Dickens's Genera Mixta: What Kind of a Novel is Hard Times?

… fiction … is less a genre than a menagerie of genres.

—Irving Howe

Unlike the classical genres of epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral, etc., the novel has no rules except those that it chooses to borrow eclectically from those traditional forms.

—David Lodge

I

The genre of Hard Times (1854) has seemed more or less self-evident at least since 1958, when Raymond Williams grouped together a number of early and mid-Victorian novels, including Hard Times, under the name "industrial novels" in his influential Culture and Society, and when Arnold Kettle classified the same group of novels as "social-problem novels" in an essay in the new Penguin Guide to English Literature.¹ Williams and Kettle did more than identify a subgenre of the Victorian novel; they also defined the terms in which these novels would be discussed for the next half century, beginning with David Lodge's 1966 essay on H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay in his Language of Fiction, and followed by Catherine Gallagher's The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985), Joseph W. Childer's Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture (1995), and Josephine M. Guy's The Victorian Social-Problem Novel (1996). This classification has recently been reconfirmed by Richard Simmons Jr.'s essay "Industrial and 'Condition of England' Novels" in Blackwell's Companion to the Victorian Novel (2003):

From the late 1830s on, with issues such as the "factory question," the "hungry forties," the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the Chartist uprising as rich ground from which to mine subject matter, novels about problems of class conflict and capitalism became one of the most significant subgenres of Victorian literature. Such fiction has been variously labeled, but the "condition of England" novel seems most inclusive.

(Simmons 337)

While this approach has produced illuminating readings of this group of novels, it has also ensured that these novels, including Hard Times, have been discussed almost exclusively in terms of their intervention in the condition-of-England debate of the 1840s and 1850s, and especially debates about industrialization and the class conflict it produced. "The industrial novels of early Victorian England," says Deirdre David in Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (1981),

are very often primarily regarded as a source of information about industrial conditions, and then secondarily as novels in themselves with all the attendant difficulties that have to do with the relationship between the actuality of those conditions and their transformation into fiction. The industrial novel … provides invaluable depictions of a society in the process of unprecedented and disturbing alteration, and, for readers of the time, offered glimpses of unknown territory.

(5–6)

Although explicit questions about the genre of Hard Times have not figured prominently in criticism of it, the debates about its social and political engagements, as well as its artistic success, have, as I hope to show, been inseparable from an implicit debate about what kind of novel it should be read as. The question posed by David Lodge in his essay on the novel in Working with Structuralism (1981)— "what kind of novel is Hard Times" (Lodge, Working 38)—has, in my view, never been satisfactorily answered, although the designation of it as a condition-of-England novel has tended to mask this failure. A recurring feature of criticism of Hard Times has been a confident assertion of its genre, followed by a qualification or even a contradiction that exposes its generic instability. For example, in a paper delivered to the English Institute in 1967 (and published a year later), Northrop Frye proclaimed, "Every novel of Dickens is a comedy," specifically a variant of the New Comedy deriving ultimately from Plautus. Yet later in that essay, he says "… it is clear that Hard Times, of all Dickens's stories, comes nearest to being what in our day is sometimes called the dystopia, the book which, like Brave New World or 1984, shows us the nightmare world that results from certain perverse tendencies inherent in society getting free play" (67). Matthew Hodgart also finds the novel bifurcated: "There is no one...