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THIS ARTICLE WILL REVISIT some of the critical issues that have been opened up in the past around the characterisation and motivation of Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times. It will work towards a resolution of some of the anomalies, focusing finally on the nature of Stephen's 'muddle'.
There have been many negative critical responses to Hard Times prior to and after the commentary of F. R. Leavis, who gave the novel such a high accolade.1 Of these many have focused on the novel's subplot, the story of Stephen Blackpool. In summarising the critical reception of Hard Times, Roger Fowler included in the elements which had led to reactions being 'antagonistic and uninterested', the presentation of Stephen Blackpool:
Stephen and Rachael are said to be too good to be true; Stephen's martyrdom to a drunken wife is a cliché; his refusal to join the union is not motivated and therefore puts him into a weak, contradictory position in relation to his fellow- workers.2
I want to begin with a reconsideration of these two critical views.
Many critics over a century and a half have shown sympathy with the first of these two positions cited by Fowler: the 'too good to be true' model. A great number of these have referred back to John Ruskin's comments on Hard Times, as their authority.3 In his first essay in Unto this Last Ruskin, focusing on the relations between men and masters, added, in a footnote, a reference to Dickens, whose illustrations on this subject he commended. Even so, Ruskin regrets Dickens's use of caricature in relation to such serious subjects, particularly in Hard Times, a novel which addresses the concerns he was expressing in this essay. It is in focusing on Bounderby and Stephen as illustrations of the relations between men and masters that Ruskin makes his famous reference to Stephen as 'a dramatic perfection'. These comments are not offered as a blanket criticism of the impact of the whole text:
the usefulness of that work[...]is with many persons seriously diminished [on this theme] because Mr Bounderby is a dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic example of a worldly master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman.'4
Ruskin's criticism of both...