“Wilderness of Smoke and Brick”: Imagination of the Times in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times

The article examines the imagination of the present period of English society in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times. This industrial novel is somewhat atypical of Dickens’s novel writing, for its setting in a manufacturing town (the fictional Coketown). The focus of the article is on the novel’s representation of the ideologies of the town’s middle class (associated with political economy and utilitarianism), and on the role of Stephen Blackpool, a working-class character, in the context of that representation. The novel depicts a society in which large segments of the population experience great economic, political and legal inequality, and critiques a number of middle-class ideological attitudes, embodied in the characters of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby. The article discusses the importance of the novel’s image of the town’s industrial society as a “wilderness”; such figurative language has the effect of defamiliarizing the middle-class social ideologies in the industrial society of Coketown. The article also examines the way the novel addresses its work of defamiliarizing the middle-class ideologies to the middle-class readership.