Hard Times

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 philos...