Dickens's Hard Times Research Articles

"What Does it Matter?": Reading Within Architectural Spaces in Dickens's Hard Times

Abstract: In this article, I analyze the progression of Louisa Gradgrind's imaginative and emotional interior life in Charles Dickens's Hard Times . I integrate Gaston Bachelard's theory of the intrinsic relationship between imagination and architectural spaces in The Poetics of Space (1958) with Cassandra Falke's theoretical approach to learning empathy through reading literature in The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) in order to create a critical framework. This framework then illustrates Dickens's use of domestic spaces to guide his readers experientially through Louisa's interior healing and development throughout the novel. I argue that Dickens desires his readers to believe by the end of Louisa's story that this inner wholeness is also possible and achievable for them through reading literature.

Controlled Childhood and the Moulding of the Children's Characters; Critical Analysis of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, and Great Expectations

This study reads Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, and Great Expectations as "condition of England novels" by applying realism and naturalism theories, which focus on "parole". The term referred to by Ferdinand de Saussure in language acquisition to mean "performance". This paper addresses how Charles Dickens uses the term "parole" to refer to children's performance under social influences. Through his works, Dickens shows that the environment plays an elementary role in building children's characters as they grasp knowledge from their surroundings. They interact with the social environment, which fosters or hinders their development. Childhood is a crucial stage in the development of societies. Through the portrayal of children in Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, and Great Expectations, Dickens highlights the ordeals and suffering of children in the nineteenth century and shows the plight of the Industrial Revolution as it damaged the essential block of Victorian society. Accordingly, schools, factories, streets, workhouses, teachers, masters, and parents all of these take part in the formation of the child’s character. Children during that time faced different types of social pressures that affected their characters and future lives. This study investigates Dickens’ embedded message, showing how childhood is not only a stage of playing but is also important and influential in the performance and shaping of the child’s character.

An objective criticism of the Persian translation of Dickens' Hard times according to Broeck's systemic model of trancism

A critique of the translation should be conducted using a systematic model, free from any subjective biases. In this study, an objective assessment was made of the Persian translation of Dickens (1985) Hard Times according to a systematic model of translation. This evaluation involved comparing the original text with the translated text based on Broeck's (1985) translation model, with the goal of categorizing Arabi's (2008) translation as either adequate or acceptable. Additionally, Harvey's (2000) translation strategies, which include functional equivalence, formal equivalence, transcription, and descriptive translation, were used to analyze the specific strategies employed by the translator at the micro level, as well as the overall strategy at the macro level. The results showed that Arabi primarily used target text-oriented strategies at the micro level, indicating a target text-oriented approach at the macro level. The evaluation also considered the factual degree of equivalence, recognizing differences between the source text and the target text. Furthermore, Arabi achieved an acceptable translation by incorporating optional shifts, leading to an overall judgment of the translation's quality.

Conrad, Lawrence, and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre

Abstract This article considers Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love as modernist reworkings of the industrial novels of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Charles Dickens's Hard Times. Conrad and Lawrence, the article argues, rework the industrial-novel genre as a way to figure a crisis of British culture—and of the novel as a form. In the era of British imperial decline, the apparent massification and globalization of modern Western culture, and revolutionary changes in gender relations and family life, the synoptic historical narratives of Nostromo and Women in Love describe the transformation of the earlier promise of development into an apocalyptic present, and, in turn, the dissolution of the progressive assurance of the realist novel. While the nineteenth-century novels plead for reform and paternalistic care to moderate but protect the free market and liberalism, Nostromo and Women in Love narrate precisely the historical fulfillment of this wish—but, then, in turn, also narrate the end of that reformist logic and the triumph of a fully globalized and “perfected” capitalism, which they characterize as worse than the free-market capitalism that the earlier novels both criticize and celebrate. Drawing on Marxist-feminist theories of “social reproduction,” the article describes especially how the modernist novels imagine the family as a machine for maintaining and servicing capitalist production: the regeneration of the family—a trope so important to the resolution of plot in the realist novel—is now a sign of decay instead of resilience.

