[A respected Canadian professor of economics, Leacock is best known as one of the leading humorists of the first half of the twentieth century. He is also the author of biographies of Twain and Dickens. In the excerpt from the latter which appears below, Leacock sketches the plot and details the "failure" of Hard Times.]

The story Hard Times has no other interest in the history of letters than that of its failure. At the time, even enthusiastic lovers of Dickens found it hard to read. At present they do not even try to read it. A large part of the book is mere trash; hardly a chapter of it is worth reading today: not an incident or a character belonging to it survives or deserves to. The names of Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby are still quoted, but only because they are felicitous names for hard, limited men, not because the characters in the book are known or remembered. Not a chapter or a passage in the book is part of Dickens's legacy to the world.

This may well seem strange. If the book had been written at the outset of its author's career, its faults could have been laid to immaturity; if at the close, to the waning powers of age; if written ten years later—as was Our Mutual Friend—it could have been explained away as the product of a wearied body and an over-taxed mind. But this book was written at the height of Dickens's power, with David Copperfield and Bleak House just in front of it, and A Tale of Two Cities and Little Dorrit still to follow.

It may be, of course, that the added exertion involved in assuming the editorship of Household Words had already overstrained the abounding energy of Charles Dickens. There are complaints at this time of uncertain health, passed off as "hypochondria." But there was as yet no so such cruel strain of either mind or body as could involve such a literary collapse as this. It may be also that the form of publication week by week in Household Words was unfortunate, that it unduly "breaks" the story. But there is really very little to break.

The scene of the book is laid in a factory town (Coketown) intended as typical of the new industry and the new tyranny that went with it. Its leading characters represent the soulless employers of the age, applying the ruthless philosophy of laissez faire and the survival of the fittest; and against this, the angelic suffering of the working class. The book is thus an amalgam of Jack the Giant Killer, Ricardo's Political Economy, and the Sermon on the Mount; the whole of it intermingled with a comic strain which fails to come off.

The book can be explained only in terms of the old adage that even Homer nods at times. It is the result, perhaps, of oversuccess and overencouragement. You encourage a comic man too much and he gets silly; a pathetic man and he gets maudlin; a long-winded man and he grows interminable. Thus praise and appreciation itself, the very soil in which art best flourishes, may prompt too rank a growth.

In the case of Dickens, failure was likely to be as conspicuous as success. He thought in extreme terms and wrote in capital letters. There are no halfway effects in the death of Little Nell and the fun of Mr. Pickwick. Hence, any of his characteristic methods—comic, pathetic, impressive, or rhetorical—could be strained to the breaking point. This book strains them all: the humour is forced, the rhetoric is rodomontade, and the pathos verges on the maudlin.

But the principal fault of the book is that the theme is wrong. Dickens confused the faults of men with the faults of things; hardness of heart with hardness of events. In attacking the new industrial age of factories and machinery that was transforming England, Dickens directed his attack against the wickedness and hardness of his Gradgrinds and his Bounderbys, his brutal employers of labour. Did he really think that they were any wickeder than other people? Mankind at that period had been caught in the wheels of its own machinery and was struggling vainly for salvation; just as it has been caught again and struggles at the present moment. But Dickens insists on regarding the poor and the working class as caught in the cruel grasp of the rich, which was not so, or only in a collective sense, impossible for the individual employer to remedy on the spot. It was the grasp of circumstance and not the hand of tyranny.

At the time the tremendous prestige of Dickens was sufficient to float the book along, and at least to guarantee its sale. But Lord Macaulay, in a well-known phrase, damned it as "sullen socialism." Even John Ruskin, whose ideas it is supposed to reflect, sees the weakness of it as art. In a note to his first essay in Unto This Last he says, "I wish he could think it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only for public amusement. The usefulness of the work, Hard Times, is with many persons seriously diminished because Mr. Bounderby is a dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic example of a worldly master: and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman."

These are the judgments of the moment, of contemporaries among whom Dickens towered as a living reality. With the lapse of time the book has found the place it deserves.

But the inferiority of this book does not in any way detract from a proper estimate of Dickens's genius. In art one must judge a man by his best, never by his worst; by his highest reach, not by his lowest fall.