Hard Times | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 21 pages of analysis & critique of Hard Times.
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Hard Times | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 21 pages of analysis & critique of Hard Times.
This section contains 6,147 words
(approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by David H. Hirsch

SOURCE: "Hard Times and F. R. Leavis," in Criticism, Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter, 1964, pp. 1-16.

The essay below represents one of the two most notable critical responses to F. R. Leavis's seminal 1948 essay on Hard Times, the other being John Holloway's "Hard Times: A History and a Criticism" (1962). Hirsch finds Hard Times "One of the dullest and least successful" of Dickens's works, despite the author's "most commendable" purpose.

The inability of Dickens scholars to agree in their evaluations of particular novels has become one of the commonplaces of Dickens criticism. Hard Times, especially, has had a checkered career. On the one hand, it has been completely ignored as a novel (F. G. Kitton excluded it from his book The Novels of Dickens). On the other hand, such men as John Ruskin and George Bernard Shaw considered it Dickens's best book. In recent years, largely on the basis of the...

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This section contains 6,147 words
(approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by David H. Hirsch
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Critical Essay by David H. Hirsch from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.