Hard Times (Annotated)

Hard Times is Dickens's most concentrated industrial novel, a searching indictment of utilitarian education, laissez-faire economics, and the spiritual impoverishment of Victorian modernity. Set in the grim manufacturing town of Coketown, it opposes "Facts" to imagination through the lives of Thomas Gradgrind, Louisa, Tom, Sissy Jupe, and Stephen Blackpool. Its style is compressed, allegorical, an...