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Dickens's Hard Times and Dante's Inferno.(Charles Dickens and Dante Alighieri)(Critical essay)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 20060922
Author:Colon, Susan

Dickens's debt to Dante in Hard Times extends not only to the evocations of infernal imagery in the descriptions of Coketown's factories and machinery, but also to the moral analysis Dickens performs on its denizens. The moral drama in Hard Times--its protagonists' journey from a state of sin to a state of grace--takes its terms in part from Dante's Divine Comedy. The besetting sin of the novel's paired protagonists, Stephen Blackpool and Louisa Gradgrind, is that of the second half of the Inferno's fourth circle: sullenness. Dickens's diagnosis of this moral ill, and the ...

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