SOURCE: "Hard Times: 'Black and White'," in Dickens the Designer, The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1987, pp. 177-92.

In the following essay, McMaster examines how Dickens uses color imagery in Hard Times to reinforce its characterizations and themes.

In Hard Times Dickens made colour a major feature of design. One of the titles he considered for it was 'Black and white.' The novel is patterned on a progression between the two most powerful scenes: the first in the 'intensely whitewashed' schoolroom at the beginning, with its albino star pupil, Bitzer, so pale that he looks as though he would 'bleed white,' and the second set in Sleary's darkened circus ring at the end, with Tom Gradgrind disguised as a blackamoor clown, his face 'daubed all over' with a 'greasy composition' of black make-up.

But the world of Hard Times is not all just black and white, and that...