SOURCE: "Hard Times: The News and the Novel," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 1, June, 1977, pp. 166-87.

In the following essay, Butwin examines Hard Times as a novel of social reform and compares it with social-reform journalism of the period.

Modern criticism tends to judge the novel that aims at social reform by standards that are appropriate to another kind of novel. This tendency is typified by Virginia Woolf s rejection of the novels of Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy according to standards that she derives from the novels of Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen:

What odd books they are! Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave One with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write...