ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author makes no apology for the title, especially as it once was "The Modicum is the Massage: Hard Times and the Homeric Doodle in Dystopia." But Charles Dickens and dystopias, metacomedy and God as well? In Hard Times's first phase, Dickens might have admitted that ancient dogma and the latest fancy, moral rules, and imaginary extravagances, had nothing to do with each other. Religion and morality and questions of human nature are live issues in Hard Times; still the liveliest of issues for us, as they cut to the heart of what Utilitarianism and science and industrial management have found out about life itself. In the moral drama of Hard Times, Dickens has worked through tragedy to something beyond. Hard Times as metacomedy sees man and the cosmos in play. Dickens, founding father of dystopian fantasy, was no mere romantic socialist, despite his influence over G. B. Shaw's Emergent Evolution.
