Hard Times (Vintage Classics)

The shortest of Charles Dickens’s novels, Hard Times is also his most pointed and impassioned satire of social injustice.

Set in Coketown, a fictional industrial town in the north of England, Hard Times was born of its author’s indignation at the soul-crushing conditions of the industrial age, and yet it vibrantly transcends the stock situations and polemical weaknesses typical of social protest fiction of the time. The indelible characters—Mr. Gradgrind, whose utilitarian educational philosophy emotionally cripples his own children; the hypocritical factory owner Josiah Bounderby; Stephen Blackpool, an honest worker wrongly accused of a crime; and Sissy Jupe, a circus performer whose father abandons her to what he hopes is a better life—all come alive in classic Dickensian fashion, and contribute to a satiric vision of society tempered equally by righteous anger and compassionate humanity.

Dickens's widely read satirical account of the Industrial Revolution.

Dickens creates the Victorian industrial city of Coketown, in northern England, and its unforgettable citizens, such as the unwavering utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the factory owner Josiah Bounderby, and the result is his famous critique of capitalist philosophy, the exploitative force he believed was destroying human creativity and joy. This edition includes new notes to the text.

Philip Collins is the author of Dickens aria Crime and Dickens and Education, and the editor of volumes of interviews with Dickens and Thackeray. He was formerly Emeritus Professor of English at Leicester University.

From the Hardcover edition.