Phonological Deviations in Dickens Hard Times

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) achieved a recognizableplace among English writers through the use of the stylisticfeatures in his fictional language. This study is concernedwith Dickens' unique fictional language, used in one of hisnovels entitled "Hard Times", in relation to phonologicaldeviation from settled norms in English. It endeavors toshow Dickens' manipulating language and the effectsachieved through this manipulation.This research investigates Dickens' use of languagewhich deviates from the linguistic norm phonologically. Assuch, it is hypothesized that Dickens used phonologicaldeviation to show the character's social class.The study aims to analyze the types of phonologicaldeviations in Dickens' "Hard Times". It determines thereasons behind these deviations, and how that reflects

The Politics of Cultural Carnivalism in Charles Dickens's Hard Times

The Politics of Cultural Carnivalism in Charles Dickens's Hard Times

A Stylistic Study of Patterns of fronting and Postponing in Charles Dickens's Hard Times

Varying sentence length and patterns results in a natural , fluid form ofwriting . Writing should be pleasing to readers . If all of the sentences follow thesame pattern , however , the writing and rhythm become boring and dull .Creating a variety of sentence patterns not only holds a reader’s interest , which ,after all , is the purpose of writing , but it also reflects the mind’s ability to thinkcreatively and complexly . There are many options to change the simplesentences into more sophisticated sentences . Therefore , this paper is devoted toanalyzes the main marked structures of fronting and postposing in Hard Times;written by Charles Dickens in 1854.These structures are passive voice , left-dislocation , cleft sentences , Extraposition , existential sentences , pseudo-cleftsentences , and reversed — pseudo cleft sentences .It aims at discovering thestylistic realization of these structures and their coincidence with the importantevents in the novel, especially certain specific communicative implications canbe revealed by these structures. So instead of having chosen independentexamples coming from a computational corpus , we decide to analyze thesestructures in a novel written by Charles Dickens . With the analysis of thecorpus of examples, it will be proved that the use of these anomalous syntacticprocesses points out a clear contrast with the normal order of the Englishsentence i.e., these syntactic processes clearly break SVO

“Three Cheers for the United Aggregate Tribunal!”: Confronting Anti-Union Discourse, Then and Now

In this piece, I discuss Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1855) in the context of my experience as one of the lead organizers of the successful campaign to unionize Skidmore College's non-tenure-track faculty. Dickens's novel outlines several claims that directly comprise modern anti-union discourse and that I saw straightforwardly rehearsed in 2022 as we sought to unionize. As an organizer and a Victorianist, I argue that we have ethical obligations in studying and teaching texts like Hard Times in light of the afterlives of their anti-union rhetoric. The Victorian industrial novel needs to be studied (and taught) from an explicitly pro-union perspective, by unionized workers. This paper contributes to that project.

The Discursive Representation of Proletariat Subjectivity: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Working Class in Hard Times, and Oliver Twist

This research is a social study of poverty and the way Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1992), and Oliver Twist (2003) specifically addressed the poor. This study will focus on socially disadvantaged members of Victorian society, including poor children and underprivileged adults. This critical analysis of Dickens' selected novels will demonstrate that Dickens was a realist and naturalist writer in some way; As a result, the subject of this research is the traces of bourgeois exploitation of the poor and working class through various means, most notably through language in his social novels in relation to Marxism. This study will also use Norman Fairclough three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis. This research concludes the analysis by presenting the gap between the higher class and lower class and its impact on the lower class.

Getting Bored withHard Times

This essay confronts an impasse in criticism of Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854) by working to take the novel's principal weakness—its tediousness—seriously, not only as a matter of sociohistorical concern, but also as a strategy for literary representation. I situate the novel within a cultural history of boredom that originates in the eighteenth century, arguing that Hard Times represents an important moment in the synthetic development of a democratic conceptualization of this situated psychological condition. As such, the novel forges similarities across differences in class, professional, and gender identity, and models a form of collectivizing sympathetic attention that works against novelistic teleology to productively frustrate readerly pleasure. The essay works to challenge the factory/circus binary that so often dominates critical accounts of the novel, instead illuminating Dickens's ambivalent interest in this unlikely (because anti-energetic) source of textual energy. In locating boredom as the novel's guiding heuristic, I argue, we can better account for the affordances and limits of Hard Times' antiutilitarian critique as well as its politics of reading.

