The great classic about the society of the Industrial Revolution.
In Coketown, the Industrial Revolution has already transformed into a capitalist nightmare. The affluent Mr. Gradgrind raises his children Tom and Louisa based on a cold utilitarian philosophy, seemingly contributing to the son’s adult involvement in crime and debauchery, while the daughter becomes an unhappy woman, married to the father’s business partner, the thirty years older Mr. Bounderby. As wealth accumulates among the few, workers attempt to organize, including Stephen Blackpool who is expelled from one of Bounderby’s factories and falsely accused of robbery.
Hard Times is a bustling cross-section of English society and perhaps Dickens’s most political book, an appeal against the forefathers of liberalism, Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, whose ideas shaped the era. Here, poverty is as glaring as wealth is outrageous, and the notion that prosperity and high morality are connected is ground into a furious satire.
CHARLES DICKENS [1812–1870], born in Portsmouth, England, was the most popular English-language novelist of his time. He created a fictional world that reflected the social and technological changes during the Victorian era. Among his most famous works are David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, and The Pickwick Papers.
