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.
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