Hard Times

Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Features: It depicts Coketown, a typical red-brick industrial city of the North. Its schools and factories cage children and adults and enslave them, with no personal freedom until their spirit is broken. Against this social backdrop where harsh regimes are enforced by the likes of Josiah Bounderby, the pompous self-amdeman, and Gradgrind, the censorious disciplinarian, the personal tragedies of Louisa Gradgrind and Stephen Blackpool are played out. Despite its vivid portrait of the horrors of the newly mechanized society, Hard Times is shot through with a wit, good humour and a conviction that entertainment is essential for human happiness, making it one of the most uplifting of Dickens's novels.
Author Bio: Charles Dickens (1812-70). Best known for his host of distinctly cruel, comic and repugnant characters, Charles Dickens remains the most widely read of the Victorian novelists. Set in the fictional Coketown, which is partly based on Dickens's experiences of Preston, Hard Times (1854) has a strong social theme. In it, he highlights the plight of the men, women and children whose lives were thrown into turmoil by the Industrial Revolution of the 1840s.