For the three months that John Dickens and his family lived in a single, cramped room in the Marshalsea, Charles--then only eleven
--was left to live alone in lodgings, and was sent to work at
Warren's Blacking Factory.

These three months changed Dickens as a person and shaped his outlook as a writer and social critic. It was at Warren's that Dickens met the boy on whom he would later base the Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist. The misery of the Warren experience is reflected in several chapters of the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield. Many of his broad novelistic images and themes--prisons, degraded conditions of labour, children lost in the city--grew out of this traumatic childhood experience.

Dickens returned to school after the family's situation improved. He attended the Wellington House Academy from the years of 1824-1827 and, at fifteen, entered the world as a solicitor's clerk. He studied shorthand at Doctors' Commons, which lead to work as a Parliamentary reporter: his speed and accuracy amazed his contemporaries. By 1833, he had contributed his first sketches of urban life to the Monthly Magazine and other periodicals.  These were soon collected in his first book, Sketches by 'Boz' (1836), and in that same year, on the crest of this wave of success, he married Catherine Hogarth.

Now twenty-four, Dickens started the weekly serial publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-37) which quickly made him a literary phenomenon. While Dickens wrote his next novel, Oliver Twist (1837-39), and edited Bentley's Miscellany, the Dickens family moved from their first home at Furnival's Inn to 48 Doughty Street. The death of Catherine's sister Mary, to whom both were very attached, troubled the couple deeply during this active time: images of her are later reflected in Dickens's portraits of saintly, diminutive female characters like Little Nell and Little Dorrit. Nicholas Nickleby appeared in 1838, and the family moved up again, to 1 Devonshire Terrace. Setting the pattern of industriousness that would typify his entire career, Dickens edited (and ultimately authored) the weekly periodical Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-41), which included Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop.

In 1842, Dickens took America by storm. His six-month trip bore literary fruit: the controversial and unflattering American Notes (1842) and the slyly devastating American episode in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4). He published A Christmas Carol in December 1843,
the first of five widely popular Christmas books. In the mid- to late 1840s, the Dickens family lived in Italy, Switzerland, and Paris as well as maintaining residence in London. He published Pictures from Italy in 1846, Dombey and Son in 1848, and his 'favourite child,' David Copperfield, in 1850. Also during this decade, in 1847, Dickens's commitment to philanthropic causes led him to help establish Miss Coutts's Home for Homeless Women, where he 'booked' the degraded but fascinating clientele.

In 1851, the Dickens family moved to Tavistock House.  But by now, Dickens's marriage had grown increasingly troubled. Catherine had born Dickens ten children, but by the end of the decade he separated permanently from her, and in 1858, he made the acquaintance of the actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he maintained a close relationship until his death.

The fifties marked a return to journalism for Dickens, and increasing attention to social problems. He launched Household Words in 1850, a periodical that spanned the decade (and was incorporated into All the Year Round in 1859).

In 1852-3 Bleak House appeared, one of his most famous novels and a frontal attack on the foggy and wasteful English legal system. Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1855-57) shortly followed, lambasting exploitative industrialism and rapacious financial greed. The benefit of all this social criticism, however, was his purchase in 1856 of the gentleman's residence he'd always dreamed of owning, Gad's Hill Place in Kent. He then detoured into historical fiction, publishing A Tale of Two Cities in 1859.

Dickens began his immensely popular public readings in 1858. The stress and strain of these performances, which he toured in both England and the United States, led to a breakdown in 1869. The sixties saw the publication of more journalistic essays in The Uncommercial Traveller (1860), the weekly-serialised novel Great Expectations (1860-61), and his last twenty-number monthly novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). After a farewell season of public readings early in 1870, he began The Mystery of Edwin Drood in April. His persistent illness would not relent, however; Dickens died on 9 June, 1870. Edwin Drood was left uncompleted. Our Mutual Friend became his last finished work.

Hard Times was serialised from 1 April to 12 August, 1854, in Household Words, a magazine Dickens edited and its popularity more than doubled the magazine's circulation.  With its blend of fairytale characters in modern dress and the moral indignation of investigative journalism, Hard Times more than doubled the circulation of Household Words. The mythical Coketown (named after the coking coal used in the blast furnaces of northern England's industrial revolution) based in part on Preston, which he had visited in January of that year.  The book was dedicated to the historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle, in the belief that he would sympathise with the feelings expressed therein.

Dickens described the appalling conditions of life in factory towns; preached that the poor were entitled to the same justice, the same healthy conditions, the same freedom, as the rich; attacked every kind of public pest, especially those whose love for the public was really a love of publicity; and above all "ridiculed the typical bureaucratic mentality which substituted scientific accuracy for imaginative reality, convinced that facts and figures were all-important, while fancies were beneath contempt" (Pearson 211).

The Preston lock-out of 1853-4 has long been recognised as providing a backdrop for the scenes of industrial unrest in Hard Times. Preston with union support held on and in October the 'masters' in Preston began to lock out the workers. The employees were starved back to work--on the employers' terms. The timing of the strike was at a downturn in trade that did not help the workers' cause.  Dickens visited Preston in January 1854 and wrote about it in "On Strike" emphasizing the mistakenness of it but stressed the virtues of working people. In Hard Times, which appeared shortly afterwards on 1 April,1854, the virtuous people seem to become the circus folks and the workers more pathetic in their belligerence.

Dickens was intrigued with the intrinsic nature of industrial organization in which the worker has nothing to do but mind the machine . . . and which productivity is pursued at the expense of the human satisfaction it is supposed to serve. He saw (sometimes) the working people as exerting intelligence, courage and elasticity and the masters blocking, curbing and denying their humanness.

Hard Times centres on the failure to recognise the need for humanness and the destruction that this causes everyone. The industrial relations environment of Coketown is vividly described in metaphor to underline the bleakness and inhumanness of the "rational" thinking of the 1850's.  This rational thinking based on statistics and reason easily lead to the divisions of worker and master--on economic "facts" alone.

I've put together a webpage with excerpts from letters and other materials to give you some background to the novel and another with some historical events.

Electronic Sources:
There are several good, comprehensive sites focusing on Dickens, including David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page, Mitsuharu Matsuoka's Dickens Page, and the Victorian Web page on Dickens.

Study Questions:
1.  As you read Hard Times and think about the novel, here are some helpful hints to move you from just summarizing the text to analyzing what it is all about.  If you understand these issues, you have a very good understanding of the novel.

2.  Critics have called Hard Times an allegory.  Would you agree with this statement?  (Look at Louisa's descent on the allegorical "staircase of shame"--Bk. II, ch. 10).  Can you come up with other specific examples of symbolism?  Are the characters' names a relection of allegory?

3.  What analogy is drawn between Coketown and the Gradgrindian philosophy?  (What is the Gradgrinian philosophy?)

4.  Rachael and Stephen have been subjected to criticism by readers who say that they are almost too good to be true.  At what points in the story do Rachael and Stephen refute this criticism?

5.  Of what significance was the "Star Shining" to Stephen?  What does this represent symbolically?

6.  What is Mrs. Sparsit's role in the novel?

7.  Dickens is utilizing satire to agitate for better conditions in England.  What are some specific examples of satire?  To what advantage does Kidderminster serve Dickens' purpose?

8.  In the time of the Hebrew prophet Daniel, Belshazzar, last king of Babylon, saw the "handwriting on the wall," which foretold his destruction.  How does Dickens utilize this analogy?

9.  Why is it signifcant for the novel to open in the classroom of Facts and conclude in the circus of Fancy?