Excerpt from Hard Times: And Other Stories

Dickens established a weekly periodical, called Household Words, on the 30th of March, 1850. On the 1st of April, 1854, he began in it the publication of the tale of Hard Times, which was continued in weekly instalments until its completion, in the number for the 12th of August. The cir culation of Household Words was doubled by the appear ance in its pages of this story. When published in a separate form, it was appropriately dedicated to Thomas Carlyle, who was Dickens's master in all matters relating to the dismal science of political economy.

During the composition of Hard Times the author was evidently in an embittered state of mind, in respect to social and political questions. He must have felt that he was, in some degree, warring against the demonstrated laws of the production and distribution of wealth; yet he also felt that he was putting into prominence some laws of the human heart which he supposed political economists had studiously over looked or ignored. He wrote to Charles Knight that he had no design to damage the really useful truths of political econ omy, but that his story was directed against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else; who would take the average of cold in the Crimea during twelve months as a reason for clothing a soldier in nankeen on a night when he would be frozen to death in fur; and who would comfort the laborer in travelling twelve miles a day to and from his work, by telling him that the average distance of one inhabited place from another, on the whole area of England, is only four miles.

This is, of course, a caricatured statement of what statisticians propose to prove by their figures and averages. Dickens would have been the first to laugh at such an economist and statistician as Michael Thomas Sadler, who mixed up figures of arithmetic and figures of rhetoric, tables of population and gushing sentiments, in one Odd jumble of doubtful calculations and bombastic declamations yet Sadler is only an extreme case of an investigator, who turns aside from his special work to introduce considerations which, however, important in them selves, have nothing to do with the business he has in hand. Dickens's mind was SO deficient in the power. Of generaliza tion, so inapt to recognize the operation Of inexorable law, that whatever offended his instinctive benevolent sentiments he was inclined to assail as untrue. Now there is no law the opera tion of which so frequently shocks our benevolent sentiments as the law of gravitation; yet no philanthropist, however accus tomed he may be to subordinate scientific truth to amiable impulses, ever presumes to doubt the certain operation of that law. The great field for the contest between the head and the heart is the domain of political economy. The demonstrated laws of this science are often particularly offensive to many good men and good women, who wish well for their fellow creatures, and who are pained by the Obstacles which economic maxims present to their diffusive benevolence. The time will come when it will be as intellectually discreditable for an educated person to engage in a crusade against the established laws of political economy as in a crusade against the established laws of the physical universe; but the fact that men like Car lyle, Ruskin, and Dickens can write economic nonsense, with out losing intellectual caste, Shows that the science of political economy, before its beneficent truths come to be generally? Admitted, must go through a long struggle with benevolent Sophisms and benevolent passions.

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