SOURCE: "The Rhetoric of Hard Times," in Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, pp. 144-63.
Lodge is an English novelist and dramatist who is also highly regarded for his work as a literary critic and as the editor of several works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British authors. In the following essay, he evaluates Dickens's rhetorical strategies, which he believes form the polemical basis of Hard Times.