SOURCE: "Hard Times: A History and a Criticism," in Dickens and the Twentieth Century, edited by John Gross and Gabriel Pearson, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 159-74.

The essay below, along with David H. Hirsch 's "Hard Times and F. R. Leavis" (1964), represents the most trenchant critical response to Leavis's famous 1948 essay championing Hard Times as Dickens's most accomplished novel.

I

'With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face', Dickens writes of Mr. Gradgrind. That Hard Times is a novel which embodies a moral problem, an issue between ways of living, is by now familiar knowledge; and so is it, that one side of the issue, in some sense or another, is 'Utilitarianism'. But the ideas and attitudes which that word most readily calls up today prove not to be those which were most prominent in Dickens's own mind or own time; and to trace the exact contour of significance...