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 enough only for the anger that usually accompanies his issue-oriented perspective. Character is, of course, offered in the novel; Dickens cannot help but express his genius for presenting us with people who are unforgettable. But the major portions of his talent, energy, and column inches, of necessity, are devoted to crucial topics; and, given the way Dickens’ talent works, we get, necessarily, more of the journalistic voice, the voice about issues—and more issue-forced caricature than character.

As he learned to master the monthly serial, he would come to control the weekly form. In his next novel written in weekly parts, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his own emotional life will be more directly tapped, and Dickens’ sense of character will hold its own with his anger over injustice and his fear of mob rule; in the weekly Great Expectations (1860-61), he will write in the first person and will recall his own early years, creating a triumph of structure, character, and mood.

In writing Hard Times, as he wrestles with deadlines and a necessary compression of story, Dickens arrays the forces of imagination—of life—against the forces motivated by mercantile profit—the forces of death. Stephen Blackpool, a Coketown weaver, carries the metaphoric weight of a number of the issues Dickens confronts. In 1854, Dickens went north to Preston, to cover a strike for Household Words. While he was sympathetic to the laboring poor, he was also unhappy at the prospect of class reversal—workers dictating to manufacturers, the lower class confronting the management of the middle class—and worried, as he always had been, over anything resembling mob rule. His ambivalent response to the strike—

In its waste of time, in its waste of a great people’s energy, in its waste of wages, in its waste of wealth that seeks to be employed . . . in the gulf of separation it hourly deepens between those whose interests must be understood to be identical or must be destroyed, it is a great national affliction

—is echoed in his novel as Blackpool, acting on Dickens’ beliefs or uncertainties, refuses to join a union and is ostracized; whom Dickens will kill, he first excludes from the human community. Blackpool, in love with Rachael but haunted by an alcoholic wife, also carries the burden of Dickens’ marital unhappiness and wish for more liberal laws about divorce. He falls into a disused mineshaft and is a victim, then, of industrial carelessness and parliamentary obtuseness. He is also, physically, hurled down—the place of his accident is called Old Hell Shaft. Dickens does much in this novel about social decline and descents toward a kind of hell. Blackpool says, for his author who cannot support union action but who wishes to support the workers, “See how we die an’ no need, one way an’ another—in a muddle—every day!” Stephen uses that description frequently. As Peggotty’s buttons are her signature theme, “muddle” is Stephen’s.

“Muddle” refers perhaps to Dickens’ confusion over labor relations as well as to the confusion—the mess—in which decent men and women of his day found themselves. The word denotes turbidness, muddiness; it connotes unclarity, impurity; it derives, perhaps, from the Middle Dutch verb for making muddy. In other words, it is about dirtiness that pollutes a wet surface and makes vision through that surface difficult or impossible. Dickens used it in Bleak House—“We both grub on in a muddle”—to signify a disordered or confused condition. In the 1865 Our Mutual Friend he will describe a shop window lit by a candle “surrounded by a muddle of objects.”

We can surely see its relationship to Blackpool and to the issues that Dickens in this novel joins. Furthermore, muddle, in nineteenth-century Scots and English slang, as a variant of meddle, denotes copulation. And the state of being “muddled,” in English and American slang of that time, suggests oafishness or intoxication. In 1840, writing against mob rule in Barnaby Rudge, he speaks of being “slightly muddled with liquor.” Dickens knew slang well and appreciated it. We cannot discount his employing Stephen Blackpool to label the villains of his world and of his book.

But “muddle,” besides suggesting confusion, hints at filth, at sewage, at a wet dirtiness.