "charge the enemy, and they would soon beat down his ranks."

Four weeks after the meeting in Manchester, Morley responded to the assault on "twopenny publications [written] for the benefit of pseudo-philanthropists." The response, titled "Death's Cyphering-Book," is a fairly faithful record of the transactions at Manchester accompanied by a commentary that clearly bears the mark of Dickens's own repugnance for "arithmetical" calculation of life and death. Greg's statistics were supposed to reduce the threat of unfenced machinery. Through a series of imaginative counterexamples Morley reduces to absurdity "the assumption that arithmetic will ever work out questions of moral right and wrong. By such calculation a man who spends only five minutes out of a long lifetime as a murderer cannot be found guilty, especially when he could have had so many more victims. "Our pseudo-philanthropic readers" are left to decide the question.

However they are labeled, these readers are Dickens's intended audience, a morally responsive middle class whose collective power is embodied in public opinion. In one of his few vocal outbursts, Stephen Blackpool is allowed to aim his attack not at bad working conditions but at bad publicity. Stephen complains to Bounderby:

"Look how you considers of us, an writes of us, an talks of us, and goes up wi' yor deputations to Secretaries o' State 'bout us, and how yo are awlus right, and how we are awlus wrong, and never had'n no reason in us sin ever we were born."

If Stephen cannot speak for himself—and Dickens says that he cannot—others will. Stephen's speech to Bounderby invites the appearance of a spokesman who never appears in the novel. Whatever was to be said in his behalf as a specific complaint that might require specific reform would be said in the editorial columns of the journal.

When Hard Times was published as an independent volume immediately after its conclusion in Household Words, it was bound to appear incomplete, even to those readers who came to it with the correct expectation of a novel that would answer pressing social questions. Reviewers in both Blackwood's and the Westminster Review declared that the public was cheated out of a timely statement on the industrial theme. "The name of the book and the period of its publication alike deluded the public. We anticipated a story . . . of the unfortunate relationship between masters and men which produced the strike of Preston; and this most legitimate subject, at once for public inquiry and for the conciliating and healing hand of genius, to whom both belligerents were brothers, might have well employed the highest powers." Both reviewers are perplexed by the turn to the educational theme which strikes them as fanciful and irrelevant.

Dickens, if he had wished to, could have justified himself by pointing to Household Words. Another novelist of social reform would be less inclined to let the reader wander beyond the text. In North and South, which began in serial form (2 September 1854) a month after the completion of Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskell reopens the industrial theme with a fully articulate working man, Nicholas Higgins, who reads books and responds to them, who explains the rationale of the strike and who understands the value of "public opinion" and knows how it is to be won. Higgins meets a master, John Thornton, who is stubborn but intelligent and eventually willing to change. Before the novel is over, Higgins and Thornton have begun to reconcile their differences and have embarked on a cooperative enterprise. It may be that North and South is too pat, too perfect. In this case Gaskell is less willing than Dickens to recognize that the novel of social reform takes a modest position in the literary and political processes of a world that refuses to perfect itself.