Hard Times (Everyman's University Library) (Victorian, #111) (Orient Blackswan Abridged Texts)

by Charles Dickens

Frederick Busch (Introduction) and Jane Smiley (Afterword)

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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 Times is 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 Smiley
  • ISBN10 0451530993
  • ISBN13 9780451530998
  • Publish Date 1 July 2008 (first published 1 April 1854)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Out of Print 17 May 2016
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Signet Classics