Charles Dickens & Sir Philip Sidney: Hard Times, An Equine Defence for the Novel

Abstract:While critics have often read Hard Times as Dickens’s defense of imagination against utilitarianism, industrialism, and the fact-driven education of his time, the source of Dickens’s defensive theory and poetics has remained comparatively obscure. This article will argue that Dickens, in his attempt to defend imaginative literature, invokes Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century Defence of Poetry. More specifically, Dickens borrows from Sidney the trope of “Horsemanship” as a means to discuss the value of “Poetry.” Throughout the novel, Dickens turns to the image of the horse and the members of Sleary’s Horse-Riding as the catalysts for poetic powers, fancy, and imagination. Sleary’s troupe exposes the failure of the mechanical residents of Coketown, who insist on manufacturing passionless Bitzers rather than sensitive Sissys. The novel’s equine aesthetic repeatedly conjures the anxiety of the Gradgrindian School of “poesy,” where Dickens, through the equine invocation, carries out his apologetic debate.