Recognizing Status in Charles Dickens's Hard Times

Abstract

Although most often read for its fictional—and, for many reviewers and critics, vaguely unsatisfying—response to the condition of England question, Hard Times also analyzes the historical peculiarities of Victorian middle-class status with sufficient sophistication to test the limits of later sociological and cultural theory from Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. Attentive to several of the warrants that might legitimize the exercise of domination in Victorian society and reliant upon the use of type concepts at the level of character, Dickens identifies each possible warrant for public domination with one or more representative characters, whose respective loss of status before the end of the narrative then undermines his or her associated warrant. Their systematic repudiation results in a figure “of wonderful no-meaning,” middle-class status, which is provocatively constructed by Dickens on the basis of a series of categorical negations, and which therefore can be confirmed only through its recognition from those—whether circus performers or periodical readers—in a position to be dominated. In rendering status a highly figurative and uncertain affair, Hard Times suggests that ultimately novelists may be the best sociologists when it comes to representing the epistemologically unstable society of the Victorian middle classes.