SOURCE: "Hard Times and the Condition of England," in The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change, Oxford University Press, Inc. 1974, pp. 109-31.

In the following essay, Craig details Dickens's use of cultural and popular elements in Hard Times.

Dickens's flair for expressing matters of common concern in their own style shows in the very title of the novel in which, for once, he dealt with the average life of his time. Most of the twenty-five possible titles for Hard Times and the fourteen he short-listed suggest, usually by a cliché or a pun, the theme of human life ground down by calculation and routine: for example, 'According to Cocker', 'Prove It', 'Hard Times', 'Hard Heads and Soft Hearts', 'A Mere Question of Figures'. 'Hard Times' stands out in that it was the phrase which came most naturally, when weariness or hardship had to be voiced, to the people...