does not share Gradgrind’s principles—he has no principles. An upper-class idler, he sets about corrupting both young Tom Gradgrind, who needs more and more money to support his gambling habit, and Louisa, whose beauty and indifference intrigue and challenge him. At the end of book two, Louisa saves her virtue by fleeing to her father.

A typical Victorian melodrama would have ended with the foiling of Harthouse’s plot, but Dickens was not as interested in the consequences of his characters’ actions as he was in having the characters understand the origins of those consequences. In book three, “Garnering” (a synonym for “storing away”), Louisa, young Tom, and their father must pay the price of the elder Gradgrind’s educational theories—his daughter’s life has been blighted by a purely commercial marriage, made without love or even the expectation of love. Gradgrind’s belated understanding of the fruits of his methods is contrasted to his friend Bounderby’s entire failure to come to terms with the meaning of his own downfall. In the meantime, Stephen Blackpool, who has been shut out of employment by both the owners and the strikers, is duped by Tom Gradgrind in a plot that illustrates the way that his upbringing and education have robbed him of all conscience and all sense of attachment to others.

In spite of Dickens’ hopes for the serial and the novel, Hard Times did not improve the circulation of Household Words, and was not popular once it was published in volume form. Few critics liked it, and it more or less disappeared from Dickens’ canon until it was revived in 1948 by F. R. Leavis. After Hard Times, Dickens embarked upon Little Dorrit, which sold well beyond Dickens’ hopes, and after that novel came A Tale of Two Cities, which has remained one of his best-loved works. A Tale of Two Cities was followed by Great Expectations , also an enormous success. But Hard Times has several things in common with Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, and should, I think, be read as a first attempt to try for effects that finally succeeded in the later works.

Charles Dickens was an ambitious and precocious novelist. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he was published and celebrated, but it became clear to him as he wrote through his twenties that he needed, first, an organizing principle for each of his sprawling and lively works, and, second, a theory of society to match his intuitive grasp of psychology. In all of the early novels, Dickens explored some facet of English injustice: Oliver Twist grows up in the workhouse; Nicholas Nickleby finds employment in a cruel Yorkshire boarding school; Jonas Chuzzlewit becomes involved in an insurance swindle. The most perfect of his earlier works (though not everyone’s favorite) is Dombey and Son, in which Dickens successfully portrays all the ramifications of his protagonist’s human failings as they connect to his business ambitions—his selfishness, his insensitivity, his materialism, and his pride. Dombey fails at every relationship: his son dies without loving him, his daughter goes unappreciated, the manager of his company runs off with his wife, his business collapses. After Dombey and Son, in David Copperfield, Dickens addressed and contextualized his own life (though David Copperfield is far from strictly autobiographical), and also commented upon child labor. In Bleak House, Dickens introduced the motif of the Chancery lawsuit as a method of exploring the connections between all classes of society, but even in this, his ninth full-length novel, he still did not have a theory of how society worked—London was too vast and populous to be organized in such a way, and Dickens’ favored setting was always London (with occasional vacations to the countryside or America).

Coketown, however, a company mill town in the north of England, was a simpler world that could be understood, and in Hard Times, Dickens works out his theory—humans are used like machines: regulated, owned, and steadily worked for profit. Money, countable and tangible, is the only good, and is also the model for all things rational. Whatever cannot be bought or sold is considered to have no value. Gradgrind and Bounderby run things in Coketown. Bounderby owns factories and the bank. Gradgrind trains the children and is the Coketown representative in Parliament, where he promotes his inhumane programs.

From the first chapter, Hard Times is intended to send a message. It has much the same substance as “On Strike”—those in power are selfishly resentful of the powerless; the powerless do the