It is a culture more and more consecrated to profits, a nation more and more divided into the land of the rich and the land of the poor. Hard times are not merely difficult days; they are the time when the national hymn is mathematics, and we can see how Dickens refused to sing that song. As he prepared to write his novel in weekly installments, he thought of titling the book Prove It, as well as Stubborn Things, and Two and Two Are Four, A Mere Question of Figures, Something Tangible, A Matter of Calculation, and Rust and Dust; Hard Times was sixth on his list. These times of which Dickens writes, as they oppress workers by adhering to the cold utilitarianism of Bentham and Malthus; as they educate (and only a few, at that) for the sake of the acquisition of meaningless facts and lockstep thinking; as they forbid divorce, chaining together miserable husbands and wives—the essential thematic concerns of the novel—these times are hard and heavy enough to crush the individual beneath their weight.

As illustration, Dickens compares the stiff, self-satisfied rectitude and pompous immensity of the times to the lightness, gaiety, happy skills, and life-affirming play of the circus. Like a Fellini one hundred years before Federico Fellini’s films about clowns, Dickens from time to time cuts or dissolves to Sissy Jupe or Sleary’s circus troupe of daredevil horseback riders, counterposing them against characters who represent aspects of the age’s factitious, mind-numbing materialism: Mr. Bounderby, bully, liar, and industrial magnate, the fraudulent worst of the upwardly mobile middle class; Mr. Gradgrind, member of Parliament for northern industrial Coketown, a Utilitarian and a model of misguided fatherhood, two of whose children are named Malthus 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.