Rhetorical Technique and Moral Purpose in Dickens's Hard Times

Abstract

Hard Times is the sort of novel which has sometimes invited refutation as well as analysis or criticism. Though Dickens absolutely repudiates the philosophy of Fact, he wants to base his indictment on the facts of mid-century Victorian England. He could not be indifferent to the factual accuracy of his grim depiction of industrial life. Numerous critics meet Dickens on his own ground and attempt to refute some of the literal claims they feel the novel makes. While F.R. Leavis, for example, finds much to praise, he finds fault with Dickens's treatment of Coketown's eighteen religious denominations. Dickens 'has no notion of the part played by religion in the life of nineteenth-century industrial England.’ In a similar way Edgar Johnson says that the portrait of the union organizer is a caricature because 'labor organizers are not like Slackbridge and do not talk like him, and did not do so in Dickens' day.' If Dickens cared about the truth, so have many critics.