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.
About the Author
Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870) was an English novelist and social critic, widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His literary genius is evident in his creation of some of the world’s most iconic fictional characters. Born in Portsmouth, Dickens faced adversity…
See all books by Charles Dickens →
Listen to Hard Times Audiobook Free
Listen to Hard Times by Charles Dickens free online. The full audiobook (10 hr 55 min, 22 chapters, read by volunteer narrators) streams free on this page.
Hard Times (1854) is a public domain work.
| # | Chapter | Length | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Book 1, Chapters 1-3 | 23:49 | |
| 2 | Book 1, Chapters 4-5 | 31:28 | |
| 3 | Book 1, Chapter 6 | 25:28 | |
| 4 | Book 1, Chapters 7-8 | 26:24 | |
| 5 | Book 1, Chapters 9-10 | 35:07 | |
| 6 | Book 1, Chapters 11-12 | 24:59 | |
| 7 | Book 1, Chapters 13-14 | 33:46 | |
| 8 | Book 1, Chapters 15-16 | 35:46 | |
| 9 | Book 2, Chapter 1 | 31:42 | |
| 10 | Book 2, Chapters 2-3 | 27:11 | |
| 11 | Book 2, Chapters 4-5 | 41:06 | |
| 12 | Book 2, Chapter 6 | 31:30 | |
| 13 | Book 2, Chapter 7 | 29:23 | |
| 14 | Book 2, Chapter 8 | 26:56 | |
| 15 | Book 2, Chapters 9-10 | 30:52 | |
| 16 | Book 2, Chapters 11-12 | 31:00 | |
| 17 | Book 3, Chapters 1-2 | 35:28 | |
| 18 | Book 3, Chapters 3-4 | 39:40 | |
| 19 | Book 3, Chapter 5 | 21:30 | |
| 20 | Book 3, Chapter 6 | 21:37 | |
| 21 | Book 3, Chapter 7 | 24:17 | |
| 22 | Book 3, Chapters 8-9 | 25:46 |
Prefer reading? Read Hard Times online free or download the PDF and EPUB above.
