Blue Books in Hard Times

Abstract

This chapter argues that Hard Times (1854), the Dickens novel that is most openly critical of government publications, is paradoxically the one that most resembles them. Whereas Oliver Twist turns blue book themes into a riveting fairy tale, Hard Times pairs a thematic insistence on fairy tales with a mimicry of blue book forms. The chapter reads Hard Times as a commentary on reports concerning working-class education, including a controversial 1847 report on education in Wales. It links Dickens’s “Report of the First meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything” (1837) to his depiction of the dangers of statistics and testimony in Hard Times. Looking anew at Dickens’s attack on the blue books in Hard Times illuminates a crucial scene in the history of public knowledge as well as the history of the novel.