Payment by Results ( 1862- 1897): Ensuring a Good Return on Governmental Expenditure

"Payment by results" ( 1862- 1897) was a system whereby the annual governmental grant for English and Welsh elementary schools depended for the most part on how well pupils answered in the examination conducted by Her Majesty's Inspectors. In this article I review its origin, its principles, its practice, and its effects. My main conclusion is that it was a narrow, restrictive, Philistine system of educational accountability. It impeded for the second half of the 19th century any hope that England's elementary education might swiftly advance from its generally appalling condition during the first half of the century when the theories and practices scorned in the likes of Dickens's Hard Times were more the norm than the exception.

Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel by Jesse Rosenthal

Reviewed by: Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel by Jesse Rosenthal Daniel Williams Jesse Rosenthal. Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017. 256 pages. Jesse Rosenthal's brilliant book works from a disarmingly simple query—what does it mean for a novel to "feel right"?—to unfold an intricate account of how a forgotten branch of Victorian ethical philosophy has tacitly shaped our critical practices and canonical preferences, leaving a "moral stamp" (7) on those experiences of novel reading we might designate "morally neutral" (5). Good Form is not a defense of the ethically improving or sympathetically enhancing qualities of reading, nor an application of recent moral philosophy to Victorian novels. It is a formidably inventive, urbane, and compelling work of scholarship that marshals historical and philosophical insight alongside deft close analysis to reimagine key tenets of novel theory. The book's conceptual architecture, laid out in a crisp introduction and expansive first chapter, comprises two movements that could be labeled historical and genealogical. Rosenthal recovers "moral sense" theory or "intuitionism," a philosophical counter-tradition to utilitarianism that has roots in the work of Shaftesbury and Frances Hutcheson, was espoused in the nineteenth century by thinkers like William Whewell, and later influenced Henry Sidgwick. Positing "a faculty that allows us to perceive, or sense, the ethical quality of an action or state of affairs" (18), this theory broadly sides with intuition against induction, the internal and a priori over the external and empirical—although Rosenthal astutely observes that, in difference from utilitarianism's impersonal calculus, it often invokes "a tacit sense of community" (21). These claims are only roughly contextual: moral sense theory is on the same epistemic team as novels that evince "a pointed and explicit denunciation of the principle of utility" (17); like Victorian "moral conceptualizations of narrative form" (5), it concerns intuitive judgments. Alongside this historical recuperation runs a bolder genealogical argument. Victorian understandings of the compulsive experience of narrative—the "ability to engage a reader and mobilize expectation toward a certain state of affairs" (11)—still inflect our notions. When characterizing narrative's "nonrational draw" (14) through the "intuition that only comes with the experience of reading" (13), theorists like Georg Lukács, Roland Barthes, and Peter Brooks rely on figures of seeing, leading, or sensing that Rosenthal cannily traces back to Victorian images for "the seemingly physical nature of narrative experience" (14). In the dual valence of his pithy title, narratological assessments of "good form" as "what feels right" (13) thus disclose an "implicit morality" (11). Narrative's "felt necessity" (13) was, and so remains, one "means of describing the movement from what is to what ought to be" (2). "We cannot understand the formal principles of the novel that we have inherited from the nineteenth century," Rosenthal ventures, "without also understanding the moral principles that have come with them" (2). Moreover, the morality that hews to narrative in "the experience of anticipated, developing, formal satisfaction" (5) targets qualities distinct from [End Page 1356] novelistic ethics in more typical accounts. The former emerges in "diachronic narrative development"; the latter, aiming at sympathy or social awareness, relies on "synchronic description" (4). Here, an asymmetry that supports the argument might have been made more explicit. Rosenthal's examples of ethical readings of literature that contrast the intuitionist inheritance—he mentions pragmatism (Richard Rorty), virtue ethics (Martha Nussbaum), and the ethics of radical alterity (Emmanuel Levinas)—are not utilitarian. By the same token, the anti-utilitarian he instances to show how mechanisms of narrative intuition are deployed in philosophy (Bernard Williams) is not exactly an heir to Shaftesbury or Whewell. The "moral sense" is doubly buried now: its excavation requires the sort of resourceful, precise attention to form that Rosenthal's analyses everywhere display. Good Form's main work aligns these historical and genealogical, moral and formal claims, and the first chapter usefully sketches its method by examining the "shift away from sympathy to a more internally founded ethics" (24) in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854)—examples of that firmly anti-utilitarian genre, the social problem novel. But Rosenthal also floats...

