Abstract: Tracing the reception of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and its doomed millworker Stephen Blackpool through nineteenth-century American print culture, the essay shows how a conservative text and character were radicalized and repurposed to suit an audience grappling with the shift to a predominately industrial economy. A contextual reading of their reception reveals the novel’s function as a tool of social reform for a society caught between two contradictory impulses: an embrace of the working class and a worship of capitalism. The linguistic adoption of dialogue and characters; the contextualization of Hard Times alongside labor fiction such as Frederic Whittaker’s Larry Locke, Man of Iron, or, A Fight for Fortune: A Story of Labor and Capital, Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills,” and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887; and the deletion of key passages on unionization from a dime novel reprint all demonstrate how nineteenth-century American audiences retooled a popular English novel for their own radical purposes.

中文翻译：

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纠察线上的布莱克浦：困难时期在 19 世纪的美国蔓延开来

摘要：这篇文章通过 19 世纪的美国印刷文化追溯了查尔斯·狄更斯的《艰难时期》及其注定失败的磨坊工人斯蒂芬·布莱克浦 (Stephen Blackpool) 的接受程度，展示了保守的文本和角色如何被激进化和重新利用，以适应正在努力应对向以工业经济为主的转变的观众. 对他们的接受情况的上下文阅读揭示了这部小说作为社会改革工具的功能，适用于夹在两种矛盾冲动之间的社会：对工人阶级的拥抱和对资本主义的崇拜。对话和字符的语言采用；艰难时期与劳工小说的情境化，如弗雷德里克·惠特克的拉里·洛克，钢铁侠，或者，为财富而战：劳动与资本的故事，丽贝卡·哈丁·戴维斯的“钢铁厂的生活，”和爱德华贝拉米的回顾2000-1887；一毛钱小说重印中关于工会化的关键段落的删除都表明，19 世纪的美国观众如何为自己的激进目的改造一部流行的英国小说。