Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about Charles Dickens and his condition-of-England novel Hard Times. I discuss Dickens’s successful but tumultuous life, including his petit-bourgeois and downwardly mobile origin, his literary celebrity, and his personal scandals; Dickens’s afterlife as an influence and counter-influence on the development of both the elite and the popular novel; the importance to Dickens (and to the whole of modern literature and politics) of the Victorian Sage Thomas Carlyle, including Carlyle’s influence on the emergence of both socialism and fascism; the Victorian problems of utilitarianism, individualism, and revolutionism Dickens identifies in Hard Times; the solutions to these problems the novel proposes, including reformism, sentimentality, domesticity, Christianity, and fancy; and the novel’s utopian horizon, as against Carlylean fascism-socialism or sentimental reformism, located in the potentially universal déclassé space of the circus and theater whose form the dramatic Dickensian novel imitates. The first 25 minutes, which include a scorching denunciation of didacticism in the art museum, are free to all. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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