Dickens Quarterly Checklist

Dickens Quarterly Checklist Kim Edwards Keates and Claire Horrocks Secondary Sources Abuzahra, Nimer, and Nawras Imraish. "The Industrial Revolution Impact on Families as Seen in Hard Times." Studies in Linguistics and Literature 1.1 (2017): 23–28. [Online journal: http://www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll/article/view/972/1119]. Ashton, Rosemary. One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858. Cornwall: Yale UP, 2017.ISBN 9780300227260. Boone, Troy. "Early Dickens and ecocriticism: the social novelist and the nonhuman." Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives. Eds. Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 97–113. ISBN: 978-1472454706. Breckbill, Anita. "Dismal sounds: flute playing in the fiction of Charles Dickens." Flutist Quarterly, 42.3 (2017): 20–26. Caruth, Cathy. "Language in Flight: Memorial, Narrative and History in David Copperfield." Sillages critiques, 22 (2017) [Online journal: <http://sillagescritiques.revues.org/4880>]. Cazzo, Luigi. "(Dis)Integrating Visions: South and Imperial/Colonial Difference in Dickens and Conrad." Altre Modernità, 17 (2017): 148–63. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13130/2035-7680/8465. Cremonesi, Claudia. "Charles Dickens from street food to the restaurant." Not Just Porridge: English Literati at Table. Ed. by Francesca Orestano and Michael Vickers. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing, 2017. 81–92. ISBN: 9781784915780. Dickens Quarterly 34.2 (June 2017). [Contents: Goldie Morgentaler, "When Dickens Spoke Yiddish: Translations of Dickens into the Language of East European Jews": 85–95; Leon Litvack, "Dickens Posing for Posterity: The Photographs of Herbert Watkins": 96–158; William F. Long, "The Invisible Woman Disappears: Ellen Ternan's Last Performance at the Haymarket": 159–71; Giles Whiteley, "An Oblique Allusion to Barbauld in The Mystery of Edwin Drood": 172–75; Sarah Gates (Rev. Jesse Rosenthal, Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel): 176–78; David Paroissien (Rev. Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, David Sorensen, eds.: The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle): 179–82; Notices: 183–86; Clare Horrocks and Kim Edwards Keates, [End Page 283] "The Dickens Checklist": 187–89]. The Dickensian 113.1 (2017). [Contents: Hugo Bowles, "A Stenographic Origin for the Boz Nickname": 5–9; Alan Dilnot, William F. Long, "Dickens and Anne Beadnell's Wedding": 10–16; "Dickens to Ainsworth: A Newly Discovered Letter": 17–19; Marzia Dati, "Dickens in Carrara": 20–29; Nathalie Vanfasse, "Dickens in My Life": 30–34; Jennifer M. Ide, "A Rose for Charles Dickens": 35–38; Jørgen Riber Christensen, "Foucault's Heterotopia and the Hulks in Great Expectations": 39–50; Valerie Purton (Rev. Charles Dickens: An Introduction): 55–57; Jeremy Tambling (Rev. Dickens and the Business of Death): 57–58; Paul Graham (Rev. Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison): 58–60; Tony Williams (Rev. Cedric Charles Dickens My Life): 60–61; Paul Graham (Rev. Great Expectations, Silk Street Theatre, 25–30 November 2016): 62–63; Jenny Hartley (Rev. A Christmas Carol, Wormwood Scrubs, London): 63–64; Paul Graham (Rev. The Ghosts of Mr Dickens, Platform, Islington): 65–66; John Lockwood (Rev. Twist Your Dickens, John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Washington DC): 67–68; Allan Clack (Rev. Ladybird Life of Dickens: An Illustrated Adventure, the Charles Dickens Museum): 69–70. Falchi, Simonetta. "Little Dorrit and adaptation." Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, 10.1 (2017): 43–53. Fiss, Laura Kasson. "'Out with It,' as the Subeditor Said to the Novel: Wellerisms and the Humor of Newspaper Excerpts." Victorian Periodicals Review, 50.1 (2017): 228–37. Franks, Rachel. "Building a Professional Profile: Charles Dickens and the Rise of the 'Detective Force.'" M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture, 20.2 (2017). [Online journal: <http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1214>]. Hansági, Ágnes. "Literary Capital and Mass Media: Umberto Eco, Charles Dickens, Mór Jókai, Zsigmond Móricz." Hungarian Perspectives on the Western Canon: Post-Comparative Readings. Eds. László Bengi, Ernő Kulcsár Szabó, Gábor Mezei, Gábor Tamás Molnár and Pál Kelemen. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 78–105. ISBN: 978-1443844918. Heady, Emily. "Reading to Mourn: Narrative Gaps and Ethical Burdens in Dickens's Hard Times." Victorians Institute Journal, 44 (2016): 130–156...

