SOURCE: "Introduction to Hard Times," in Shaw on Dickens, edited by Dan H. Lawrence and Martin Quinn, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1985, pp. 27-35.

Shaw is generally considered the greatest and best-known dramatist to write in the English language since Shakespeare. During the late nineteenth century, he was also a prominent literary, art, music, and drama critic, and his reviews were known for their biting wit and brilliance. Like his friendly rival, Chesterton, Shaw was a longtime enthusiast of Dickens's work, primarily because of its value in the literature of class struggle, an emphasis which appealed strongly to the Fabian Shaw. In the following introduction to the Waverley subscription edition (1913) of Hard Times, Shaw finds the novel to portray the realism and social criticism that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century literature.

John Ruskin once declared Hard Times Dickens's best novel. It is worth while asking why Ruskin thought this, because he...