SOURCE: "Hard Times and F. R. Leavis," in Criticism, Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter, 1964, pp. 1-16.

The essay below represents one of the two most notable critical responses to F. R. Leavis's seminal 1948 essay on Hard Times, the other being John Holloway's "Hard Times: A History and a Criticism" (1962). Hirsch finds Hard Times "One of the dullest and least successful" of Dickens's works, despite the author's "most commendable" purpose.

The inability of Dickens scholars to agree in their evaluations of particular novels has become one of the commonplaces of Dickens criticism. Hard Times, especially, has had a checkered career. On the one hand, it has been completely ignored as a novel (F. G. Kitton excluded it from his book The Novels of Dickens). On the other hand, such men as John Ruskin and George Bernard Shaw considered it Dickens's best book. In recent years, largely on the basis of the...