Hard Times

Hard Times is Charles Dickens’s short, fierce novel of industrial England, published in 1854. Set in the grim northern mill town of Coketown, it attacks a world governed by cold calculation and hard fact, embodied in the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, who raises his own children on statistics and forbids them anything so useless as wonder or feeling. As his daughter Louisa is married off without love and the honest weaver Stephen Blackpool is crushed between mill owners and union men, Dickens shows the human cost of treating people as figures in a ledger. It is his angriest book about the failures of the age, written with all his usual force and pity. This free PDF and EPUB offers the complete novel.