ABSTRACT
All of Charles Dickens’s novels are about society, but Hard Times—the work that led back to Dickens—has a peculiarly acute saliency when one thinks of literature as a systematic imagination of society or of using literary texts as social or cultural documents. The point about both Dickens and Sigmund Freud and why one likes to see the grand sweep of their lives is that they are both essentially heroic characters, Freud a hero of thought and Dickens a hero of literature. Moreover, both were aware that they were heroes, that they had heroic destinies and heroic mythological structures in their lives. So, in reading about their lives, one wants to see how the fate of the hero is played out in detail, through all his terrible defeats and recoveries, as well as in the mythology that accrues about him.