Illustrating Pip and the Terrible Stranger

Of all Dickens's novels, Hard Times and Great Expectations were the only ones to appear without accompanying illustrations. Coincidentally, both were written to revive slumping sales of Dickens's own unillustrated weekly journals. This has spawned speculation about the reason for the omission of illustrations for Great Expectations. In Why Wasn't Great Expectations Illustrated, Alan S. Watts concludes that the era of illustrated fiction was coming to an end (8-9). In Dickens and Phiz, Michael Steig asserts that by the late 1850s Dickens was experiencing a growing lack of interest in illustration (312). (2) Robert Patten claims that Dickens's readers in his lifetime more often read his novels without all, or any, of the original illustrations. (3) Early critics of like Edgar Browne, Hablot K. Browne's son, assumed that after Dickens severed ties with his father, the novelist found it too difficult to find a new collaborator. In Dickens, Hogarth, and the Illustrated Great Expectations',' Paul B. Davis explains that changes in realistic fiction and readership made illustrators less essential to the novels of the (139). Yet many novels during the 1860s were illustrated, such as the bestselling Tire Woman in White and Lady Audleys Secret, Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire series, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, and Eliot's Romola to name a few. In 1859 Phiz was successfully illustrating the magazine Once a Week, including Charles Lever's Davenport Dunn', and in a letter to Edward Chapman in October 1859, Dickens referred to the reissue of A Tale of Two Cities in monthly installments to be illustrated by Phiz. I have not yet seen any sketches from Mr. Browne for No. 6, he wrote. Will you see to this, without loss of time (Letters. 9: 136). Browne's sketches were subsequently reproduced in the Chapman and Hall one-volume edition (1859). No comparable discussion occurred with reference to Dickens's next weekly serial contribution to All the Year Round. Q. D. Leavis infamously observed that the novel's complexity and unique greatness explain why Great Expectations didn't need an illustrator. Can we imagine satisfactory illustrations to this novel? she asked in Dickens the Novelist (362). This statement, as Jane Cohen notes, is misleading (268, n. 16), particularly in view of Dickens's intention to publish the novel in monthly parts, only to abandon the plan in order to issue it in weekly numbers in All the Year Round. Working quickly and adhering to a tight schedule, he produced a brilliantly structured novel whose weekly format allowed no scope for illustrations, even had Dickens thought them desirable. The American serialization of Great Expectations, however, confirms that publishers and readers of novels, especially those by still valued illustration. Great Expectations appeared in Harper's Weekly from 24 November 1860 through 3 August 1861, and at home in All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 through 3 August 1861. In 1859 Harper had employed New York artist John McLenan to illustrate A Tale of Two Cities for Harper's Weekly, a year later, Mclenan produced 34 full-sized plates, and six headnote vignettes for Harper's serial printing of Great Expectations. The novel was subsequently issued in volume form by T. B. Peterson & Brothers of Philadelphia (1861), and included McLenan's illustrations (though not the vignettes for Great Expectations). Although installments of Great Expectations in Harper's Weekly were accompanied by John McLenan's illustrations, neither the installments in All the Year Round nor the Chapman and Hall first edition (1861) was illustrated. (4) As Edgar Rosenberg notes, Despite the [British] copyright laws, which forbade prior publication in foreign countries, the serial began with a week's head start in Harper's Weekly. 'Splendidly Illustrated by John McLenan' (399). This would lead us to regard the volume issued by T. B. Peterson ofPhiladelphia as the first volume edition (though many consider the Library Edition the first one-volume edition). …

Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now

Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now

Dickens and the Pleasure of the Text: The Risks of Hard Times

This essay examines the pleasure of the text in Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and considers the risks it takes in its performance as a novel in a utilitarian economy. Walking a tightrope between employing the genre as an agent of social change and entertaining middle-class readers, Dickens fuses homo ludens with homo faber . The sheer pleasure of reading must be shown to be useful, yet the novel has not proven popular until recent years and its moral message does not wear will in a postmodern hedonistic culture. Nevertheless, imagination as means as well as metaphor must be tested by its success, and the author, like Mr Jupe, cannot afford to miss a trick.

Teaching Marx, Dickens, and Yunus to Business Students

This essay explores strategies for teaching texts that are critical of an untempered pursuit of wealth to business students, although many of these students have chosen their course of study based on their internalization and privileging of capitalist discourse. Karl Marx's “Estranged Labour,” Charles Dickens's Hard Times, and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech by Muhammad Yunus can be used in the classroom to encourage students to broaden their understanding of wealth, power, and class and to suggest that they, in their professional lives, may be agents of social change. Pedagogical strategies employed in this first-year course include giving students responsibility for the direction of class discussions, so that their specific interests and agendas receive attention, and requiring that students personalize these texts that may seem distant to them by exploring their own experiences in the world of work and commerce in the context of the readings. By the end of the semester, the binary structure of their worldview has been challenged and, ideally, complicated.

Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer (review)

Reviewed by: Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer Juliette Berning Schaefer (bio) Valerie Gray , Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), pp. xvii + 233, $99.95, cloth. Valerie Gray begins Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer by arguing for the necessity of a comprehensive study of Knight, "a multifaceted man of letters in the pre-specialist early nineteenth-century sense of the term: that is, a scholar, an author, a critic and according to Carlyle 'our most important modern person"' (3), whose active career as popular educator and publisher spanned over fifty years (1812–1869). In six chapters, Gray provides that study. Chapter 2 is devoted to Knight's early career as editor and journalist. Gray traces Knight's development politically and socially as he engaged in the life of the city, advocating education and cheap wholesome reading material, and she concludes that during this period Knight "did his utmost to think independently and dispassionately on every topic, but favoured moderate liberal reform" (34). In Chapter 3, Gray asserts that the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) was both Knight's "salvation and his nemesis" (43). She explores Knight's relationship with founder Henry Brougham, the criticism that Knight was interested in publications as social control, and Knight's founding of the Library of Entertaining Knowledge. In her general discussion of Knight's publications, including the Almanac and the Penny Magazine, Gray highlights Knight's quest to "keep up standards of creative integrity and of production and to keep prices down; to ensure readability, accuracy and originality and to provide numerous illustrations" (62). Gray begins Chapter 4, on Knight as a popularizer of education and literacy, by explaining that Knight's "educational work pervaded his whole life and far exceeded his role as publisher of popular literature for the SDUK" (95). Gray provides an interesting summary of the state of the (largely nonexistent) educational system and of Knight's contributions toward reform. She also discusses Knight's relationship to other reformers, such as his wife Sally, her good friend Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, the Utilitarian Edwin Chadwick, and the Mechanics' Institutes. In Chapter 5, on Knight as a popularizer of political economy," Gray's primary argument is that Knight was not the model for the Utilitarian educator Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens's Hard Times. The chapter is divided into five chronological sections, each containing a wealth of information. Chapter 6 concentrates on Knight's distinction of being "instrumental in creating the first 'mass market' readership" (153). Gray claims that "critics have underestimated Knight, chiefly because they have failed to [End Page 290] take account of his entire output in the context of contemporary publishing conditions" (154). She asserts that Knight, like Dickens, believed in entertainment and instruction as co-existing. She discusses Knight's challenges with regard to competition and commercial pressures, readership, and the infamous "taxes on knowledge," and she also discusses his innovations with regard to illustration and engraving, coloring prints mechanically, and the distribution system. Gray's study includes a detailed chronology of Knight's life, useful endnotes for each chapter, and a comprehensive bibliography. She includes ample biographical and historical information, ideas for further study, 15 original illustrations, and the text of Knight's will. Chapters 3 and 6 will be of particular interest to scholars of Victorian periodicals. [End Page 291] Juliette Berning Schaefer Ohio Dominican University Juliette Berning Schaefer Juliette Berning Schaefer is Associate Professor of English at Ohio Dominican University, where she teaches British Literature and Composition. Her research interests include Victorian literature, women's studies, and teaching, technology, and composition. She has reviewed several books for VPR. Copyright © 2008 Victorian Periodicals Review

