Hard Times [Paperback]

Dickens’s scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society. 

Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens’s most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above curiosity and logic over sentiment, only to see his philosophy warp and destroy the lives of his own family.

Filled with memorable characters and scenes,Hard Timesis a daring novel of ideas—and, ultimately, a celebration of love, hope, and imagination.

With an Introduction by Frederick Busch 
and an Afterword by Jane SmileyCharles Dickens(1812–70) had a happy childhood until age twelve when, due to his father’s confinement in debtors’ prison, he was forced to leave school to work in a factory. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication ofSketches by Boz(1836) andThe Pickwick Papers(1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success, includingOliver Twist(1838),David Copperfield(1850),A Tale of Two Cities(1859), andGreat Expectations(1861). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death,The Mystery of Edwin Droodremained unfinished.

Frederick Busch(1941–2006) was the author of eighteen works of fiction, includingClosing Arguments,Girls, andThe Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens. The winner of numerous awards, he was the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate Unil1