SOURCE: "The Radical," in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912, pp. 255-82.

In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1898, Gissing writes of Hard Times as a failed labor novel..

We do not nowadays look for a fervent Christianity in leaders of the people. In that, as in several other matters, Dickens was by choice retrospective. Still writing at a time when "infidelity"—the word then used—was becoming rife among the populace of great towns, he never makes any reference to it, and probably did not take it into account; it had no place in his English ideal. I doubt, indeed, whether he was practically acquainted with the "free-thinking" workman. A more noticeable omission from his books (if we except the one novel which I cannot but think a failure) is that of the workman at war with capital. This great struggle...