Over decades since college I've read and re-read my way through Dickens' masterworks while unnecessarily slighting "Hard Times." I enjoyed it at least as much as any of his pointedly social commentaries and much more than some ("Bleak House," for example). Dickens' fans know what to expect - when a character is good, their virtue is saintly, and when they are bad, they are horrid. Each reaches their apotheosis, damnation, or belated enlightenment, as their character deserves, making this a deliciously brisk Dickens read and perfect literary snack. There's nothing difficult about "Hard Times," which makes it a delight.

Thank you very much indeed for your excellent service - I received the novel within only a few days of my order.

Bruce Berry (Dr.)

"Hard Times" is set in the ugly and imaginary (but all too realistic) mid-Victorian Northern city of Coketown - a near-dystopian blend of the worst of capitalism and the ravages of rampant industrialization. Its blackened factories belch soot, steam and a poisonous haze of sun-blotting pollution. Its citizens are joyless automotons, dancing their repetitive daily work jig to the mind-numbing tick of a drudging, miserable metronome that is wound up every day by Josiah Bounderby, the heartless factory owner, a banker and ostensibly Coketown's leading citizen.

While the workers have begun to sample the delights of the forbidden fruit of trade unions and labour organization, the very idea is still much in its infancy. Indeed, Bounderby is so completely ensconced in the status quo that he cannot even imagine why a worker would want more than he has and why he would feel that there was anything more that he might possibly need. He genuinely believes that what he offers his workers is complete, generous, utterly selfless and more than sufficient unto their needs.

Thomas Gradgrind is a retired hardware merchant. While not quite in the same league as Bounderby with respect to wealth and insufferable pomposity, Gradgrind is now a teacher and, like Bounderby, is so completely comfortable as to be utterly unable to imagine any other way of living. In fact, Dickens portrays Gradgrind as a staunch utilitarian who does his utmost as a parent, a person, and an educator to eradicate any fanciful notions of imagination, joy, dreaming, aesthetics, music, poetry, fiction or, indeed, even amusement, in both his students and his children. His students' curriculum is centered on "facts, facts, facts" and hard skills such as analysis, deduction, mathematics, science and pure observation are glorified.

"Hard Times" is really the story of Gradgrind's children, Louisa and Thomas Jr, brought up in the sullen atmosphere of Coketown under the strict discipline of their father's colourless educational regimen. It is the story of Louisa's arranged marriage to Bounderby, a man thirty years her senior who imagined her as his bride even as he watched her grow from infancy. It is also the story of Thomas Jr's fall from grace as he is unable to avoid the twin siren calls of the vices of gambling and liquor to escape from the drudgery of life as his father's son and as Bounderby's employee.

While I found "Hard Times" to be as entertaining as any other Dickens novel that I've read (and, frankly, I've loved them all), I did find it to be too bleak and unremittingly socialist in nature. Dickens' far left-wing political leanings were crystal clear.

There were "blacks" and there were "whites" but there were no grays anywhere in sight. "Hard Times" was a story of polar opposites, fact vs fancy, joy, happiness and hope vs despair, honesty vs dishonesty, generosity vs greed, and so on. And, although Dickens did allow the story to end portraying Thomas Gradgrind as a parent who was doing his very best to act on his love for his children, even these acts of altruism were aimed at ultimately ensuring that theft against the evil Bounderby went un-punished. In short, Bounderby and the capitalist class could do no right while the working class could, in effect, do no wrong.

Entertaining, to be sure, and not a story that I would want to have missed but "Hard Times" is also a story that is not as timeless as others Dickens has written.

Paul Weiss

Written in 1854 as a weekly series in the "Household Words" periodical edited by Dickens, this short novel is not one of his best. But even a middling Dickens can be better than the best of those new age plot-less wonders our book club has had to endure lately. Propelled by interesting, if somewhat exaggerated characters, the story manages to hold your interest from beginning, to climax, to end. Appealing to masses of readers, the book pays homage to all those common folks struggling against oppressive socio-economic-forces designed to stifle creativity and opportunity. It's a system whose schools eschew the arts and humanities. These are hard times, but not times without humor. In the very first chapter, you'll find it difficult not to recall Dragnet's Joe Friday as school teacher Gradgrind screams: Only Facts; just the Facts; all we care about are facts. Gradgrind makes it clear that feelings, art, decoration, are worthless distractions. Only facts have value. Gradgrind's over-the-top Jack Webb notwithstanding, you'll witness Dickensian irony at its best when Gradgrind's own children, Tom and Louisa, prove early victims of this "just the facts" upbringing. By way of contrast, Sissy Jupe, perhaps Gradgrind's worst student, the indigent daughter of circus performers, channels her innate creativity to save Tom from jail and Louisa from a Snidely Whiplash husband.

My son had to read this book for High School. This edition has some good supplemental information that might prove useful on those essay questions in English Literature class.