Satire and Sentiment: Dickensian Characterization in Hard Times

Readers of Charles Dickens both celebrate and criticize his characters, who are paramount among the quintessential aspects of his writing. His industrial novel Hard Times bears particularly the weight of such criticism in its portrayal of Stephen Blackpool, one of the Coketown factory Hands. Scholars have complained that Blackpool exemplifies, in too boring or didactic a manner, the typical virtues of the Victorian era, such as saintliness, humility, and long-suffering (Spector 365), and that his character lacks the necessary traits to compel and inspire readers. Such a critique has prompted the following research and analysis. Using formalist observation of diction and semantic style within the novel, as well as historicist commentary on Dickens’s own authorial situation, my goal is to argue that Blackpool is neither a flat nor ineffective character. Instead, I suggest that the moral fable style of Hard Times lends itself to both realism and satire. In other words, by using this framework, Dickens effectively crafts complex, flawed human characters and connects them under a diagnostic rhetorical mission that critiques society and its reduction of humans to mere parts. My research is supported by analysis of Roman Jakobson and Kenneth Burke and their explanations of literary devices such as metonymy, which identifies a whole by one of its parts. I conclude that, by using metonymy himself, Dickens draws attention to, and therefore censures, a governmental and educational system that stifles human individuality