After Hard Times, Dickens honed his social critique and his polemical skills, and he employed them with more success. In Little Dorrit, England is a vast prison--when the Dorrit family is in debtors' prison, they live essentially the same pointless and unhappy life that they live after they receive a large inheritance. In Great Expectations , all class lines are fluid, crooks abound, and no one is safe from criminality. "Respectability" is surrounded by the merest fictional tissues of hypocrisy and deceit. In Our Mutual Friend, the dustman, the scavenger, and the society hostess exist side by side, all bound together by gossip, greed, and murder. In all of these novels (as well as in A Tale of Two Cities), Dickens is superlatively angry, superlatively polemical, but he knows better in the later ones how to develop his story with more humor and cleverness, and that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.
Many of us read Hard Times as children; we liked it well enough, and it sticks in our minds. My experience is that, as much as any Dickens novel, it rewards rereading. His analysis of capitalism is still relevant, as is his educational satire. And his style is an unfailing pleasure, to be enjoyed again and again.
--Jane Smiley
Selected Bibliography
WORKS BY CHARLES DICKENS
Sketches by Boz, 1836, 1839 Sketches and Stories
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, 1837 Novel
Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress, 1838 Novel
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, 1839 Novel
The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841 Novel
Barnaby Rudge, 1841 Novel
American Notes: For General Circulation, 1842 Travel Book
A Christmas Carol: in Prose, 1843 Christmas Book
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844 Novel
The Chimes, 1844 Christmas Book
The Cricket on the Hearth, 1845 Christmas Book
Pictures from Italy, 1846 Travel Book
The Battle of Life: A Love Story, 1846 Christmas Book
Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, 1848 Novel
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, 1848 Christmas Book
The Personal History of David Copperfield, 1850 Novel
A Child's History of England, 1852, 1853, 1854 History
Bleak House, 1853 Novel
Hard Times: For These Times, 1854 Novel
Little Dorrit, 1857 Novel
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (with Wilkie Collins), 1857 Travel Book
Reprinted Pieces, 1858 Collection of Magazine Articles
A Tale of Two Cities, 1859 Novel
Great Expectations, 1861 Novel
The Uncommercial Traveler, 1861, 1868 Collection of Magazine Articles
Our Mutual Friend, 1865 Novel
"George Silverman's Explanation," 1868 Story
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished), 1870 Novel
BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York and London: HarperCollins, 1990.
Andrews, Malcolm. Dickens and the Grown-up Child. London: Macmillan, 1994.
Butt, John, and Kathleen Tillotson. Dickens at Work. Fairlawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1958.
Chesterton, G. K. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. New York: Dutton, 1911.
----. Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men. Foreword by Alexander Woollcott. New York: The Press of the Reader's Club, 1942.
Collins, Phillip. Dickens and Crime. 3d ed. London: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
Epstein, Norrie, ed. The Friendly Dickens. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Foor, Sheila M. Dickens's Rhetoric. New York: Lang, 1993.
Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.
House, Humphrey. The Dickens World. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.
Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.
Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: A Biography. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1988.
Leavis, F. R., and Q. D. Leavis. Dickens the Novelist. New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Miller, J. Hillis. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Orwell, George. "Charles Dickens." In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. I. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. London: Penguin, 1972.
Schlicke, Paul, ed. Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Smiley, Jane. Charles Dickens. Penguin Lives. New York: Lipper/Viking, 2001.
Stone, Harry. Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.
Tomalin, Claire. The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
Welsh, Alexander. The City of Dickens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Wilson, Edmund. "Dickens: The Two Scrooges." In his The Wound and the Bow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.
A Note on the Text
This edition of Hard Times is based on the first book-form printing of 1854. The spelling and punctuation have been brought into conformity with modern British conventions and obvious errors have been corrected.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times
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