Abstract
Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times critically represents mid-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism while uncritically adopting its mindset. Hard Times focuses on shadows of capital—utility, indifference, commensurability, and calculation. It largely passes over capital’s constitutive forms—money, wages, profit, and interest. In subsuming the domestic sphere—especially nurturing children—Thomas Gradgrind’s utilitarian philosophy exceeds the reach of capital’s constitutive forms. What upsets Dickens is capital’s overreach. Dickens accepts key bifurcations of modern conceptions of reason and society. He allows the pinched Gradgrind philosophy to stand rather than reconsider its claim to count as a reason. With its embrace of fancy, fantasy, and feeling, Sleary’s circus—Dickens’ counterpoint—repels Thomas Gradgrind and defies his calculations. Dickens looks to amusement to ameliorate utilitarian harms. Where Dickens insists that “reason” must be complemented by fancy, Martha Nussbaum shows why sympathetic emotion is essential to public judgment. Hard Times shows how capital’s shadows extend its reach.