SOURCE: "The Rhetoric of Hard Times," in Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, pp. 144-63.

Lodge is an English novelist and dramatist who is also highly regarded for his work as a literary critic and as the editor of several works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British authors. In the following essay, he evaluates Dickens's rhetorical strategies, which he believes form the polemical basis of Hard Times.

'It is the least read of all the novels and probably also the least enjoyed by those who read it,' said Humphrey House of Hard Times in The Dickens World (1941). The first part of this statement, at least, has probably not been true since The Great Tradition was published (1948). Of Hard Times, it will be remembered, Dr Leavis said, '. . . of all Dickens's works, it is the one that has...