Hard Times

Facts and figures. In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens. I've not revised many of his novels in the 34 years since, except A Christmas Carol and Hard Times. A Christmas Carol because I wrote a foreword for it, and Hard Times because there was something un Dickenson about it that intrigued me. Set in a northern mill-town rather than Dickens's usual London, Hard Times tackles politics in an uncharacteristically rigorous fashion, bringing it closer to Disraeli's Sybil than Pickwick Papers. Dickens seizes on utilitarianism – a philosophy most of us recognise as benign and socially progressive – and vilifies it as a great evil that poisons the human spirit. He expresses his loathing for trade unions, too. It's all rather problematic,..............
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