On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England

Research Article| March 01 2008 On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England Michael L. Ross Michael L. Ross Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2008) 54 (1): 75–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-2004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael L. Ross; On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2008; 54 (1): 75–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-2004 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Watt's Perfect Engine: Steam and the Age of Invention (review)

Reviewed by: Watt’s Perfect Engine: Steam and the Age of Invention Gillian Cookson (bio) Watt’s Perfect Engine: Steam and the Age of Invention. By Ben Marsden. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+213. $19.50. To start at the end—which is generally the direction from which James Watt is approached—Ben Marsden's defining final chapter, marked by a skillful turn of phrase, considers the inventor's reinvention as a genius and eponymous unit of power. The spin doctors were at work on his image, romanticizing and canonizing, even before Watt's death in 1819, and partly at his own instigation. Faced with versions of his life and achievements that awarded what he considered undue credit to the work of others (but seem in fact to have been sensibly balanced), Watt produced his own account of events, one of questionable accuracy. The culture that shaped Watt, and the culture he came to shape, is a central preoccupation of this neat book titled Watt's Perfect Engine. The innovator-turned-draconian-patentee, whose defense of his own rights stifles innovation, is another of Marsden's recurring themes. Watt is exposed as not above a little piracy of his own: in his Glasgow years he apparently produced musical instruments with fake Parisian labels to maximize their sale value. Marsden describes the breadth of his work, in precision instruments and canal engineering—far from the "giant with one idea" which Coleridge saw in Watt's engine. He is also excellent on the social, technical, and scientific context of Watt's life, emphasizing how experiences in the University of Glasgow, contacts in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and other colleagues—notably the "speculative innovator" John Roebuck and the engine erector William Murdock—married the scientific and technological for Watt. Marsden also sorts out issues of precedence and priority, and includes useful diagrams and simple explanations of the engines' workings. Nor are the blind alleys and failures overlooked, despite Watt's own efforts to airbrush these from the record. And yes, Watt did have "a trusty tea kettle," though he needed Joseph Black to explain to him his newly minted theory of latent heat. It was the patent of a competitor, James Pickard, that obliged Watt to think outside the box and come up with the sun-and-planet rotary motion, and then parallel motion, which he himself considered the greatest achievement of all. His partner Matthew Boulton, described here as "the big-thinking buckle-maker," handled the patents, and the two lived well off patent royalties, mainly from Cornish mines, for years before they started making complete engines in 1796. The partners' sons were at this point dispatched to become patent enforcers in Cornwall, the erstwhile collaborator John Wilkinson was recast as a pirate, and Boulton and Watt were transformed into "technological conservatives." While this is not uncommon among successful innovators, it is interesting to see how explicitly Watt admitted ceasing to attempt to invent, fearing for his fortune and reputation. Marsden [End Page 651] is evenhanded in his summary of Watt: certainly not a lone genius, far from an untutored philistine, and a man whose work had a long-reaching influence on nineteenth-century thermodynamics and other sciences growing from the new technologies of the steam age. Watt's Perfect Engine is written with a light touch and presumably is aimed at the readership usually described as "intelligent general." It has neither footnotes nor index, though there is a useful glossary and a bibliography divided by topic. While the strong narrative does not patronize, some may quibble at the use of anachronistic terms—"brain drain" and "head hunting" could be justified as accessible language, or may be a step too far toward overpopularization. There are one or two surprising lapses. Brunel's view on patents is not a matter of significance, as he was born after Watt's glory days. Likewise, Dickens's Hard Times and the planned village of Saltaire long postdated Watt and hardly amount to social or industrial context; New Lanark, maybe. But aside from a slightly simplistic picture of industrialization, which may have been better presented as a re-skilling rather than de-skilling...