THE EVOLUTION OF THE MORAL IDEAL IN CHARLES DICKENS: FROM JOURNALISM TO THE NOVEL IN THE LIGHT OF HARD TIMES

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of the moral ideal in the work of Charles Dickens, tracing its trajectory from the writer’s journalistic and publicistic statements towards its mature artistic embodiment in the novel. Whereas earlier scholarship has tended to treat Dickens’s moral concerns either biographically or as a static humanist creed, the present study argues that his moral ideal undergoes a discernible three-stage development: from the individual reformist optimism of the early period, through the institutional critique of the mature period, to the dialectic pessimism of the late period. Taking the novel Hard Times (1854) as a focal case study, the article demonstrates how the abstract moral position articulated in Dickens’s non-fiction is transposed into concrete poetic structures — characterization, spatial imagery (the topography of Coketown), and the symbolic opposition between fact and fancy. The analysis employs close reading and comparative-historical methods. The findings indicate that in Hard Times the moral ideal is no longer asserted didactically but is realized through the very architecture of the text, in which evil is institutionalized in the utilitarian system and good is preserved in the faculty of imagination. The study contributes to a more precise, diachronic understanding of Dickensian poetics and of the relationship between ethical content and aesthetic form in the Victorian social novel.