and Adam Smith after the grim economists; Mr. McChoakumchild, Coketown’s master of the school run by Gradgrind. The battle is between the life of the imagination and the false mercantile values of these hard-hearted men.

The novel opens as Mr. Gradgrind tests the students. Sissy, who loves, lives with, knows horses, cannot define one to Gradgrind’s or McChoakumchild’s satisfaction. As the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti might not have recited a fact-laden definition of color, Sissy is “thrown into the greatest alarm” by her test. Bitzer, a student reminiscent of David Copperfield’s Uriah Heep, then gives the preferred reply, in which language does not communicate so much as, vanlike, carry freight: “Quad ruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth. . . . Sheds coat in the spring. . . . Age known by marks in mouth.” We hear everything but the horseness of the creature. Imagination and affection are omitted, and the arithmetic of existence rides high in the saddle.

The particularly allegorical names of these characters, and their self-satirizing speech, the manner in which their every aspect consists of eccentricity galvanized by wickedness or errant thinking, suggest that even as Dickens’ angry realism informs the novel (and we will see that it does), the effort here is to create a kind of tutelary fairy tale—a small, exaggerated lesson instead of a long journey through space and time (that includes fabulous moments resembling the whole of Hard Times) in which we feelingly witness the education of several souls. In a Household Words essay called “Frauds on the Fairies,” published in October of 1853, Dickens writes: “In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected.”

Without reliance on talking animals, then, Dickens creates a kind of fable. He upholds the importance of the imagination by praising the fairy tale, and he employs the processes of the fairy tale as he writes Hard Times. In addition, the novel is compressed and fabulous because Dickens had to produce serial parts on a weekly basis; he hadn’t much time to consider what he would produce, and he hadn’t the space in which to permit his characters to develop and expand. They had to demonstrate moral and social issues through exaggerated speech and action. Writing to John Forster, always his confidant, sometimes his agent, and his eventual biographer and literary executor, Dickens says: “The difficulty of the space is CRUSHING. Nobody can have an idea of it who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some elbow room always, and open places in perspective.” In his long novels—say, Dombey and Son, or Bleak House, or David Copperfield—Dickens wrote both plausible, realistic elements as well as what I’m here calling the fabulous. Of course, he had planned these well ahead; of course, he had more time between the publication of monthly serial parts. In the 1850 Copperfield we have both the powerfully persuasive gloomy elements of David’s lonely childhood and the absurdly named stepfather Murdstone, who terrorized him; we have both the frail but lovely, necessary mother and the stronger earth mother Peggotty, his nanny whose buttons ridiculously popped off her clothes and into the air because she was stout and always in motion, and because Dickens wanted her to have a signature gesture.

In his longer, more leisurely novels, Dickens offered both endearing or satiric silliness, allegorical names and actions and serious, realistic portrayals of endangered children and brooding adults. In addition, his eye for political nuance and the absurdity of institutions, trained when he was a young reporter, was wedded to his anger at the cruelties of his age. The eye informed the voice, and the anger they expressed became a separate tonality in his long novels. Often, then, we hear declamations of rage—(here, from the 1853 Bleak House) “As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers”—as Dickens contemplates a London slum. Dickens’ disapproval compresses actuality into faceless generality and description into sermon.

I’m suggesting that the language of his anger in Hard Times is all that he can muster time and space to develop. The novel is conceptual from the start—an examination primarily of issues more than souls. As Dickens wrote to Thomas Carlyle, “It contains what I do devoutly hope will shake some people in a terrible mistake of these days.” Dickens has pace and room