Title: The Critique of Benthamite Utilitarianism and Inner Conflicts in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times

Abstract: Among the Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens is undoubtedly the fiercest opponent to the dominant ideology of the early Victorian Age: Benthamite Utilitarianism. In Hard Times, he intends to makes an obvious and full-length critique of its typical principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, egoist ethics, laissez-faire economics as well as its highly rationalizing way of thinking. Yet a closing reading of the text reveals that there are some conflicts hidden in the novel itself, which undermine the novelist’s original intention, in other words, while criticizing Benthamism, Dickens shares the same utilitarianist tendencies with Bentham in his dealing with the discourse of self-help and characterization of Jupe and Blackpool, as a result of his unconscious self-fashioning under the socio-historical conditions of the time and the influence of Benthamite Utilitarianism.

Keywords: Benthamite Utilitarianism, Self-Help, the Victorian Age

Author: Guoxin Zhao, Professor, School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China.