Hard Time

 Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens FRSA ( 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.[1] His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognized him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.

Discuss the views of F.R. Leavis and J.B. Priestley on ‘Hard Time’. With whom do you agree? why?

Hard Time by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens is known for writing about life during the Industrial Revolution. Hard Times, published in 1854, falls into this category. It focuses on the fictional town of Coketown, England and the people who live there and their struggles. It begins with Thomas Gradgrind lecturing about facts. Academic supervisor in the community of Coketown, Gradgrind believes facts provide the keys to success. Fun, needless to say, is normally withheld from Gradgrind's children, and he is horrified one day to find his children, Louisa and Tom, captivated by the sight of Coketown's circus. Gradgrind discusses this behavior with a close friend, the wealthy Josiah Bounderby. He blames the children's classmate, Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus performer, for piquing the children's interest in carnivals. Sissy, the two men decide, must leave school. But arriving at the circus to inform Sissy's father of her dismissal, they learn he has disappeared, probably never to return. Gradgrind determines Sissy should move into his home.

 In this novel two writer his own views and thought to write about dickens novel Hady Time see the views about two writers F.R. Leavis and J.B. Priestley.

 F.R. Leavis View: 

The inability of Dickens scholars to agree in their evaluation of particular novels has become one of the commonplaces of Dickens criticism Hard Time, especially ignored as a novel. On the other hand, such men as John Ruskin and George Bernard considered is Dickens’s best book. In recent vears, largely on the basis of the critical brilliance of F.R. Leavis's, it is the latter view that has prevailed.

           Dr. Leavis close reading and perceptive analysis seem to have set the book's reputation, once and for all, on firm aesthetic ground .

Hence, Edgar Johnson, the most important recent biographer of Dickens, accepts Leavis's evaluation wholeheartedly, concluding that the low eviations of the book are not the result of aesthetic failure on Dickens's part, but are to be explained by the fact that the book on " is an analysis and a condemnation of the ethos of industrialism." For literary critics to condemn a book on such non- aesthetic grounds is deplorable, but it is equally deplorable for literary critics to attempt to praise a work of art on such ground. And yet, this is just what defenders of the book, including the new- critical Dr. Leavis, have done.

 In the first chapter of The Great Tradition, Dr. Leavis writes," adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness I can think of only one of his books in which his distinctive creative genius and that is "Hard times..." controlled throughout to a unifying and organizing significance in the words "genius  is controlled To put Dr. Leavis speaks of. And the reader's consciousness of Dickens's moral purpose is, I suspect, what he means by the challenge to sustained seriousness. what I shall try to show is that both the challenge" organizing significance, and that is hard times..." The tendency of Dr. Leavis's criticism is critical novel.

J.B. Priestley View

Hard Times . . . . has had its special admirers, particularly among those who see Dickens as a propagandist for their own political-economic ideology. We are told that one Cambridge pundit  a few years ago, declared that the only Dickens novel worth reading was Hard Times — surely one of the most foolish statements of this age. It would be far more sensible to reverse this judgment, to say that of all the novels of Dickens's maturity Hard Times is the least worth reading. It is muddled in its direct political-social criticism. As a novel it falls far below the standard set by Dickens himself from Dombey and Son onwards. Here for once it is almost as if we are seeing Dickens through the eyes of his hostile critics, for in Hard Times there really are reckless and theatrical over-statements, there really are characters that are nothing but caricatures, there really is melodramatic muddled emotion- alism. On the other hand, only in a few odd places is there any evidence of Dickens's unique grotesque-poetic genius, so obvious in Bleak House. We may join him in condemning an industrialized commercial society, its values, its economics, its education, its withering relationships, but this does not mean we have to pretend an unsatisfactory novel is a masterpiece, just because it favours our side. . . .

The truth is, Dickens did not know enough about industrial England. He had given a public reading in Birmingham, which provided him with some horrifying glimpses of the grim Midlands. Because there was a big strike in Preston, he paid it a visit, but he found no drama there. He came away deeply sympathizing with the men but feeling doubtful about trade union organizers. He was not on any ground familiar to him. So his Coketown is merely a horrible appearance, and in order to offer us a sharp contrast to Gradgrind and Bounderby, their outlook and style of life, he sketches a travelling circus to represent arts, skills, warm personal relationships. But he could have found all these, together with many odd attractive characters, in Coketown, if he had really known it and not simply looked at it from a railway train. As it is, Coketown belongs to propaganda and not to creative imagination.

I am Agree with F.R.Leavis because the traditional approach in the novel. Hard Time did not get the recognition it so deserved. He observes a lot of unexacting Expectations from the author by the those time. Henry James The Europeans also suffered like Hard Time because of these unexacting expectations.

Words: 1032