ABSTRACT
Victorian Britain evinced multiple lines of thought on work and much Dickens criticism has therefore focused on situating his discourses of labor and personhood in the context of Marxist thought or on liberalism and its utilitarian perversions. This chapter proposes, rather differently, to read human work and the worker as they are represented in Hard Times in the theological context which would, by the end of the nineteenth century, find its best-known expression in Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On the Condition of the Working Classes”), often taken as the first major document of modern Catholic social teaching. Influenced by the social criticism of the Oxford Movement and anticipated by Dickens’ social gospel despite his reiterated antipathy for “Romishness,” Rerum Novarum and later works enable a theological vocabulary of work that facilitates a reading of Hard Times and the “Hands” in a different intellectual tradition outside the Marxist or liberal accounts of labor. Such a project does not read Dickens’ theology to illuminate human work but rather uses human work to illuminate his idea of the modern subject in theological terms. Insofar as a figure like Stephen Blackpool is a person, in John Paul II’s sense, he reveals the depth of dehumanization imposed on him in and by an idea of the human person for whom dignity is conferred by outside forces such as work, rather than inhering in the human person.
