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Blackpool on the Picket Line: Hard Times Goes Viral in Nineteenth-Century America
- Studies in the Novel
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 49, Number 1, Spring 2017
- pp. 49-68
- 10.1353/sdn.2017.0002
- Article
- Additional Information
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Tracing the reception of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and its doomed millworker Stephen Blackpool through nineteenth-century American print culture, the essay shows how a conservative text and character were radicalized and repurposed to suit an audience grappling with the shift to a predominately industrial economy. A contextual reading of their reception reveals the novel’s function as a tool of social reform for a society caught between two contradictory impulses: an embrace of the working class and a worship of capitalism. The linguistic adoption of dialogue and characters; the contextualization of Hard Times alongside labor fiction such as Frederic Whittaker’s Larry Locke, Man of Iron, or, A Fight for Fortune: A Story of Labor and Capital, Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills,” and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887; and the deletion of key passages on unionization from a dime novel reprint all demonstrate how nineteenth-century American audiences retooled a popular English novel for their own radical purposes.