HARD TIMES

"This edition of Hard Times is especially designed for undergraduate students who wish to find an authoritative text, literary essays and critical analysis in a single volume. Published in 1854, Hard Times presents a passionate polemics of utilitarian education, worker's unions and industrial life in mid-nineteenth century manufacturing town of Coketown. Dickens attacks the stifling atmosphere, the squalor and sootiness of Coketown. It would be naive to believe that Dickens was against the products of industralization or the institutions of Victorian society that gave rise to it. He saw the burgeoning of factories in England between 1770 and 1840 as something unavoidable but something, that scarred its pastoral landscape. These factories also changed the economic power structures making some extremely wealthy while leaving others to eke out a living. The harsh reality of economic deprivation early in life, lack of proper education and unhappy employment in a blacking factory made Dickens to work hard and turned him into an autodidact. The impact of utilitarian education and self-help are clearly reflected both in theme and character.Hard Times presents the bitter consequences of materialism, greed and egotism with unerring clarity through the lives of its principal characters-Josiah Bounderby and Thomas Gradgrind. Dickens, as always, is a compelling storyteller and a great entertainer. In this novel he creates unforgettable characters such as Sissy Jupe, Louisa Bounderby, Stephen Blackpool, Rachael, James Harthouse and Mrs. Sparsit Five critical essays, selected from many scholarly articles on the novel, are added, Critical opinion on the text begins with F.R. Leavis and includes new essays by Jean Ferguson Carr, Catherine Gallagher, Steven Connor and Richard Fabrizio. New Critical thinking impacting upon the text, such as structural criticism, deconstructionism, new historicism, dialogism, postcolonial criticism, feminist and psychoanalytic are also included in the introduction."