Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth in the southeast of England. Dickens’s father, John, was a kind and likable man, but he was incompetent with money and piled up tremendous debts throughout his life. When Dickens was nine, his family moved to London, and later, when he was twelve, his father was arrested and taken to debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother moved his seven brothers and sisters into prison with their father but arranged for Charles to live alone outside the prison, working with other children at a nightmarish job in a blacking warehouse, pasting labels on bottles. The three months he spent apart from his family were highly traumatic for Dickens, and his job was miserable—he considered himself too good for it, earning the contempt of the other children.

After inheriting some money, Dickens’s father got out of prison and Charles returned to school. As a young adult, he worked as a law clerk and later as a journalist. His experience as a journalist kept him in close contact with the darker social conditions of the Industrial Revolution, and he grew disillusioned with the attempts of lawmakers to alleviate those conditions. A collection of semi-fictional sketches entitled Sketches by Boz earned him recognition as a writer. Dickens began to make money from his writing when he published his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which was serialized beginning in 1836 and published in book form the following year. The Pickwick Papers, published when Dickens was only twenty-five, was hugely popular, and Dickens became a literary celebrity after its publication and would remain one throughout the rest of his life.

At about this time, he fell in love with Mary Beadnell, the daughter of a banker. Despite his ambition and literary success, Dickens was considered her social inferior in terms of wealth and family background, and Mary’s father prohibited the marriage. Dickens later married Catherine Hogarth, but after twenty years of marriage and ten children, he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress many years his junior. Soon after, Dickens and his wife separated, ending a long series of marital difficulties.

Dickens remained a prolific writer to the end of his life, and his novels—among them Oliver Twist (1839), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), A Christmas Carol (1841), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). He died of a stroke in 1870, at the age of 58, leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. He was interred in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, which is also the resting place of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and other eminent English writers.

Background on Hard Times

Though he was far too great a novelist to become a propagandist, Dickens several times used his art as a lens to focus attention on the plight of the poor and to attempt to awaken the conscience of the reader. Hard Times is just such a novel: set amid the industrial smokestacks and factories of Coketown, England, the novel uses its characters and stories to expose the massive gulf between the nation’s rich and poor and to criticize what Dickens perceived as the unfeeling self-interest of the middle and upper classes. 

Indeed, Hard Times suggests that 19th-century England itself is turning into a factory machine. The middle class is concerned only with making a profit in the most efficient and practical way possible. Hard Times is not a delicate novel, as Dickens hammers home his point with vicious, often hilarious satire and sentimental melodrama. It is also not a difficult book, since Dickens wanted all his readers to catch his point exactly, and the moral theme of the novel is very explicitly articulated time and again. There are no hidden meanings in Hard Times, and the book is an interesting case of a great writer subordinating his art to a moral and social purpose. Even if it is not Dickens’s most popular novel, it is still an important expression of the values he thought were fundamental to human existence.

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