Critical Essay | Critical Essay by David Sonstroem

Critical Essay by David Sonstroem

SOURCE: "Fettered Fancy in Hard Times," in PMLA, Vol. 84, No. 3, May, 1969, pp. 520-29.

In the following essay, Sonstroem identifies conflict between Fact—dry statistics and empirical definitions—and Fancy—variously identified with imagination, romance, wonder, and nonsense—as central to the structure of Hard Times.

Clifton Fadiman on Dickens's Anti-politicism:

[There] is something that bids us pause before accepting the easy view of Dickens as the revolutionary whose socio-economic libido was insufficient to make him fall in love with the proletariat. To be even an unconscious revolutionary one's temper must be dominantly political—and the feeling comes over one that Dickens was not only nonpolitical, but anti-political. Hard Times is full of sympathy for the oppressed factory-worker, though hardly for the union. Yet its central theme is not political but, in a sense, poetical: at bottom Hard Times is a plea, not for the claims of the worker but for the claims of the imagination. Its anger...
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