ity Shop.
Dickens visited the United States in 1841, which resulted in two volumes critical of the society there, American Notes and the novel Martin Chuzzlewit. On his return to London, he began what was for a while an annual tradition, a series of extremely popular Christmas novels. His later work includes the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. The uncompleted manuscript, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was published after his death in 1870. Extraordinarily popular during his life, his death caused great public mourning, and the novelist was buried with honors at Westminster Abbey.
Dickens wrote Hard Times in 1854 at the height of his literary powers, yet the novel is one of the least known of his classic works. F.R. and Q.D. Leavis wrote an appreciation of the work in 1947 which was "received at the time with ridicule" (ix) but which eventually brought about a scholarly rethinking of the book's importance and formed the centerpiece for the Leavis' analysis, Dickens the Novelist:
Hard Times is not a difficult work; its intention and
nature are pretty obvious. If, then, if is the
masterpiece I take it for, why has it not had
general recognition? To judge by the critical
record, it has had none at all. If there exists
anywhere an appreciation, . . . I have missed it. Yet
. . . of all Dickens's works it is the one that [has]
the distinctive strength that makes him a major
The novel begins with a display of that strength, thrusting the reader at once into the middle of a recitation of what appears to be the life's philosophy of Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, retired wholesale hardware merchant and expounder on the necessity for schooling that gives students a thorough grasp of nothing at all but hard, cold facts.
Dickens does not immediately identify the speaker but instead gi...