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 and polluted environment. <
br/> This is the soulness domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby. However, uman joy is not excluded thanks to ''Mr. Sleary''s Horse-Riding'' circus, a gin-seaked and hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an antidote to all the drudgery and misery endured by the ordinary citizen of Coketown.
Macaulay attacked Hard Times for its ''sullen socialism'', but 20th-century critics such as George Bernard Shaw and F.R. Leavis have praised this book in the highest terms, while readers the world over ave found inspiration and enjoyment from what is both Dickens'' shortest completed novel and also one of his important statement on Victorian Society.
This edition published 1995, by Worldworth Editions Limited.
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