SOURCE: "Hard Times: An Analytic Note," in The Great Tradition, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954, pp. 273-99.

Leavis was an influential twentieth-century English critic. His methodology combines close textual criticism with predominantly moral and social concerns; however, Leavis is not interested in the individual writer per se, but rather with the usefulness of his or her art in the scheme of civilization. The essay reprinted below, which appeared in its present form in 1948, is widely considered the seminal (and most controversial) essay on Hard Times published in the twentieth century. Here, elaborating on claims made in decades past by Ruskin and Shaw, Leavis presents a case for perceiving Hard Times as Dickens's greatest novel. This essay has been answered by numerous critics during the past forty years, notably by John Holloway (1962) and David H. Hirsch (1964).

Hard Times is not a difficult work; its intention and nature are pretty obvious. If...