[In the following excerpt, Engel favorably appraises Hard Times, focusing upon its economy of presentation and emphasis upon the need for imagination—not utility alone—to make life bearable and full.]

The recent marked increase in the reputation of Hard Times has come at the expense of Dickens' general reputation. Satisfaction with this one sport of his genius has been used as a basis on which to denigrate that genius in its more characteristic manifestations. Hard Times satisfies the modern taste (in the arts alone) for economy—in Action, for spare writing and clearly demonstrable form. Dickens was capable of both, but they were not natural or congenial to him, and he chose to employ them only under the duress of limited space. Curiously enough, Hard Times grants a scant measure of the very quality for which it argues, imaginative pleasure. Its seriousness is so scrupulous, plain, and insistent that the reader moves along with simple, too rarely surprised consent, and it is worth noting that at one point Dickens considered calling the novel "Black and White."

Yet it is silly to prolong the arbitrary see-saw between Hard Times and the rest of Dickens' work. It is more to the point to see that the greatest virtues of Hard Times are Dickens' characteristic virtues, but less richly present in this book than in many others.

Hard Times is least interesting as an exploitation of its avowed subject, the inadequacy of the Benthamite calculus. The crude but forceless simplicity of Gradgrind can scarcely be said to represent the complexity and solidity of Bentham's influential contributions to English thought. Gradgrind is the merest of straw men. But it may well be that in writing Hard Times Dickens was impelled as much by a need to dissociate himself fully and publicly from the Benthamites as by any need to attack them for themselves. The chief grounds on which he attacks the Benthamites, however, are well taken grounds—are, in fact, the very grounds on which Mill himself was to attack them two decades later in his Autobiography. Mill had to discover poetry in order to recover from the ravages of the Benthamite education imposed on him by his father; and the ultimate deficiency of the Gradgrind system, too, is that it ignores or condemns the imagination.

More interesting than the attack on the Benthamites, then, though it is laid out almost as obviously, is the defense of fancy and imagination. The necessity for imagination becomes clear only when the inadequacy of reason and of rational social action to deal completely with the unalterable aspects of existence is recognized. The death of fancy is linked to the threat of revolution:

The poor you will always have with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the days of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.

It is only imagination, too, that can bridge the gulf of difference between the classes, only imagination that can merge immediate and divergent self-interests in an ultimate common self-interest. "The like of you don't know us, don't care for us, don't belong to us," Rachael says to Louisa, and the "facts" of Coketown amply support her contention, though in Louisa's case the birth of her imaginative powers is accompanied by a growing realization of and sympathy for the condition of the poor.

Fancy is the progenitor of charity, in the Christian rather than the philanthropic sense, and it is the lack of fancy in her childhood that makes it impossible for Louisa to approach her mother's deathbed with full feeling, with better than "a heavy, hardened kind of sorrow." This recognition immediately precedes one of Dickens' most brilliant and functional death scenes, the death of Mrs. Gradgrind with only Louisa present.

"But there is something—not an Oology at all—that your father has missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don't know what it is. I have often sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write to him, to find out for God's sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give me a pen."

Even the power of restlessness was gone, except from the poor head, which could just turn from side to side.

She fancied, however, that her request had been complied with, and that the pen she could not have held was in her hand. It matters little what figures of wonderful no-meaning she began to trace upon her wrappers. The hand soon stopped in the midst of them; the light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out; and even Mrs. Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and patriarchs.

Here, as usual with Dickens, death is the control by which reality is measured—and, in this case, by which the Gradgrind system is discounted. In the vivid imaginative rendering of the scene, we comprehend what forces are at work on Louisa to pierce her trained incapacity, as we do too when her hazard at the devices of James Harthouse is rendered in an extraordinary sexual image: "The figure descended the great stairs, steadily, steadily; always verging, like a weight in deep water, to the black gulf at the bottom."

It is finally the brief, largely figurative renderings of experience in this novel, far more than the rather mechanical working out of the plot, that most effectively accomplish the destruction of the "hard facts" point of view. We know best what is wrong with Coketown not from the facts we are told about it, nor from the picture of Bounderby's hypocritical oppression, nor even so much from the scene of the union meeting, as from the descriptive imagery of serpents and elephants. In a sense, imagination makes its own best case for itself.

The great virtues of the novel are in disquieting part incidental virtues—incidental, that is, to the main line of development of the story, though absolutely essential to its impact. The questions this raises are peculiar questions concerning the forced restriction of the play of imagination or fancy in a novel that has chiefly to do with the necessity for the free life of the imagination. It seems almost Gradgrindian therefore to prefer Hard Times to, say, David Copperfield or Our Mutual Friend!