Hard Times and Little Dorrit

Abstract

The step from Bleak House to Hard Times¹ involves a radical transition — one has only to compare the respective opening chapters. To begin with, Dickens had returned — after a gap of thirteen years — to weekly serialisation. This resulted, untypically, in an astonishing economy of means, and it is no surprise to hear that the author had heartily complained about the restrictions imposed upon him: ‘The difficulty of space is CRUSHING’², he writes. For all that, the process obviously imprinted on Dickens a greater awareness of a taut, tightly-knit structure. His new novel — a moral fable whose form and content, right up to the basically unhappy ending, can be viewed as ironic twists of the fairy tale — confronts the reader with a background utterly unlike that previously met with in Dickens’ fiction: industrial unrest in the north of England. This has led, unfortunately, to a certain lack of intimacy between subject and author which, more perhaps than anything else, accounts for the book’s limitations and relative lack of success; for here will be found far less both of what is popularly considered Dickensian and of not so obvious but more valuable artistic qualities.