Appraisal

Abstract

By now it should be becoming clear what sort of critical comment Hard Times has elicited from its critics. Varied as they have been in their approaches, essentially their responses have been evaluative ones. Its admirers, Ruskin, Shaw, Leavis, Craig, have been willing to make a case for it by pleading tolerance for its faults. Its sociologically-minded detractors have evaluated the novel in ways which discover it failing to meet the criteria of what an analysis of industrial society should do; in particular, they admonished its failure to adequately convey an authentic sense of working-class life, or industrialism, or the trades union movement.