enough only for the anger that usually accompanies his issue-oriented perspective. Character is, of course, offered in the novel; Dickens cannot help but express his genius for presenting us with people who are unforgettable. But the major portions of his talent, energy, and column inches, of necessity, are devoted to crucial topics; and, given the way Dickens’ talent works, we get, necessarily, more of the journalistic voice, the voice about issues—and more issue-forced caricature than character.

As he learned to master the monthly serial, he would come to control the weekly form. In his next novel written in weekly parts, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his own emotional life will be more directly tapped, and Dickens’ sense of character will hold its own with his anger over injustice and his fear of mob rule; in the weekly Great Expectations (1860-61), he will write in the first person and will recall his own early years, creating a triumph of structure, character, and mood.

In writing Hard Times, as he wrestles with deadlines and a necessary compression of story, Dickens arrays the forces of imagination—of life—against the forces motivated by mercantile profit—the forces of death. Stephen Blackpool, a Coketown weaver, carries the metaphoric weight of a number of the issues Dickens confronts. In 1854, Dickens went north to Preston, to cover a strike for Household Words. While he was sympathetic to the laboring poor, he was also unhappy at the prospect of class reversal—workers dictating to manufacturers, the lower class confronting the management of the middle class—and worried, as he always had been, over anything resembling mob rule. His ambivalent response to the strike—

In its waste of time, in its waste of a great people’s energy, in its waste of wages, in its waste of wealth that seeks to be employed . . . in the gulf of separation it hourly deepens between those whose interests must be understood to be identical or must be destroyed, it is a great national affliction

—is echoed in his novel as Blackpool, acting on Dickens’ beliefs or uncertainties, refuses to join a union and is ostracized; whom Dickens will kill, he first excludes from the human community. Blackpool, in love with Rachael but haunted by an alcoholic wife, also carries the burden of Dickens’ marital unhappiness and wish for more liberal laws about divorce. He falls into a disused mineshaft and is a victim, then, of industrial carelessness and parliamentary obtuseness. He is also, physically, hurled down—the place of his accident is called Old Hell Shaft. Dickens does much in this novel about social decline and descents toward a kind of hell. Blackpool says, for his author who cannot support union action but who wishes to support the workers, “See how we die an’ no need, one way an’ another—in a muddle—every day!” Stephen uses that description frequently. As Peggotty’s buttons are her signature theme, “muddle” is Stephen’s.

“Muddle” refers perhaps to Dickens’ confusion over labor relations as well as to the confusion—the mess—in which decent men and women of his day found themselves. The word denotes turbidness, muddiness; it connotes unclarity, impurity; it derives, perhaps, from the Middle Dutch verb for making muddy. In other words, it is about dirtiness that pollutes a wet surface and makes vision through that surface difficult or impossible. Dickens used it in Bleak House—“We both grub on in a muddle”—to signify a disordered or confused condition. In the 1865 Our Mutual Friend he will describe a shop window lit by a candle “surrounded by a muddle of objects.”

We can surely see its relationship to Blackpool and to the issues that Dickens in this novel joins. Furthermore, muddle, in nineteenth-century Scots and English slang, as a variant of meddle, denotes copulation. And the state of being “muddled,” in English and American slang of that time, suggests oafishness or intoxication. In 1840, writing against mob rule in Barnaby Rudge, he speaks of being “slightly muddled with liquor.” Dickens knew slang well and appreciated it. We cannot discount his employing Stephen Blackpool to label the villains of his world and of his book.

But “muddle,” besides suggesting confusion, hints at filth, at sewage, at a wet dirtiness. And this aspect of the image—not associated by Dickens, incidentally, with the healthy world of Sleary’s Circus and the natural product of its horses’ metabolism—is part of the realism I mentioned earlier. Dickens’ sense of psychology, his penetrating realism about guilt and alienation, is keen; he prefigures Dostoevsky, say, and Freud. His genius produces, in Hard Times, the