Introduction

Abstract

‘The difficulty of the space is CRUSHING’, wrote Charles Dickens to his friend and eventual biographer, John Forster, as he wrestled with Hard Times, the ninth of his major novels, and the shortest. For a writer used to writing for monthly serial publication, and not for weekly instalments, as here, and for whom the relative brevity of 117,000 words is to be measured against the 350,000 words of Bleak House or David Copperfield it is hardly surprising he could jokingly complain that his ‘perpetual rushing at the work [made him] three parts mad and the fourth delirious.’ Similar anxieties are promised to anyone attempting to deal with even a fraction of the vast critical debate which has accumulated around this least liked of Dickens’s works. Inevitably, some critics will be lost in the crush as the variety of critical approach is temporarily subdued to a semblance of manageable proportions. In a short study such as this semblance is the operative work.