ABSTRACT

Charles Dickens spent a considerable amount of time searching for a suitable title for his novel about the deleterious effects of factory life in midnineteenth century Britain. Finally settling upon Hard Times, Dickens chose a ‘vernacular phrase, common in folksongs especially between 1820 and 1865 but not in pamphlets, speeches, or the papers, however popular and radical’ (Craig 1969, 11). The phrase neatly summed up the weariness and hardship felt by the working men, women and children to whom Dickens gave a voice in his short novel, which he dedicated to the Scottish historian, critic and sociological writer Thomas Carlyle. It was a phrase much used in popular songs and ballads of the nineteenth and, indeed, twentieth centuries, in songs from both sides of the Atlantic, and heard many times in the folk song revival and blues boom of the 1960s. The efcacy of this title is itself felt in the two-pronged manner in which Dickens set out to explore ‘both the immediate facts of mill-town life and the less direct, the all-pervading cultural effects of the new intensive production’ (Craig 1969, 16) in the smog-lled ctional location of Coketown, based upon the Lancashire milltowns of northern England.