Introduction and Notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster. Illustrated by F. Walker and Maurice Greiffenhagen.
Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the
imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its
blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This
is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and
the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby. However human joy is not
excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse-Riding' circus, a gin-soaked and
hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an
antidote to all the drudgery and misery endured by the ordinary citizens
of Coketown.
Macaulay attacked Hard Times for its `sullen
socialism', but 20th-century critics such as George Bernard Shaw and
F.R. Leavis have praised this book in the highest terms, while readers
the world over have found inspiration and enjoyment from what is both
Dickens' shortest completed novel and also one of his important
statements on Victorian society.
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
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