Manufacturing Novels: Charles Dickens on the Hearth in Coketown

In an unsigned 1855 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine essay celebrating the "great and well-deserved reputation" of Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant pauses to consider the famous author's latest offering. Compared to his otherwise organic, "full and many-toned conception of human life, its motives and its practices," Hard Times hits a metallic note: "The book is more palpably a made book than any of the many manufactured articles we have lately seen."¹ Using the royal "we" of the weary critic who has become all too familiar with such products, Oliphant's statement evokes Thomas Carlyle's objections to an increasingly commercial literary marketplace in "Signs of the Times" (1829): "Literature, too, has its Paternoster-row mechanism, its Trade-dinners, its Editorial conclaves, and huge subterranean, puffing bellows; so that books are not only printed, but, in a great measure, written and sold, by machinery."² Acting as a component of that literary machine, our reviewer shapes perceptions of "Charles Dickens" by setting his industrial novel apart from the rest of his work. Oliphant also perceptively hits on one of the novel's most provocative and abiding concerns as, in the midst of its efforts to protest the statistical abuses and inhumanity of industrial modernity, Hard Times explores the compatibility of literary work and manufacturing.

In panning Hard Times, Oliphant was joining the critical chorus in response to a novel which excited many pronouncements. Attempting to define genres and fields of expertise in the mid-nineteenth century, reviewers repeatedly lament, as The Rambler does, that "It is a thousand pities that Mr. Dickens does not confine himself to amusing his readers, instead of wandering out of his depth in trying to instruct them."³ Oliphant's distaste for the clunky mechanics of Dickens's novel to some extent resides in her similar assertion that "fiction breaks down when it is bound within these certain limits, and compelled to prove and to substantiate a theory," one of many critical assessments that have become part of a familiar story about this novel's rocky reception and eventual reevaluation.⁴ By introducing the language of manufacturing, however, Oliphant's review usefully foregrounds Hard Times's own apprehensions about purpose and the exercise of influence in a reading, working metropolis. Surprisingly, given her concerns, the critic does not have much to say about the character in Hard Times whose wedding wears "a manufacturing aspect";⁵ yet Oliphant's review can also, I will argue, help us make sense of Louisa Gradgrind Bounderby, the figure who embodies Hard Times's own worst fears and most deeply cherished hopes about urban readers and literary products.

Hard Times's representation of the legitimate role of fiction in an urban setting challenges nineteenth-century critics like Oliphant who assume that the novel as a genre should be defined against industry. Efram Sicher says as much when he asserts that "Hard Times is a novel about writing a novel in a utilitarian urban society where the novel plays a diminishing role and may soon have no more right to existence than in Plato's Republic."⁶ Yet lest we read Dickens's work as a heroic attempt to revamp a literary institution, Oliphant's review reminds us that Hard Times was asserting the use-value of a genre that was still establishing its cultural credentials and could be accused of being already too immersed in commerce. Like Jennifer Ruth, I am suggesting that we should acknowledge Dickens's willingness to represent writing as continuous with industrial forms of labor, though in the case of Hard Times, the novel reflects Dickens's working through of the effects of literary labor rather than a representation of the work of writing itself.⁷ Robert Colby takes a similar approach as he argues that during the Victorian period, "the epoch of the novel's struggle for prestige," writers embraced "fiction with a purpose" as a way to establish the value of their work.⁸ As the critical response illustrates, however, rather than taking the novel's purpose and usefulness as a given, Hard Times immediately excited concerns about...