SOURCE: "The Late Novels," in Charles Dickens: The Later Novels, edited by Ian Scott-Kilvert, Longman Group Limited, 1977, pp. 13-34.

In the excerpt below, Hardy examines Hard Times as one among several novels in which Dickens chose not to affirm a sure solution to the social problems he addressed.

Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations limit their concluding demands on the reader and do not expect us to settle down and see everything and everyone as now prospering after all that pain. The sense of reality begins in Hard Times (1854), with a toughening of moral humours in the two chief women characters. Sissy Jupe is a more subdued type of womanly virtue than Esther [in Bleak House] and we are asked to concentrate not on Sissy but on Louisa, a close study in moral psychology who also does not task our credulity or...