Blackpool on the Picket Line: Hard Times Goes Viral in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Tracing the reception of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and its doomed millworker Stephen Blackpool through nineteenth-century American print culture, the essay shows how a conservative text and character were radicalized and repurposed to suit an audience grappling with the shift to a predominately industrial economy. A contextual reading of their reception reveals the novel’s function as a tool of social reform for a society caught between two contradictory impulses: an embrace of the working class and a worship of capitalism. The linguistic adoption of dialogue and characters; the contextualization of Hard Times alongside labor fiction such as Frederic Whittaker’s Larry Locke, Man of Iron, or, A Fight for Fortune: A Story of Labor and Capital , Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills,” and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 ; and the deletion of key passages on unionization from a dime novel reprint all demonstrate how nineteenth-century American audiences retooled a popular English novel for their own radical purposes.