Wordsworth Classics Hard Times By Charles Dickens

Product Description

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 critic such as George Bernard Shaw & F.R. 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.