Hard Times” was Dickens’ treatise on child-rearing and moral education. Written in 1854, it comes after “David Copperfield” and “Bleak House and before “Little Dorrit” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” and it has the distinction of being the only one of Dickens’ novels that F.R. Leavis thought made its author worthy of the name genius. Leavis, who dismissed Dickens generally as “a great entertainer,” initially omitted him from his pantheon of novelists in “the great tradition” of English fiction; only “Hard Times” did he find sufficiently taken up with “the moral preoccupations that characterize the novelist’s peculiar interest in Continue reading

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