Introduction & Notes by Dinny Thorold University of Westminster Illustrated by F Walker & Maurice Greiffenhagen Unusually for Dickens Hard Times is set not in London but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories downtrodden workers & polluted environment This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind & the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby However human joy is not excluded thanks to & Mr Sleary&s Horse-Riding& circus a gin-soaked & hilarious troupe of open-hearted & affectionate people who act as an antidote to all the drudgery & misery endured by the ordinary citizens of Coketown Macaulay attacked Hard Times for its ‘sullen socialism’ but 20th-century critics such as George Bernard Shaw & FR Leavis have praised this book in the highest terms while readers the world over have found inspiration & enjoyment from what is both Dickens’ shortest completed novel & also one of his important statements on Victorian society